Top 10 link building mistakes

Link building is emerging as a crucial SEO task but can quickly deplete your resources in terms of time and money so look out for these ten link building mistakes:

1. Scam artists exist who will take your money but not load backlinks at all or load them without the “nofollow” attribute. Routinely check on backlinks to ensure they still exist and can be followed.

2. Meaningless anchor text bore visitors and won’t lead to business.

3. Using images as backlinks don’t work as well as properly worded anchor text.

4. If image links are your only option, remember to include your keywords in its ALT text.

5. Wasting backlinks on irrelevant sites is a common error. At least ensure that the backlink comes from a site relevant to yours.

6. Don’t let your backlink get lost amongst a myriad of others. It is difficiult to stand out in a crowd. If all the others are “nofollow” links though, you still stand a chance of getting a hit.

7. If spiders cannot crawl the site that carries your link it is useless to you. Test for this with the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool.

8. Making it obvious that you pay for links can hurt your ratings. Even worse is to specify actual prices. Use link selling services like Backlinks.com to minimize the impact of this problem.

9. Links to sites with a poor reputation or “bad neighbors” can put you in search engines’ bad books. Be aware of who you associate with via your links.

10. Checking backlinks as part of your routine cannot be overemphasized since sites carrying your links that started off with a good reputation may have gone down the tubes and this could quickly bring bad news to your door.