Do you receive hundreds of guest posts request on the mailbox? Do you note that many top rated SEO agency and consultants continue to make the same errors in their backlinks?
Any of these link-building myths and blunders may not affect you right now, but you’re leaving a nice trail of red flags for Google to track in the future. So how to focus on future-proofing your SEO so that your customers are safe and remain with you for the long haul.
This article will teach you how to avoid common link-building mistakes and how to fix them.
1. City Names In Anchor Text
Your local clients expect you to rank for terms like “best physiotherapist in Delhi” or “local SEO services,” so your natural instinct is to go out and get links using those terms as keywords.
The issue is that Google does not look at keywords in this manner. Delhi, New York, or any other city is a location, not a word.
“Neck Pain” or “Physiotherapist” will be the keyword, with no reference to a specific location.
Google can figure out what area your company is targeting by looking at your IP address, physical address on your site, or just on-page SEO.
When you use your city name in your anchor text, however, you’re essentially telling Google to “look at this amazing SEO I’m doing.”
Another reason not to do it is that it does not seem normal in the middle of a sentence.
2. Bad Capitalization In Your Anchors
Either of two things can go wrong with this one.
The first one I notice frequently is that some SEOs capitalize the first letter of each word in their keyword.
You forget that these anchors must be placed in the middle of a sentence, and the term should never be capitalized in a sentence. Do not capitalize on something that isn’t a proper name or a brand name.
Capitalizing the first letter of each word in your key phrases screams to Google, “Oh, this is my keyword, and by the way, this link is unnatural!”
If the term is a proper name, such as a company name or a person’s name, it must be capitalized. No self-respecting writer or blogger will allow anything like that to be written, so if you fail to capitalize on it, it will appear unprofessional.
3. Building Links To Promotional Pages
Keep in mind that your aim is to create the most natural backlink profile so that Google will love you.
The service pages are entirely promotional. They exist solely to inform customers about the services you or your client provide for them to buy from you.
No one will automatically connect to these websites. Not a single one.
Do you see how a link to your services page might be construed as a fake link by Google?
Building an amazing homepage builds confidence and then powers the inner pages. The non-promotional insightful content to your audience is the best link-building strategy for getting these pages to rank. From these pages, create internal links to your services pages.
Then you can go crazy building links to these “power pages” and letting the SEO juice flow to your services pages.
Also Read: SEO vs PPC – Which is best for your Business?
4. The 500 Word Guest Post
Across the guest posting site, the standard article length for all guest post services has become 500 words.
Most of the third-party sites follow this link building practice.
What made 500 words the standard? Since a 500-word article is very simple to write for a guest posting program.
Since it takes the shortest period, it has the highest profit margin.
The only problem is that writing an article with some depth or meat in 500 words is difficult. As a result, the article will almost certainly not hold a lot of SEO weight.
The other, more obvious problem with the 500-word article is that, since it is the norm, those ordering guest posts assume that 500 is nice because it is the default.
This means there are over 100,000 500-word blog posts out there, the majority of which only refer to one website.
If I were Google, I’d look for any blog post with 400-600 words and just one external connection, and then disregard its SEO meaning.
We are not suggesting you can’t rank for keywords using just 500-word guest post links. You can, on the other hand, be effective. If someone in SEO does things in the same way, Google has a bad habit of penalizing everyone involved.
To be secure, make sure that the majority of your guest posts are at least 750 words long. It’s a small price to pay for a significant level of SEO benefit.
5. If You Write Great Content You’ll Naturally Get Links
Most SEO professionals believe content writing is the door to top rankings. Well if this was the case, then there was no need for SEO’s, content writers would be enough.
It is an SEO misconception about link building that you should know.
The argument “if you write great content, people will automatically read it” can only be true if you already have a cult following of raving fans waiting for you to post something new so they can share it with their friends.
And if you fit into that group, you probably don’t need or think about link building in the first place.
