Link Building Rules to Live By

Have you been doing your link building properly? The sad thing is that many marketers are out there using some pretty outdated methods. There are several experienced online marketers right now who are specifically pointing out some common do’s and don’t’s in regards to link building rules in today’s environment. Let us take a look.

Link Building Dos

Here are some of the do’s that people are recommending in regards to link building.

Access the value of each link. We have to determine what each link is going to bring to our website. Will that link give you authority or relevancy? Or perhaps it could give you ranking or even generate lots of traffic. This should be fairly easy as you were probably attracted to the link for the obvious reason anyway. This is not the most obvious of link building rules.

Do Not Discount Local listings.  These links are actually doing quite well. Major search engines are looking closely at local business citations from many different platforms. It adds trust and authority to your site. In fact, getting a few of these should be one of the first things you do when you set up your online presence. It is very effective.

Unlinked brand mentions. When you are alert to what other sites are saying about you, one of the things you are bound to discover is that many of them will mention you or your brand, but fail to link to you. A very useful thing to do and to contact them is point blank ask them for a link back to your site. Be nice about it. The one thing you have going for you is that they already know who you are.

Reclaiming broken links are still a favored way to get some really nice backlinks. The thing is that there are very few marketers who are taking advantage of these methods. Finding these means you need to be mindful of what is going on out there in regards to your blog posts and web pages. If these are hitting 404s, then marketers should at least redirect those pages to another online asset.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Do not forget this potential source of backlinks. Let these reporters help push up your web authority. The beauty of this method is that it is a win-win for everyone who is involved. It can really give you a boost of PR as well.

Link Building Don’ts

So now let us examine what we shouldn’t do during our link building.

Never ask for specific anchor text. You have to be very mindful of your anchor text these days. Everyone in the business knows this, so it is looked upon as link manipulation any time you ask for a specific anchor text. Let the link provider decide for themselves what the anchor text will be. This assures that you are receiving natural looking links – because you are.

Never Use Hidden links. This is done by all of us in the early days, but it is a big no-no now. What we are talking about is putting a white link on a white background. Don’t be stupid; search engine bots are too smart for this. Do not fall into this trap.

Low-quality directory links. Another method we used over ten years ago. We used to load up with all those cheap directory links – because we could get dozens of them in just an hour or two. But we should never point low quality links from low quality to our blogs and websites. It will destroy your ranking and possibly even get your site deindexed.

Comment links that have obvious over-optimized anchor link text. Yes, comment links are very desirable, but they need to come from quality pages that don’t already have thousands of outbound links already. Secondly, it is natural for anchor text on comment links to be the names of people and not obvious link stuffing texts like “Home Refinance Loans” or “Weight Loss for Women”. So you need to make these things look natural.

Overuse of and Abusing guest posts. There are lots of people out there who crank out blog posts to be submitted to blogs who accept them. There are two motivations for this arrangement to be abused. The first is that blogger are always looking for unique content and many times there are not very particular about the quality of that content – as long as it is unique. The second motivation for abuse is that people who write low quality blog posts see this as a way to get some backlinks. This is yet another case of link building where the quality can be questionable. A blogger who accepts any old blog post probably has an entire site full of low quality content. Therefore, a link from that site will not be very valuable to you in the end. Not everyone observes these link building rules.

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