When you are working to direct greater amounts of traffic to your website, a great strategy to use to draw in visitors and boost your rankings in search engines is link building.

However, although link building, in theory, does not sound complicated, it can actually be difficult to perform well in the beginning. Similarly to other modalities of search engine optimization, to correctly implement link building, it is necessary to have determination, patience, and practice. No single strategy will lead you to effective link building, and there are no solutions that will work overnight.

Here are the five of the most frequently committed errors in link building; avoiding these will help you when you develop your site and promote it on the web.

Ignoring Social Media

A number of website owners put a lot of work into building links, but sadly see their efforts come to naught due to their lack of attention paid to the power of social media. Google’s search algorithm has recently begun to add links from websites focused primarily on social media.

These search engines value links that result from social media, as they are a form of social proof. In other words, when sites like Twitter and Facebook send links your way, provided those links are from good sources on those sites, then you gain credibility on your site and you win both greater traffic and higher rankings in search engines.

Favoring Quantity instead of Quality

Quality is always going to be more important than quantity when it comes to the links you receive. The effects here are similar to those of social media power on impacting the future of your website. When other sites link to you, search engines will compute algorithms to determine the credibility of those other sites, which determines whether or not your search engine ranking will increase. You should focus your efforts, therefore, on obtaining a few good links rather than putting your efforts toward trying to acquire as many links as you can. Similarly, high quality sites will direct more traffic in your direction than lower quality sites.

Refusing to Reciprocate Links

You also need to remember to reciprocate your links. You do not simply have to provide links back to any sites that link to you, and you also should not expect to receive links in return simply because you link to other sites. That said, when you link to sites that are of high quality and of high relevance to your site’s patrons, two main benefits result. First, you provide information to your readers that are helpful, and second, you work to improve your relationships with other website owners and bloggers. These relationships are important to facilitate your success online. In other words, active engagement on the internet community is important.

Forgetting to Use Important Phrases in Anchor Texts

As you devote greater attention to link building in search engines, you should also pay attention to how important particular phrases are in your anchor texts. Relevant phrases help search engines understand that the content you are providing is valuable while also helping them understand what that link content is. Rather than telling your visitors to “click here”, take the time to describe your links.

Only Linking to a Single Page

Finally, when owners of websites ask for links, they often focus solely on their homepage. Though this won’t hurt, you can improve things by linking to different inner pages on your site. This will usually provide search engines with additional information of your worthwhile content and increase visitor interest.

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by Alex Petrovic, Advanced SEO strategist – Dejan SEO company.
Main activity – Link building team leader.
Personal twitter account: http://twitter.com/Alex_DejanSEO
Company twitter account: http://twitter.com/dejanseo