For SEO practitioners link building is perhaps the most important task of their endless endeavor to drive up the ranking of the website in the SERPs. It can be an extremely expensive process to acquire links that point back to your site from websites that have a good standing. You surely do not want to waste your SEO budget by committing mistakes that can be avoided with a little attention to detail. Some of the most common link building mistakes that you can dodge:
Not Checking Backlinks for ‘Nofollow” Attribute
Because Google algorithms still smile on sites exchanging links, SEO practitioners lay a great amount of focus and energy in trying to attract backlinks from reputed sites and sites that are considered to be authorities in their domains. However, the entire process can be extremely costly because it can be quite difficult to attract genuine natural backlinks, and you might have to shell out cash for the pleasure. The problem arises when after you have paid for a link; it unexpectedly disappears, leaving you high and dry. You should make it a point to inspect all your backlinks to verify that the links are present and they have not been tagged with a ‘nofollow’ attribute, making them completely useless for SEO.
Not Verifying the Quality of Anchor Texts
It is natural to feel excited when you get a link from a site with a good status but you should really investigate whether the anchor text is of the quality that will get you results. For example, you are in trouble if you find anchor text like “Click here” because Google really doesn’t like it at all. Any internet marketing company should try and endeavor to get the keywords included in the anchor text because without them the value of the backlink is greatly diluted. It can be a tough job to check out the anchor texts of a large number of backlinks manually, but luckily you have tools that can do the job for you. To find out more about what anchor text to avoid it is best to consult with a competent Utah SEO services company.
Not Getting a Text Link
Because webmasters often work under a lot of pressure they can skip details such as availability of anchor text when posting backlinks and use attractive images instead. While undoubtedly an image backlink can get you a lot of visitors, especially when it is of high quality and attractive, there’s nothing really like a good quality text link with anchor text to boost your SEO. However, in case an image link is the only feasible option of getting the desired backlink, don’t reject it but instead try and make sure that your keywords are contained in the image’s ALT text.
Not Keeping Your Backlink Focus
As per Google’s algorithms, it is very important that not only the site from where the backlinks are being obtained is of good quality but more importantly it should have a high relevance to the site that it is pointing back to. For example, if you are administering the SEO of a finance site, getting backlinks from a dating site is not going to do much for you. The good thing is that unless you site is extremely niche, it is possible to locate a huge number of websites that can qualify to give you backlinks.
Backlinks from Web Pages That Spiders Cannot Crawl
While a link may appear as completely legitimate inasmuch that it has anchor text with keywords and “nofollow” attribute is also absent, it may still be a dud simply because the search engine spiders cannot discover it. It may happen due to a variety of reasons such as lack of link exchange reciprocity; links on dynamic pages or pages that cannot be indexed by Google due to a bar by robot.txt. You should definitely make it a point to periodically check whether the links can be accessed by web spiders. While doing this manually could be a pain, a tool that simulates spiders can make it effortless.
Since links are vital for getting superior page rankings it is recommended that you pay attention to the quality of the links being acquired, and also to keep on monitoring their effectiveness with tools that are freely available.
Author bio: Jim Henderson is a senior consultant at a leading internet marketing company. He frequently coordinates with a reputed Utah SEO services agency to boost the page rank of his website in Google and other leading search engines.
