No matter if you’re a digital marketer, business owner or website enthusiast, you may run into complications with your link building strategies. This organic SEO tactic is very time consuming and involved, and it can be easy to put in a tremendous amount of effort and see little to no payoff.
You may be wondering if it’s even worth doing, but we assure you that it is! When executed correctly, it will grow your web presence and website traffic. Here are some of the top reasons why your link building strategies are not creating the results you hoped for.
Your Content Quality is Poor
This is listed first because it’s the most common reason why you’re not getting the desired response you want from your link building work. Just because you have a piece of content to share doesn’t mean it’s entitled to be linked back to. If your content isn’t valuable or intriguing to users, no one will want to link to it.
When writing your content for your web pages, make sure you’re creating something worth reading and it’s unique within your space (it’s that easy). Don’t just aim to write a specific topic; make it fresh, engaging and useful.
Your Sources are Bad
Where you have links point back to your website is a big deal, and poor sources can ruin your link building campaign efforts. If a site has low authority, relevance and history, stay away from it. Aim to have high-quality websites point back to you or you could see some negative impact on your SEO.
Your Tactics are Spammy
Like a lot of SEO tactics, Google and other search engines quickly pick up black hat tricks and mark them as spammy. Any method to manipulate your rankings without offering value to web users are considered spammy, and if the links you’re trying to give or receive are found to be irrelevant or useless, it could be seen as a bad link. If this happens, you could face a Google penalty.
Here are some of the most common spammy SEO tactics:
- Forum comments: Back in the day, forum comments used to be a great link building strategy. You would answer questions or provide useful info on a thread and include a link to your website to redirect users for more information or for citing your answer. Today, forum moderators are much stricter with self-promotional content, and if people were to post links too often or post before they were established as a knowledgeable contributor, the links and comments would be removed. Forum comments are still useful for referral traffic, but it shouldn’t be relied on for SEO benefits.
- Paid links: You may think paid anything will give you a leg up on the competition, but that’s a myth. Search engines will penalize you if you pay other sites to link back to you (unless it is a sponsored link and tagged as nofollow). If you have done this in the past, undo it soon.
- Other link schemes: Google has a long list of link schemes that will negatively impact your site’s rankings. Verse yourself with this list and make sure you are not partaking in any of these tactics.
You’re Targeting Dated Pages
If you’re trying to get links on older, archived or outdated web pages, you will not see a boost in your link authority since search engines don’t frequently crawl those pages. Instead of getting links on these pages, try to find links on pages that are less than three-years-old. When looking for these younger pages, you can sort your search results by the date they were either published or updated.
You’re Point Back to the Wrong Page
Wouldn’t it be great if each of your external links would go directly to the page you want them to? Unfortunately, it’s very doubtful you’ll get a link pointed to an exact product/service page or product category page. However, you can try to steer traffic toward those pages by created valuable content that’s related to the page and link to it in the content.
Here’s an example of how to do this right: Let’s say you own a bakery and want people to order one of your pies online. To point people to your pie product pages, consider creating a fun infographic about the history of pies. You can then link to each of your pie pages as people read about those kinds of pies when they scroll through the timeline. This is a unique way to drive visitors down the sales pipe and learn more about your offerings.
No matter what link building strategies you’re using, remember all SEO tactics take time and dedication. You will never see results overnight, but by avoiding these common problems, you should see some improvement over time.
To learn more about link building and other SEO strategies, contact GreenMellen today!