No one will ever link to something you’ve published unless you consciously promote it first.
Even then, it’s unlikely that they’ll link to it.
Writing guest posts, on the other hand, allows you to connect back to your fantastic content and achieve the same SEO gain.
6. If You Just Get Links You’ll Rank
Creating backlinks and hoping to rank on the top one fine day is one of the greatest misperceptions.
The truth is that doing link building incorrectly will seriously harm your SEO efforts.
You’ve either seen or heard about Google’s dreaded “toxic link profile” penalty from the SEO community. You can be penalized if you target key phrases aggressively.
You can’t just go link building and hope that the links you get will be the right mix to propel you to the top of the search results.
Google constantly monitors those things in your backlink profile, and if you don’t have them, you’ll end up on Google’s second page, or worse, nowhere to be found.
The best thing is to hire a professional link building company who knows their job pretty well.
7. Targeting Key Phrases On The Homepage
Google is a huge fan of branded keywords. It is your duty to earn Google’s confidence, and one way to do so is to create links to your homepage.
As a result, you can almost exclusively use your brand name or some version of your URL in your anchor text for links to your homepage, rather than key phrases.
Use the website’s inner pages to target key phrases.
With on-page SEO, you can still try to rank for key phrases on your homepage, but try to do your link building to 85 percent to 95 percent using branded anchors.
Surprisingly, when your Google brand authority grows, your homepage and other high-content pages on your web will begin to rank quickly.
Indeed, if you do it correctly, several sites with little or no links pointing to them will appear on Google’s first page since your brand authority transfers SEO juice to those pages.
Also Read: How to Create Quality Backlinks in SEO?
8. If You Post Content Every Week Google Will Love You
After all these years, it is still shocking to see this myth and we don’t think it’ll go away because many agencies provide this as a service to their customers.
Adding blog content every week has no bearing on rankings. In reality, some studies have shown that adding content that does not engage others can actually hurt your rankings.
What you should be doing instead is creating incredible content. If you’re going to write a blog post, make sure the material is so good that your readers can appreciate it.
It should demonstrate how to fix at least one of their issues and place you as a subject matter expert. The material should be at least 2,000 words long.
And, once it’s out there, you sell it like crazy.
It makes no difference how often you publish this type of material. It could be done once a year. That may be every month. Take as much time as you need to complete the task correctly.
You can still provide the service to your SEO clients, but you can charge them more for it and they can get much better results.
Also Read: How over doing SEO can kill your website?
9. Bad Content Strategy
Many of us had SEO firms pay money to create links for them only to discover that they don’t have a strong content strategy.
Some people are constructing links to blog posts that don’t power pages or pages that aren’t focusing on any specific keywords.
Since guest post links can take a long time or cost a lot of money, it’s critical to have a solid content plan in place before you start building links to a blog.
To rank for key phrases that will lead to conversions, you must create backlinks.
If you don’t already have the right content in place to better target certain key phrases, start there before building links.
You need awesome content pages first, and then you need a strategic plan to create links to those pages like crazy.
10. Crappy Guest Post Links Will Be Enough
Not all backlinks that you create are of equal value. The issue is that the higher the quality of the backlink, the more money or time it will take to get it placed. Furthermore, the majority of your SEO clients will be on a tight budget, so you can’t afford to overspend on backlinks.
So you come up with the solution of simply getting them DA 10 guest posts and hoping for the best. That’s the best you can do sometimes, and it’s plenty other times. However, in order to gain brand confidence with Google, most websites would need at least some backlinks from higher authority websites.
Furthermore, DA 10 blogs often vanish or die as their owners lose interest in continuing to build them up. It takes time and effort to achieve a DA of 40 or higher, but once that is accomplished, a blog owner is less likely to abandon the site.
Final Thoughts
There are far more SEO myths and mistakes than what we’ve described here. These are just a few of the most common myths we see while working with clients to create backlinks.
