There are all sorts of traps out there for the unwary when it comes to SEO. In a world where many of the rules are not written down, it’s easy to stray onto the wrong path. The pressure to build links can lead to a lot of mistakes. Consulting a professional is a great way to avoid pitfalls, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about link building strategies. There are, however, at least ten basic things to avoid:

1. Link for more than one page. Your internal pages are a great opportunity to address the needs of specific users. Building links with a range of keywords helps the overall search engine optimisation of your site.

2. Watch the quality of your links. This refers to not only the neighbourhoods from which your inbound links come, but also the type of links they are. A ‘no follow’ link won’t do much for your ranking.

3. Avoid submitting to too many directories. The jury is out yet again when it comes to online directories. There are those that swear by them as an effective method of both promoting your site and gaining inbound links. It is probably for the former reason that Google doesn’t ignore them all together, as directories are a legitimate way of advertising.

4. Be versatile. Don’t just write up one description and submit it to lots of sites. Not only is this a bad use of your SEO resources, but it also looks like automatic submission and may be penalised by the search engines.

5. Diversify your anchor text. Similarly to the point above, your anchor text needs to be different for each new link. If you have control over the text used to anchor your links in other sites, make use of the opportunity by creating a new, specific piece of text.

6. Seek links from sites that update frequently. If the last time Google trawled the site was a couple of months ago, there’s a good chance the site’s content is rarely updated. Non-frequent crawls of a website are a bad sign for the site’s relationship with search engines.

7. Don’t forget to do a ranking check on sites that link to you. This is a basic thing, but worth noting. Links from high-ranking sites are more likely to boost your own ranking than links from low-ranked or de-indexed sites.

8. Be wary of automatic submissions. There are a lot of tools out there at the moment for automatic link submissions, and a fair number of companies willing to promote them. It has long been thought that automatic link submissions can endanger your ranking. Not only is this a concern, but the results they produce are patchy. Natural links are the best way to boost the results of organic search.

9. Be picky. Sites linking to yours have some effect on your reputation. If a site hands out links to just anyone, it’s likely they won’t boost your reputation much.

10. Stay focussed on your users. This is possibly the best thing to do in any area of SEO, because it helps you to stick to search engine rules. Your users are the people you want to please.

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