We are all aware that backlinking is vital for SEO success. I outlined this in my article about off page SEO. However, there are still a couple of backlinking mistakes committed by people worldwide which is costing them dearly in search engine rankings, traffic and most importantly, revenue.

1. No Anchor Text

This is the most basic principle of a good backlink. If you want your backlink to help your website rank for a certain keyword, then the keyword must be in the anchor text of that backlink. For example, if the main keyword of your website was “designer wedding clothes”, then the text which should be included in your backlink should be “designer wedding clothes.”

2. Linking To The Wrong Page

This follows on from the previous backlinking mistake. It also emphasises the importance of choosing to target 1 keyword per page. For example, if you have a webpage which is optimised for the keyword “designer wedding shoes” then all the backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text should be sent to that page. Don’t send it to your home page or any other page. Sounds simple and logical, but so many people forget about this.

3. Linking From Irrelevant Sites

Search engines thrive on relevancy and reward those who help it achieve that objective. Make sure that all the links pointing back to your website are from relevant websites. For example, if you had a website about designer wedding clothes, be certain that a plumbing website is not linking to you. You may come across cases where this cannot be controlled, however, in most cases, the website linking to you will get punished for linking to an irrelevant website instead of you.

A certain exception to this rule include article directories, video sharing websites and social media sites. However, all of them have categories and as long as your backlink is in the most relevant category, you will be fine.

4. Linking From Dodgy Websites

Make sure that the website you are getting linked from is not a dodgy website. Apart from affecting the reputation of your website, this can lead to your website getting punished from the search engines. A dodgy website refers to any website which uses black hat SEO strategies. For example, there are a lot of “link farms” out there on the Web which have been created specifically for website owners to put a link back to their website. Avoid such websites because they only encourage unnatural linking (which is black hat) and which will only get your website punished.

In rare cases, you may get other put a link to your website on one of these, however, most of them do require your consent. At the end of the day, these link farms will become harmless when the search engines start ignoring them.

5. Getting Reciprocal Backlinks

Many SEO experts out there encourage website owners to get reciprocal backlinks. This is when 2 websites link to one another.

The truth is that reciprocal backlinks give you very little if any SEO benefit. The reason is that for search engines, 2 websites linking to each other is not normal.

On the other hand, one-way backlinks give you the most SEO benefit. And you get this through a variety of ways as indicated in my article about off page SEO.

Avoid Mistakes To Succeed Online

Sometimes it’s those little things which make something successful. When it comes to Internet marketing and SEO, doing backlinking correctly is one of those little things which pays off in droves.

If you’ve been doing internet marketing for as long as I have, then you would know about the importance of the SEO mindset. You need to have this type of mindset if you want your website (or websites) to rank highly on the search engines, get lots of traffic and at the end of it all, get lots of sales and customers.

If you’re brand new to the world of internet marketing, I can tell you that it’s not easy to adopt the SEO mindset. It’s simply one of those things that turns into a habit with time and adopt without knowing it. In fact, as I am writing this blog post, I am (without knowing) using this mindset.

What Is The SEO Mindset?

Put simply, it’s when you think about creating websites, pages, content, links in terms of maximising SEO. It’s not easy to explain so I’ll use the example of this blog post.

As I am writing this blog post, I am strategically placing semantic keywords throughout so that when the search engines come around to index this blog post, this will get a more favourable ranking.

(Semantic keywords are those keywords which are related with the main keyword, in this case, SEO mindset)

In addition, before even writing this post, I’ve chosen the pages I want to link to as well as the anchor text I am going to use for each of them. It’s now all about putting them in a neat spot in this blog post.

How To Adopt This Mindset

The key to adopting this type of mindset is to have a detailed and thorough understanding of on page SEO and off page SEO. Once you are able to understand these 2 concepts, you will never again be able to create anything online without thinking in terms of SEO. Which is a great thing I must add.

