In a diverse SEO industry we often see what other companies are doing with their SEO tactics. It would be fair to say it helps up refine our service and avoid some bad habits. But in an industry where one rumour can change the mindset of thousands of SEO consultants what shouldn’t you do when you link build?
What Link Building SEO is
Link building SEO is the process of adding anchor text links to your site in order to boost its current rankings in Google’s search engine along with others. Knowing this, it is vital that any SEO company builds high quality, on-theme and well established links for SEO. There is a lot of rumour and hearsay that is going around in the digital marketing world saying that links are no longer important. This isn’t the case. Google made a pretty big update in April of last year that targeted links specifically. It wasn’t looking at the quality links, it was a way of Google trying to find those companies that were paying for low quality, high quantity links for their SEO.
What You Shouldn’t do
A lot of SEO companies focus on the quantity of links they can give you as a service. This in essence isn’t a bad service but more often than not the links you are getting are of low quality. The theory behind this was that the more links you have saying your keywords in the anchor text, the higher up in Google the site will rank for its respective keywords. This is still the case and links are still just as important as before, if not more important. Google is not trying to find ways to ignore links, but rather trying to find a way to find the quality and earned links. So when an SEO company tells you that you will get 1000 links per month alarm bells should be ringing. Why would any site, other than your Facebook, Twitter, the BBC and Wikipedia get so many links in that period of time? This type of link building is extremely dangerous so be very mindful of it.
Things to Avoid
There are lots of different tactics and techniques that SEO companies will use to improve your rankings. Our service is a high quality domain building service, that builds on-theme content and points to clients individually and does not point to any other clients’ sites. Other SEO companies tend to build lots of links in different ways and more often than not the networks or sites these links are on also get used for thousands of other sites. This dilutes the quality and credibility which is why Google doesn’t assign link power to them. Problems occur when you start to get lots and lots of links from these types of sites that are heavily focused on anchor text. This is not a natural thing to happen to any site, think about it. If I had a website and I asked for a link from your site how many will you give me? The likelihood is not very many especially if it doesn’t make any sense to you as a business. So when an SEO company places your link in the footer of another client’s website that sells something completely different to your business, why would Google see this a credible link – when it’s not?
Trust
The way SEO was done in the past was heavily based on links, the value of links hasn’t changed so without them you won’t get the most from your SEO campaign. But the way Google looks at quality has. In basic terms Google can now assess what it feels is a quality link and what is a paid link. So this has naturally meant that trust has become highly important and this is evident in some of the SEO tools out there. The question is how do you know if you are getting trustworthy links? Well there are ways you can check yourself. You can use various tools that show you backlink data and the favourable one we use is called MajesticSEO. This tool shows you the power and trust of the links pointing to your site. It also uses the operative word here – ‘trust’. Without fresh new content, making sure you have all the correct on page and quality, trustworthy links your SEO campaign will only get you so far. To get the most from it you need to combine all these three areas to make your site even more competitive online.
Social Links
Social media has increased in popularity in recent years. Companies are now sharing the content on their sites through various social media platforms. Social media content changes all the time, but it’s main purpose for SEO is to act as a call to action for your business, driving traffic to your site through targeted call to action landing pages. This is becoming an ever growing tactic for SEO. Content is becoming king but sharing that content on your social media is a great way to attract people to your quality articles. They will then see the effort and expertise, browse more of the site and are more likely to get in touch. A common misconception, and something we are always talking about in our new content tool, is the mind set of businesses that use social media. It is not just about having a presence, it is about utilising who you share your content to, who you follow in your industry and ultimately getting traffic from social media. The reason I have mentioned social media is merely the fact that most SEO companies don’t use social media as an SEO tool. In fact some companies aren’t asking their clients to write new content for the site and for social media purposes. If you want a successful campaign, these strategies need to work in sync. That’s the purpose of why we are doing 200 articles in 50 days!
Ask The Question
I can appreciate that sometimes as a customer you don’t really understand how SEO works and that SEO is portrayed as a specialist skill. But the only thing you really need to understand is, that it is all about quality. Quality links and quality content, these going hand in hand will help strive to a successful campaign. So the question you should be asking any SEO company even your current one should be where are the high quality links you have been building for me? They should be able to tell you and show you these. If they can’t then it is likely they haven’t done any. The reason for this is that if a site links to yours then you will be able to see it in your backlink profile nothing can be or should be hidden in the way of backlinks. My advice would be to go and ask your provider where the quality, trustworthy and powerful links are. If you are struggling in the rankings that might give you the reason.
