You’ve undoubtedly read many articles on SEO and link building in particular, both on this website and elsewhere. You may have noted down the ‘best’ methods to use so you can drive quality targeted traffic to your website. You’ve probably even read Google’s SEO guide.
But, what you may not have done is researched the link-building mistakes you need to avoid all the time! The trouble with the Web is people can sometimes find it challenging to sort helpful content from stuff that’s likely to get you in trouble somehow.
With that in mind, how can you avoid making catastrophic mistakes with your SEO link-building campaigns? Here’s a list of the worst offenders and why you must avoid them at all costs:
1. Curating Content for the Sake of Curating Content
It’s no secret that pages with just a couple of paragraphs of text aren’t going to do your search engine optimization any favors. Any reputable link building SEO agency or professional will tell you that it’s crucial to create high-quality long-form content.
However, you shouldn’t be churning out hundreds or even thousands of pages of content on your website for the sake of SEO. The only legitimate reason for doing that would be if you were building a Wikipedia rival!
2. Forgetting About Formatting
What do you think might happen if someone visited a page on your website via a Google search and they ended up looking at a massive block of text. Are they going to feel compelled to read all that text, or will they simply hit the back button on their browser?
Of course, the latter is most likely to happen. When you create content on your site as part of your link-building strategies, you need to break up the text. Here are some tips to illustrate what you should be doing:
- Limit paragraphs to two or three sentences;
- Limit each sentence to a maximum of thirty words;
- Use headings and sub-headings to break up chunks of text;
- Use bullet points to illustrate essential points or facts.
3. Gaining Links From Unscrupulous Sources
Many website and blog owners know they can make money by offering to host “sponsored content” and provide a backlink to a specific web page on an external host. The trouble is, some link builders ask for backlinks from sites without researching them first.
Do you really want your website and your brand to get associated with some shady sites? If the answer’s no, you must carry out due diligence on the websites and blogs you want to approach.
4. Copying Your Competitors
Doing the same thing as your competitors from a link-building perspective is something of a double-edged sword. Sure, you want to reach the same audiences like them, so you could target the sites they used in their previous outreach campaigns.
However, copying your competitors is also bad for several reasons:
- You could be reaching out to websites and blogs owned by them or affiliated with them;
- Some sites may refuse to work with you due to an exclusivity agreement;
- You might end up creating the same link-building mistakes as them.
Instead, it makes sense to forge a unique link-building campaign that targets your specific audience rather than someone else’s audience.