Link-building remains an important aspect of SEO, whether it’s for a small startup or a major world-spanning company. They continue to help drive traffic to a website, ensuring more eyes see whatever the site is offering. Internal link building also ensures relevant information from deeper within the site is also seen by visitors, increasing interaction.
Unfortunately, link-building is affected by many myths that make people wary of using them in their marketing strategies. These misconceptions, though easy to disprove, are so prevalent that it can be hard to counteract them. Let’s look at three of the more common myths regarding link-building in SEO.
Guest Blogs and Link Buying
There is a long-standing practice where website owners rely on guest bloggers to provide content with relevant links pointing to their site’s top pages. Alternatively, site owners prefer to purchase links in bulk to help drive traffic to their pages. The driving force is to save time and money by setting these up in large numbers to get traffic immediately.
Google has stated several times that such tactics do not help in increasing a site’s visibility on search results, or worse, can actively hurt site performance. The search engine even has a checklist to determine whether or not a blog entry is a guest post. Google encourages site owners to maintain a more organic method of link-building for positive traffic growth.
Site Authority
For years, marketing professionals have discussed the importance of domain authority and other related metrics for building links for your website. These metrics come from a variety of SEO-related marketing brands that cover various aspects of website promotion. It was claimed that an external link with a high domain rating or citation flow has a higher chance of helping drive more users to another site.
Rather than looking at these arbitrary domain numbers, it is suggested to stick to looking at actual topic relevance when linking. Alternatively, consider a search engine’s actual scoring criteria over third-party metrics that may only cover a fraction of the detail. A low-DR blog post with comprehensive information for your page has greater value to you than a very popular online entry that only has a cursory connection to what you have.
Internal Links
There are still websites out there that rely solely on dropdown menus and highlighted link buttons to show internal links deeper within the site. These links would be prominently presented in the UI in order to catch a user’s attention. The idea is that the visuals are more effective in catching a site visitor’s attention than reading through content and checking hyperlinks.
This misconception is fueled by a focus on expediency, especially for larger websites where products come and go regularly. Failure to provide contextual internal links to various relevant pages throws away a good deal of traffic. Optimizing internal links is a must if a webmaster hopes to establish a network of related pages for a site.
Link building holds a lot of power to improve a website’s SERP level, but it only works if it is utilized properly. Avoid the trap of link-building misconceptions and you’ll be on your way to an effective link-building process. Consult your digital marketing consultant to better understand how the process actually works.