Link building is one important part of off-page SEO, if not the most important. Ranking of your website highly depends on the external link popularity of the site.
In the rush of getting more and more links for their client’s websites a section of professional link builders sometime choose the path which they should not. Implementing some dirty tricks and Black Hat SEO techniques may earn you profit instantly but not for the long run. And if you get caught it can ruin your online business entirely.
Here is a list of what you should do and what you should not as a link builder.
DOs
Natural Link Building: Adhere to the basic principles in the process of building links to keep it natural.
Limited link accumulation: Even though you acquire links by using effective methods and link building strategies restrict your link accumulation to a maximum of 15 to 20 links per day.
Building large number of links everyday may provoke search engines to treat your site a spam as such sites use unlawful tricks to gather huge number of links in one day.
Variety in anchor text: Use your primary keywords in link anchor text with variations. Spam sites send huge bulk of links with identical anchor text. Therefore, variations in keywords are necessary to keep it natural.
Contextual link building: Put your best effort in contextual link building to maximize the link value.
Consistent URLs: Maintain linking consistency by using the same URL for a single webpage instead of using any other variations of that page URL (if any). It helps in consolidating the link value.
Relevant links: Link to sites only if they are relevant to the content of your website. Like spam sites, linking to irrelevant content only for the sake of achieving a huge link target in short time will only jeopardize your site’s ranking.
Mix up link building strategies: Use an assorted link building strategy including one-way links , two-way and three-way link building to keep it natural from search engine’s perspective.
DON’Ts
Link buying: Buying link is a controversial method and Google does not like the idea of paid links.
Excessive link swapping: Link exchange or reciprocal linking might be one of the commonest ways of accumulating links, but do not overuse this strategy as it looks more strategic than natural.
Spamming: Avoid spamming tricks such as:
- Using hidden inbound links
- Link farming
- Placing random links without relevant keywords close to your link ads
- Irrelevant keywords in anchor text
Image credits: Nixwebo
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