In this month’s edition of the Digital Marketing Postcard, Victoria Chemko comes to us from Ngapali Beach in Myanmar, to discuss the link building process and common mistakes to avoid to ensure your link building campaign is as successful as possible!
Rough Video Transcription:
March’s video topic came from Meagan at Virtual Acne.
When you’re starting up and managing your ongoing Link Building efforts, there are a lot of variables to keep in mind on a regular basis. Here is a listing of some of the common mistakes people make, so that you can make sure to avoid them.
1. Getting Any Type of Link (Quantity over Quality Links)
It’s no longer the “Good ol’ days” previous to the Google Penguin update, which was an algorithm launched in order to help prevent spammy links being built just to influence search engine rankings. Make sure to consider the quality of your links, and not quantity; while you could get a ton of links from low authority and low quality sites, especially in a short time span, this may boost you in the rankings quickly, but then get you booted and penalized from the search engines very soon thereafter; don’t ruin your website’s reputation in the search engines!
2. Not Diversifying Your Efforts
When trying to obtain links, don’t do it all in the same manner; if you’re trying to get links from all of the same types of sites, or in the same way, this won’t look like a natural and all-encompassing link portfolio, which is what the search engines are looking for.
Try to obtain links from various means – high quality sites within your industry, online traditional news media, relevant quality directories, industry blogs, and a variety of social media platforms that are sharing your content, which is known as social signals.
3. Not Using Appropriate Anchor Text
When setting up an inbound link from other sites or internally linking within your own website, it’s important to make sure that you’re selecting appropriate, keyword-specific anchor text for the links, wherever possible. Don’t use anchor text such as “click here” or “read this.” If you’re writing a post about link building, for example, and the link will be pointing to a post on that topic, make sure it’s relevant and says “link building basics,” instead.
At the same time, make sure not to go into keyword overdrive, and start stuffing tons of keywords into your anchor text either, or only using the same exact keyword phrases every single time.
4. Getting Backlinks with a “NoFollow” Attribute
Backlinks with a ‘nofollow’ attribute will tell the search engines not to follow that link back to your website, and as a result, may be a waste of your time. When looking to see whether or not it makes sense to go after a link, do a quick check on this first. Often times, you may get a link back, which would appear to be helpful to you, but it won’t help your rankings if it’s a ‘nofollow’ link. It would still potentially drive traffic to your site and provide awareness of your site, but the search engines wouldn’t consider this in a way that would affect your rankings.
5. Not Producing Quality Content
Finally, make sure that you’re creating quality content from the get-go. If you do so, over time, you will naturally build up your link portfolio from a variety of sources. This could include getting blog posts socially shared and sending many social signals to the search engines, and having people reference your content in future. As we’ve said before, and as you’ve already probably heard quite regularly at this point, content is king, and you want to make sure that you are producing quality that is of interest and relevance to your readers and target market.
To summarize, when conducting Link Building efforts, common mistakes include:
- Quantity over Quality Links
- Not Diversifying your Efforts
- Not Using Appropriate Anchor Text
- Getting Backlinks with a “NoFollow” Attribute
- Not Producing Quality Content
Now that you know more about what common mistakes to avoid, make sure to check out our recent posts covering some more link building tips.
If you liked this video, be sure to subscribe to the Umami Marketing YouTube Channel and the monthly Digital Marketing Postcard. Victoria will be back yet again in April, from yet another mystery beach location. See you next month!
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