Let’s face it, building links is hard work.
Not only because there are so many link building strategies out there, but also the fact that it requires dealing with people (which isn’t always a walk in the park).
The purpose of this article is to help you avoid some very common link building mistakes that, simply put, waste your time, effort, and money.
Lack Of Value
The fundamental reason why most people might not want to link to your content is because it doesn’t provide value.
If you’re trying to build links to pages that aren’t meaningful to another website, why would they link to you?
As a rule of thumb, your website should contain linkable assets which will make your life easier when trying to build links, as you’re essentially eliminating any doubts in the webmaster’s head that may be saying “well, what if this piece of content isn’t relevant to me?”.
A great way to create these assets is to come up with content that solves a problem for your target audience, be it in the form of a video, guide, or infographic.
Pro tip: comprehensive guides and multimedia content are great ways to provide value and get relevant backlinks.
Incorrect Website Prospecting
Finding the right prospects to get links from is tricky, but if you’re not looking for the right things, you may end up devaluing your website.
It’s important to perform due diligence before approaching a website, and actually auditing their sites to ensure that your linkable assets would have a high affinity, rather than being out of place and irrelevant.
This is extremely important if you’re trying to get traffic to your website (and not just a backlink).
Having backlinks on websites which aren’t relevant to your site will deter people from clicking through on the backlink, plus Google won’t see the correlation between your content and that particular irrelevant website.
Pro tip: Actively look through a website prospect to see if it’s active, has relevant content to you, and also doesn’t have too many outgoing links on their pages.
Being Too Greedy
Unfortunately, many webmasters will still opt for 50 random backlinks over 5 highly relevant backlinks.
This is because they chase volume – not quality.
For link building to actually work well for your website, you don’t need thousands of backlinks.
Of course, it depends on the industry that you’re in, but you should always opt for getting relevant backlinks, as opposed to going on Fiverr and purchasing thousands of terrible links for a few quid.
Pro tip: Pace yourself. Don’t rush out to get 20 links in one week. Try to be realistic and build a different number of links each week. You don’t have to rush link building.
Conclusion
The websites which perform the best on the SERP will generally have backlinks which are relevant, high quality, and contextual.
Your job when building links is to first identify the pages on your website which have the best chances of being linked to, and then devise a strategy to pursue your link acquisition.
As we all know, SEO is a long-term game, and link building is no different.
Stay focused on how to bring value to the right websites, without being greedy!
