The most common tip that most SEO experts give you is that the more backlinks your website has, the higher it ranks. Right? Not really.
Even the most expert SEO professionals can get things wrong.
When it comes to building links, such errors can lead to multiple lost opportunities.
Many link building strategies help you get backlinks to our website. However, it is essential to know that to rank well in search engines, you not only need backlinks – you need quality backlinks.
It means you must avoid the most common link building mistakes and understand the best practices for building quality or natural links.
Also, you cannot fix these mistakes unless you know what they are and how to handle them.
Therefore, new, and expert SEO pros must be acquainted with the most common link building mistakes to avoid them in 2022.
But, before we look into the link building mistakes to avoid in 2022, it is essential to understand the real meaning of linking because many people don’t know what link building is and how it works.
What is Linking?
Linking is a type of SEO best practice involving the creation of links to your content on other web pages and websites.
It is one of the most efficient ways to boost the traffic and authority of your website.
However, you can get contrasting outcomes if you don’t know how to execute this strategy.
Primarily, there are two ways link building increases traffic to your website.
Firstly, the backlinks you receive from other websites will allow search engines to rank your web content as more relevant.
It will improve your rank in the Search Engine Page Results (SERPs).
Also, links drive audiences from an external site to your content. Then you can convert these new audiences into devoted followers with more compelling content.
Once you have a large following, you can transform them into Marketing and sales qualified leads or even customers.
Keeping this in mind, you can now look at the most common link building mistakes to avoid in 2022.
The post will suggest some of the best ways to avoid these mistakes. It is the best way to ensure you get maximum returns from your link building efforts.
6 Common Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in 2022
Not Paying Enough Attention to On-Page SEO and Search Intent
On-page SEO and search intent are one of the most important aspects that can make or break any SEO program.
It can hurt your SEO performance severely when you don’t ensure maintaining the on-page best practices and focusing on user search demand.
It is recommended to concentrate on your on-page SEO and figure out search demand before you start building links.
Paying attention to and repairing.
How can you fix this?
- Ensure your target keyword is cited on your page so that search engines understand what your page is all about
- Look at the web pages currently ranking at the top of the SERPs, carry out an extensive competitor and industry analysis, and get improvement recommendations for your on-page SEO
- Showcase expertise on your subject matter through a powerful content strategy
Not Creating Enough High-quality Content on Your Website
Creating poor or low-quality content lowers your chances of getting more natural backlinks.
Also, it will have negative impacts on your search engine rankings. How?
No one would like to associate with sites that have poor quality content. People always look to link back to high-authority sites that add value for their target users.
If people see that your content is not informative enough, they will immediately refuse to link it to their website.
This is because your low-quality content will also adversely impact the ranking of sites that links back to it from their website.
Therefore, low quality content will considerably reduce the number of links you receive from authoritative websites.
How can you fix this?
Simple.
- You need to publish high-quality content to gain the trust of high authority figures in your niche/industry. People will be comfortable linking back to your site because they also stand a chance to benefit from it.
- Ensure that you clearly understand what makes good content and stick to it
- Ensure that the content you publish on your website answers the real questions your audience is searching for
- Include enough details that will add value to your topic
Not enough focus on broken internal links
Broken links can be a serious issue. It can be frustrating for your visitors and signal search engines that your website is of low quality.
For search engines, when a crawler encounters a broken link on your website, it has to terminate its crawling process there and won’t be able to continue to the internally linked pages from the affected page.
How can you fix this mistake?
- Review whether the link’s URL is correct and change it if necessary. If any of your web pages returns an error, remove the link leading to the error page or replace it with a live link
- Create a redirect from the broken page
- Ensure you have a well-organized internal site structure that is optimized for crawlers
Only gaining links to your Homepage alone
When search engines use backlinks to rank your page, it constantly looks at all the natural links your website receives.
If you only add links to your homepage, it might indicate to search engines that you are just buying links for the homepage.
How can you fix this?
- The best thing you can do is gain links for various pages on your website
- Don’t give search engines enough room to see you as someone practicing black hat SEO
- Diversify your link building strategy so that it can look natural
Not enough Diversity in Your Anchor Texts
If you consider including anchor texts in your backlinks, ensure that they vary from each other as much as possible. The varying or divers the anchor texts, the better it is.
Or else, search engines can see them as a scheme for building links and those links will be considered as paid or spammy links. Then search engines might end up penalizing you for such practices.
How can you fix this?
- You can use different keywords in building your links. You can use your brand name with its variations or related terms and alterations for your main keywords
- Diversify your anchor texts. It will make your links look as natural as possible. It is a great strategy when you use link building to drive improved traffic and higher ranking
Getting too many Toxic Backlinks
With the continuous increase in digitalization of business communications, it can be challenging to track all the sites backlinking to your website.
To make things even worse, advancements in automation and the programmability of modern bots imply that your site might unknowingly become the subject of a spam campaign.
How can you fix this?
- Use one of the modern SEO tools like ALPS.ai explicitly designed for the job
Final Thoughts
Though there are numerous other mistakes marketers and web admins, tend to make while building links to their websites.
Here we have only looked into 6 of the most common link building mistakes in 2022 that can severely impact our rank and traffic.
The main idea behind writing this guide is to alert you to avoid such bad link building practices so that you can get better rankings and search traffic to your website.
Are you making any of those mistakes? To know more, Sign Up for a Free Demo Here!
