Building and acquiring links to your website can improve your search engine rank and boost web traffic—if you do it properly. If you don’t, you may do more harm than good to your search engine optimization efforts. A few common mistakes during the ongoing website optimization process can waste your time, lower your ranking and even cost you money in the long run, so plan your strategy with discretion. Avoiding the most common link building mistakes makes it easier to increase web traffic while maintaining your credibility with users and search engines.
Don’t Buy Links
The web is rife with low-quality online marketing services peddling cheap backlinks. Tempting as it may be to spend a few bucks on a few hundred links to your site, these aren’t what the search engines consider quality links—and they will bust you. Once Google identifies a large portion of your backlinks to be from irrelevant, low-quality sites, they’ll penalize you with either manual penalties or ongoing algorithm updates that will ultimately lower your rankings. While legitimate online marketing services providers can help your site with quality backlinks that enhance your search engine optimization efforts, beware the discount merchants.
Avoid Bulk Linking
Even if you’re building quality backlinks, doing too much, too fast sends up red flags with the search engines. Instead of building your backlinks in large groups, space them out and build with consistency. Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules for how many backlinks you can build within a certain time period without becoming conspicuous (and it there are, Google is smart not to share them). If you’re concerned about drawing the wrong kind of attention with your link building, consult with an online marketing services provider for advice on enhancing your search engine optimization with proper backlinking efforts to ultimately increase your web traffic.
Resist Repeating Yourself
Just as duplicate text is bad for website optimization, repeating yourself with your link building devalues your work—at least, as far as the search engine crawlers are concerned. Vary the anchor text among your backlinks and make sure that every link actually leads where the anchor text or surrounding content suggests. Indiscriminately building links that all direct toward your homepage, for example, devalues them to the search engines. Just remember that whether you’re enhancing your on-site search engine optimization or building backlinks to your site, duplicating your content and your efforts hurts—not helps—your web traffic.
