3 Common Link Building Mistakes

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

After optimizing your site for both visitors and the search engines (visitors first!), you have to create a diverse portfolio of one-way, incoming links to your site to help drive targeted traffic through. That’s where link building comes in. It may seem like a relatively simple process, but it is incredibly important that you take a strictly white hat approach to your link building. This means no link exchanges, link farms, cloaked text, spamming blogs and so forth. But did you know you could still be mishandling your link building campaign, even if you are avoiding any black hat tactics?

Here are 3 common link building mistakes

1. Only going after one keyword
People don’t search for the same thing in the same way. Are they gym shoes, sneakers or tennis shoes? Some people use the three terms interchangeably, others have very strict definitions. Just like your site takes user intent into account when researching keywords, so must your link building. You want to develop a mix of anchor text keywords to keep your link building diverse, otherwise the search engines might think you are trying to spam them. It’s best to use branded keywords (Brick Marketing) as well as secondary keywords you want to rank for (Boston SEO, SEO consulting services, etc), and not just your primary keyword.

2. Only linking to your homepage
Granted, your homepage is going to be the landing page for most people when they arrive on your site, but that doesn’t mean it is the only page you should build up links to. You should also strive to build quality links for your internal pages as well, especially your product and services pages. By linking to an internal page, you are actually providing more value for the user. They might not want to dig through your homepage to find out about your products or services, but they might be more willing to hang around your site if you drop them off right there. Linking to internal pages also helps more evenly distribute link juice throughout your site. If you have a good internal linking system, this can help raise the trust factor of all the pages on your site, and help increase your online brand presence.

3. Going after any and all links sources
It’s quality over quantity. Sure, you might be able to get a link on the blog about vegan cupcakes, but what does that have to do with your company that sells refurbished office furniture? Just because you can get a link from a quality site, that doesn’t mean it’s actually going to provide any value for your company or target audience. It’s ok to be a little discerning when it comes to picking your link sources. It’s better to have fewer links that actually help drive targeted traffic than thousands of links that are on off-topic sites.