Link building is essential for SEO. The number of links--or, more importantly, the quality of incoming links--plays a big role in determining search engine rankings, besides the influx of visitors that can come from clicking on the links themselves.
The relative importance of links to SEO means that any mistakes made when building links will also have a big negative impact on your site. Though there are many specific things that could make your link building efforts ineffective, they can all be managed by avoiding three broad link building mistakes.
1. Having no strategy.You can't have a successful link building strategy if you don't actually have any strategy at all. But this is a common problem. A company can have link building efforts without having a link building strategy to effectively plan out and coordinate those efforts. Efforts without strategy can produce results--mostly due to sheer luck--but you won't get the best possible results without a plan.
A proper link building strategy will have several components:
- A clearly stated purpose and goals.
- A timeline or deadline for accomplishing tasks and reaching goals.
- Procedures for tracking results and determining whether goals are met.
- Clearly defined roles for each participant, so that everyone knows who is supposed to be doing what, and when.
- Regular evaluations and updates to the strategy, in order to stay abreast of emerging trends in the industry and account for updates to search engine algorithms.
2. Neglecting content quality.
You must have something worth linking to. If people do not find your content valuable, it will be difficult to create a natural backlink profile. Or, worse, those links won't make any difference because people quickly leave your site when they see that the content is uninteresting.
To look at it another way, producing high-quality, relevant content is a form of link building. People will naturally link to good content. Of course, they do have to see it first, which is why you will still need a strategy to introduce them to your content. But a link builder's job gets much easier, and their work becomes more effective, when they have valuable content to work with.
3. Missing the point.
Link building is a means to an end. That end is not a high search engine ranking--although gaining a high ranking can help. And it is not about getting visitors to your site--though you definitely do want visitors.
No, the real point of link building is the same as all your business activities: making sales in order to make money. That is the reason for, or at least the means to, the existence of every business.
Link building can certainly help you do that, and the intermediary goals of improving SEO and increasing traffic are very useful in progressing towards that end. The problem comes from making traffic, or rankings, or even the links themselves your reason for existence. This can cause you to think that your link building program is a success, when in reality you may be getting the wrong kind of links, ranking highly for the wrong search terms or attracting the wrong type of traffic.
By keeping the big picture in mind, having great content and developing an effective strategy to build links to that content, you can ensure that your SEO linking efforts produce the results that you really want.
*Image courtesy of stock.xchng
