We have written in relatively recent times here on the Jumping Spider Media blog, about how link building should still be a key component of brands’ digital marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts in the 2020s. But is your own organisation accumulating backlinks in the ways that will help boost its profile and power forward its sales and growth?
To help you get your bearings, here are a few things you should not be doing as part of your company’s approach to link building.
Publishing low-quality or ‘thin’ content
Whether you’re looking to publish guest posts on other sites to help drive traffic towards your own site, or you’re putting up content on your own site to hopefully help attract backlinks, the content will need to deliver genuine value to human readers.
In other words, it shouldn’t seem as if the content was only created in the first place in order to attract backlinks or to contribute to other aspects of your brand’s SEO. It needs to be well-written, informative, and engaging, while serving your target audience’s interests and needs.
Overdoing it with anchor-text optimisation
Sure, it’s a wise idea to carefully think about the specific text you use as anchor text for your links. To that end, you might understandably seek to use “exact match” anchor text – in other words, making the clickable link text the exact keyword or phrase that you wish to rank for.
Did you know, though, that Google regards such a practice as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings? You do, then, need to mix things up somewhat with the anchor text you use for your links, while still ensuring the anchor text is relevant to the linked-to content.
This means that in some cases you will use natural language phrases, while other anchor text may involve the use of your brand’s name. A diverse variety of anchor texts won’t just “look” more natural for your brand, as it could also help you reach a broader variety of readers than may have otherwise been the case.
Emphasising quantity over quality
The fact is, if you can attract a relatively small number of backlinks from authoritative and trusted websites, this is likely to benefit your brand more than a large number of low-quality backlinks. Google rightly places a greater value on quality than it does on quantity, given that a high-quality backlink will represent a powerful vote of confidence in your site.
And of course, the highest-quality and most authoritative websites won’t exactly give up backlinks easily to you. This is why cultivating strong, prolonged relationships with such sites will also be important, so that you aren’t solely dependent on relatively “cold” approaches.
Link acquisition doesn’t have to be a headache for your brand in 2024, when you know the right moves to make. Contact the Jumping Spider Media team today to learn more about how we can fuel your business’s visibility and success online.