Wrong `un: Backlink Building

The Wrong `un blog series by Laykaik in which we point out unfair practices and fallacies in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Like most of the digital marketing practices, SEO offers you the privilege of experimenting. Experiments help you evolve and learn processes that work and deliver positive results. However, they teach you what not to do, how not to do, and why not to do. In this blog, I will discuss the wrong `uns that I have learned about backlink building activity.

Backlink Building: Quick Introduction

Backlink building is the process of building an inbound link to a webpage. So, when a website adds a (hyper)link that leads to your website, it means you create a backlink to your website. It is among the essential activities in the field of SEO to improve the search engine rank of that webpage as well as the entire website.

Importance of Backlink Building for SEO

Think of backlinks for webpages as network building among humans. A website giving backlink to another is like someone mentioning a friend, colleagues, relative, or someone they know. With this approach, I will be able to explain how backlinks are important for your website.

• Increase Visibility in Search Engine Results

The anchor text, the quality, and the number of backlinks together form a strong case for your website to rank higher in the search engine results.

So, if you hang out with the famous gang in the college, you are likely to draw more attention from other students and even college staff.

• Boost Traffic

The backlink for your webpage will mean that someone clicking on that link will reach land on your webpage.

So, it adds to the traffic on your website. The broader social circle you have, the more you are likely to meet new people.

• Gain Authenticity

If someone is adding your backlink to their website, it would mean they are acknowledging your presence. By working on building quality backlinks on the high-authority and relevant websites, you can enhance your authority.

It’s like if Stephen Hawking mentions that your research paper helped him with fantastic work in physics, I am going to believe that you are a great physicist as well.

• Faster Indexing

Search engines such as Google may not crawl through your sitemap or new pages quite often if you don’t post content often. However, getting a backlink from a website (such as Twitter) where the content is published frequently can help you index faster as the search engine will crawl through them often.

So, if you switch between school and are talking to the most popular student in the new school, other students are going to notice you faster.

• Maintain Industry Relevancy

The anchor text on the backlink is another helps search engines find relevancy to keywords for which your webpage should rank. The type of websites that you are building your backlinks on is another factor that contributes to the relevance.

In a way, it resonates with “You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With.” I am going to judge you for your friends.

Top 5 WRONG Link Building Practices

1. Focusing on Quantity Instead of Quality

This point goes across all marketing activities without much change. With backlinks, the lack of quality can backfire in more ways than you can count. A large number of low-quality links will mean that there is no positive SEO improvement, and it may even invite a penalty from the search engines. A penalty will mean not being appearing in the search results for a while.

But what does low quality backlinking mean? It means that you are getting links from websites that are irrelevant and lack authority.

How to fix it?

Focus on the domain authority of the website on which you are building links. Along with that, ensure that it is meeting the relevancy parameters as well. For example, a tech blog earning too many links from a fashion website will mean irrelevancy. So, try to build links on related categories. It will also get you genuine traffic.

2. Limiting Backlink Building to Limited Websites

Some websites offer backlinks quite easily. You can consider the example of social media websites and article submission websites for that. You do not have to make many efforts to post a link on Quora, Facebook, or Twitter. Also, some networked websites can share links. Since it is a more painless process, there is no hard in getting these links. However, limiting your backlink building practices to them is not the right way.

While considering the number of backlinks, search engines value the domain expansion of new links. Limited backlink networks will cause stagnancy in your SEO results, and you may miss the growth possibilities.

How to fix it?

Regularly approach new websites to build links for your webpages. One of the most straightforward approaches for which is writing guest posts on other websites in exchange for a link. If you want to know how to ask different websites for it, here is a list of awesome guest post email templates at your perusal. Other activities that you can consider are blog comments. Go to the websites that are producing great content in their blog post and see if they are accepting comments. Posting a comment that adds values to the blog post is likely to be accepted more often.

3. Not Tracking Backlinks

Basic content marketing mentions measurement, analysis, and optimization as its crucial elements. Ignoring your efforts in the backlink building strategy will create a wide gap between where you are heading and where you could head. In other words, you will not be able to map the growth of your website performance in terms of SEO and traffic quality if you are not mapping it with your efforts.

Without the sense of positives that you are driving from your backlinking exercise, you would not know if your efforts are worth it or you working on a broken link building strategy.

How to fix it?

Maintain a sharp and consistent tracker of your backlink building campaign. Depending on the link building techniques that you are using, there are different details that you might need to monitor. An essential practice is to add a UTM link to your site in the backlink. It helps you to monitor the traffic behavior in the tools, such as Google Analytics and others.

4. Too Much Manual Dependency

While you are producing a new piece of content regularly, targeting site for guest blogging to get a useful link to your site, you would be working on on-page SEO as well. Managing all this with manual efforts exposes not only to miss out on some crucial actions but also to lose quality time.

Consider an example where you are writing just one comment and request one new website to publish your guest post every day. Within a couple of months, you will follow up updates on almost 100 websites – who has approved, who asked for revisions, and a lot more. Imagine the chaos.

How to fix it?

There are some reliable and robust tools available to help you in adding a new link to your content and tracking them. Some of the tools that I have worked on and found more than worthy are SEMrush, Spyfu, and Screaming Frog. They all serve some common and some different functions, which can add speed and accuracy to your link building campaigns. Depending on your SEO marketing budget, choosing them may bite in your pocket. So, be careful about that.

5. Buying Links

Google Search Console (or Webmaster)’s Link Schemes lists the purchase of links as a violation of its guidelines. Google Search is relying on vast and deep algorithms that are capable of tracking the difference between the genuine links and purchased one. So, rest assured that any such activity can impact your search engine ranking drastically.

How to fix it?

It is easy. Do not buy links. At Laykaik, we believe in building a marketing strategy that brings lasting as well as positive results. Therefore, we advise refraining from purchasing links and instead focusing on genuine practices.

Reading Suggestions: Customer Journey Map: A Complete Guide

Wrapping Up

Backlink building offers multi-facet benefits for your website content. Driving quality traffic to impressing Google and other search engines, backlinks can bring a world of wonders for you. However, it remains a process that requires some effort. Probably, that is the reason why it is valued so high.

We hope this blog helped you know a thing or two on what’s not the right way of building links. In the next blog of the Wrong `un series, we will cover the content marketing that some businesses have been doing wrong and what is the right approach to it. Please mention in comments your feedback to this blog or what you expect in the next one.