If you have a site, you need to be building links.
It’s as simple as that.
They are essential to helping the progress of your site and there are an endless number of ways of building them.
But there are also a high number of ways that you shouldn’t be building links. Practices that can do you more harm than good or simply be a waste of your time.
So here are a list of some of the most common mistakes I have come across so you don’t make the same mistakes.
Number one: Don’t submit your site to huge number of directories the same week you go live.
I know you are dying to get started and you can’t wait to rank for your chosen keywords.But the last thing you should do is go crazy straight away. As tempting as this is, don’t do it.
This isn’t a natural action and the search engines will spot it a mile off. As a result your site could be held back before you have even started.
Links coming into a site are supposed to be natural and built up over time.
Number Two: Over link to your site in an article, hub page or blog post
Adding links to an article, hub page or blog post you have written is normal enough. Using anchor text in these links is also expected but adding too many is just one step too far.
A link is supposed to lead the reader to a relevant page of content related to what they are reading. Offering them 15 links in one article is just overkill.
Including more than one link to the same page is also a mistake.
Google are quite open about the fact that they will only read the first link and ignore the rest so having more than one link to a certain page is a complete waste of time (as well as very annoying).
These practices simply serve to devalue your article, hub page or blog post.
Number Three: Don’t Link to your index page (for example www.domainname.co.uk/index.html).
This is a common mistake.
A lot of people will copy and paste their Home page domain name into a submission. If your site has a canonical issue (which basically means you have your “/index.html” URL live as well as your domain URL – this should be sorted out by the way) then you could be setting up links that lead to a page that ideally shouldn’t exist.
Always make sure you submit your domain without any extensions (if you are submitting your Home page).
Number Four: Don’t only link to your Home page
Following on from the above comment, don’t just link to your Home page.
It is important to have a good deep link ratio especially if you want your child pages to rank.
Make sure you deep link.
Number Five: Don’t Use the same anchor text in every link
Using the same anchor text over and over again may sound like the right thing to do, especially if you are strongly targeting that term, but don’t.
If you do this your link building campaign will stand out like a sore thumb.
Research has shown that such narrow targeting actually works against you in the search engines.
Vary it up.
Using relevant and related terms works just as well and will of course help you rank for more terms.
Also look to include your company name in a percentage of your links.
Number Six: Don’t submit your site to a directory with a long review time
Most directories will give you an idea of the review waiting time or how many submissions are still waiting to be reviewed.
If this figure is huge then don’t waste your time. It is likely that such a backlog is never going to be cleared and your submission will just get lost.
Go elsewhere.
Number Seven: Don’t over submit your content to bookmarking sites
You may be tempted to submit everything to all your bookmarking accounts, especially as these sites make it so easy but don’t. Not all in one hit anyway.
Do this gradually.
An account that has nothing but submissions from the same site isn’t going to attract the type of attention you are looking for. Any bookmarking account should look natural and like it is taking part in the community and the last thing everyone wants to see are all your pages.
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