5 Link Building Do’s and Don’ts to Better Rank on the Search Engines

As per 65% of digital marketers, link building is one of SEO’s important yet most challenging parts.

It is not at all easy to link your website to the high authority domains. Link building is the most temperamental digital marketing technique. Doing it the right way can quickly help you rank on the top search results. But if you don’t treat link building properly, it can doom all your marketing efforts.

Thus, if you want to target high DA sites for links, you have to make sure that you are building links in the right way. And for your convenience, this post will show you 5 propelling link-building do’s and don’ts so you can achieve maximum results from your external links.

Link Building Do’s

Concentrate on content quality and authenticity

The sure shot way to generate high-quality links is to produce premium quality content. Your content is the only thing that can help you earn authoritative external links.

Thus, you have to spend a decent amount of your time on producing SEO-friendly, unique, and relevant content. Here if your budget allows, you should hire a professional SEO expert and content writer to improve your content quality.

Drive links from relevant sites only

According to 56.3% of respondents, link quality and quantity have an impact on rankings. Therefore, you need to thoroughly check a site before targeting it for link building. Primary check for the following things while targeting a site for link generation:

• Relevancy to your brand
• The targeted site’s brand voice should be similar to your brand
• No direct competition
• No illegal or offensive content, etc.

Exploit your pre-existing relationships

Mostly, digital marketers use guest blogs to generate links from different websites. Now, this method is great, but its turnaround rate is very low. 7% of marketers pitch to over 100 guest blogs per month, making it very hard to get your guest blog published.

Therefore, instead of targeting unknown websites for guest blogs, you should explore your connections and try to generate quick links. If your friend’s friend or your business colleague has a website relevant to yours, request them to exchange links.

This way, you will get links quickly, and once your website picks up pace, you can target other sites to generate more links.

Use paid links carefully

Nowadays, many high-authority websites can publish your content at a significant rate and even generate do-follow links. But you should use paid links with extra caution because you don’t want Google to think that your external links are manipulative.

Now, it is not wrong to get paid links for your site; in fact, it is the quickest way to build link authority. However, just make sure that advertisements don’t pass PageRank to your website. Otherwise, Google will know that you have paid links on your website.

Target the news and press

Every press is good press. So, you should target the local and international news sites to build links. You can create press releases of your new products or services and, in return, get some media coverage and links.

Link Building Don’ts

Don’t only chase high domain authority sites

Obviously, it is good for your SEO to target the high DA site links. But it doesn’t mean average DA sites aren’t good. In fact, if you are new to link building, it is better to start with average DA sites.

That’s because there’s a higher chance of getting your content published on these sites. Additionally, Google seeks variations in the link portfolio. Google will not be impressed if you only have high DA external links on your site. In fact, Google will be more pleased if you have mixed links on your site.

However, don’t target poor or irrelevant links as Google can penalize your site if your external links aren’t up to the mark.

Consulting link brokers

Link brokers are people or webmasters who sell links to online marketers to boost their ranking. This is an illegal practice and a direct violation of Google’s guidelines. So, if Google finds out that you have brought a link instead of earning it, Google has all rights to penalize your website.

No need to stuff keywords

Targeting a certain keyword or keyphrase aggressively in your content is an outdated SEO tactic. Nowadays, Google goes by intent and favors sites that naturally use various keywords in the content.

Too much keyword stuffing or the same anchor text pointing to a site can increase your site’s chances of being penalized. Thus, it is recommended to use relevant keywords to link your site.

Don’t participate in the link exchange scheme

As we have mentioned above, you should request your connections to exchange links with you. But do it in moderate size. That’s because when Google notices two websites exchanging an unnatural number of links, it will raise a red flag.

So, don’t go overboard with link exchange and only exchange relevant links occasionally. Usually, don’t generate more than 2–3 links from a website.

Don’t participate in black-hat link building

Like black hat SEO, black-hat link building is also a shortcut to search engine rankings. But these black-hat tactics can backfire on you and get your site penalized.

So, stay away from the black-hat link building techniques as much as possible, such as:

• Clocking — a method to deceive search engines by presenting different URLs and content.
• Injecting links - — hacking someone’s website and inserting your links without permission.
• Hidden text links — trying to hide keywords stuffing in content by making them hard to find, like white text on white background.

Parting Thoughts

Digital marketers, link building is a very powerful tool to improve your SEO score and search engine ranking. And any wrong tactics to generate links can ruin all your other marketing efforts too.

Therefore, always practice the right techniques to build external links for your site and effectively grow online.