When it comes to backlinking, many SEOs don’t go about it the right way, which is why people often believe it can be a waste of time. With that said, when done correctly, backlinking can prove to be extremely valuable for your website by increasing traffic and domain authority. Here are some of the common mistakes people make when backlinking and some tips on how to avoid them.

1. Getting Links From Irrelevant Sites

When building links, it’s vital to consider what sites you are reaching out to. You want to make sure that the places you’re requesting backlinks from are relevant to your industry. For example, if you are a business attorney, you could write a bylined article for Law.com or a guest blog for the Association for Corporate Growth. On the other hand, you would not want to get a link from a gardening website because it is irrelevant to what you do and comes across as spammy. With that in mind, be sure to carefully sift through backlink opportunities and make sure they are relevant to your area of practice or industry.

2. Poor Outreach Methods

One of the biggest mistakes people make when backlinking is not using effective outreach methods. You can conduct backlinking outreach in many ways, but it’s important to find a method that works best for you and your industry. The biggest thing to remember is that you want to emphasize to whoever you’re reaching out to the value added from the backlink. No matter what, backlinking should be beneficial to both parties involved. For example, a guest blog offers valuable content on an external site, and in exchange, they provide a link back to yours. It’s a win-win!

3. Getting Links From Low Authority Websites

Receiving backlinks from low authority websites can actually hurt you in the long run. Because of this, you’ll want to make sure you are carefully creating a list of potential backlinking opportunities to reach out to. Now, you may be wondering how you can tell whether a website is of low authority. Well, there are free tools out there such as ahrefs that will provide you with a domain rating, which is essentially a website’s trust score.

At 9Sail, when we do backlink prospecting, we aim for websites with an absolute minimum domain rating of 20 or more. However, the sweet spot for domain rating is in the 30 to 80 range because those are extremely valuable and realistic to receive.

4. Building Links Back to Only One Page

Oftentimes when people start backlinking, they focus on just generating links to their homepage. While links to your homepage are helpful, you want to make sure you have backlinks to a variety of pages on your site. This is because generating backlinks can help improve rankings within search engines. So, if you really want to boost the ranking and authority of your business formation service page then you’ll want to work on getting that page backlinks.

5. Sticking to One Backlinking Strategy

There are many different strategies to build links back to your website, some of which include guest blogging, link insertions and unlinked brand mentions. With that in mind, when you are generating your list of backlink opportunities, you’ll want to keep all of the strategies in mind to target many different types of backlinks and diversify your link profile.

Need Help Building Links For Your Website?

Link building is a critical aspect of any SEO strategy that signals to Google your website is trustworthy. At 9Sail, we can help you develop a link building strategy that is effective. Contact us today to get started!