Few things are worse than creating awesome content but making it difficult for people to find it online.

If you haven’t yet done so, I implore you to read over my posts on the topics of on page SEO and off page SEO because all you need to know about getting high rankings and lots of traffic is here. Make it your goal to keep reading them until you understand every sentence. If you still don’t understand anything, you can always contact me and I will be more than happy to help.

After more than 2 years in the internet marketing industry, there’s no doubt in my mind that the SEO mindset is the difference between earning a couple of dollars sporadically online and a healthy, consistent, full time living online.

After mastering the art of on page SEO, it’s time to move on to off page SEO. If you haven’t read my previous post on on page SEO, please read that first because any off page SEO will be ineffective if on page SEO is not first up to scratch.

Off Page SEO is all about getting links back to your website so that it ranks highly for the target keywords on the search engines. These are more commonly known as backlinks.

Choose Your Keywords

The first step to performing off page SEO is to choose your target keywords. You want to come up with a list 10 keywords.

This is how you should divide your 10 keywords:

• 2 should be your primary keywords and the ones you want your website to rank number 1 for in the long run. For example, you may choose “beauty salon” as one of your primary keywords.
• 5 should be closely related keywords which are longer tailed and easier to rank highly for in the short run. For example, you may choose “beauty salon tips” and “beauty salon business.”
• 3 should be vaguely related keywords which are related to the broad topic of your primary keyword. For example, you may choose “beauty training” and “beauty services.”

Linking & Anchor Text

Now that you have your list of keywords, it’s time to link back to your website with them. The way you do this is with anchor text.

Anchor text refers to the visible, clickable text in a link. For example, if the primary keyword of your website was “beauty salon”, then you would want to use beauty salon as the anchor text, just like:

“Try out the best beauty salon on the planet.”

Note: The above is just an example.

You also want to be sure when linking with anchor text is that you are linking to the relevant page. For example, if you using “beauty salon tips” in your anchor text, make sure that it is linking to a page optimised for the keyword “beauty salon tips.” This builds on the SEO rule of optimised each page for just 1 keyword, which was covered in my post about on page SEO.

When it comes to off page SEO, it’s much easier to rank highly for a variety of keywords by linking to various optimised pages than just the main page of a website.

Backlink Sources

You can get backlinks from a variety of sources online:

Article Marketing – this refers to submitting articles (at least 300 words long) to various online article directories such as Ezine Articles. It’s important that you engage in effective article marketing if you want to make the most of this source of backlinks.

Video Marketing - this is all about creating videos and distributing them to various major video sharing sites such as YouTube. The most important thing is that the title, description and tags of each video contains the target keywords. Don’t forget to link to your website somewhere.

Press Release – this refers to sending out a press release about your website and your products and/or services. Copyblogger can explain how to use press releases better than I can. Once again, don’t forget to put a link back to your website on the press release you send out.

Blog Commenting - this is all about leaving comments on those blogs which rank highly on the search engines. If you want to leave a comment, most blogs ask you to leave your name and website URL which is then hyperlinked with your name. This is the perfect place to use your target keyword in the anchor text to your website. Make sure that you leave informative and engaging comments on blogs otherwise moderators will simply delete your comment and you will miss out on a backlink.

Forum Commenting – this refers to participating in high traffic forums about the topic of your website. Most forums allow you to put your website URL with your preferred anchor text in your signature. Just in case you don’t know, a signature is a small tab of information which appears under each of your forum posts. Search engines are constantly indexing forums, so the more you post in forums, the more backlinks you can get.

Social Media – this refers to interacting with people with similar interests in online communities such as Twitter and Facebook. This is a very broad topic which will be discussed in more detail further on. The only thing that you need to know is that search engines are continuously indexing new content and links on these sites so you would be crazy not to get backlinks from these.

Social Bookmarking – this refers to sharing your favourite links with people on the Web. This is just like the common bookmark tabs you have on your browser but this time, you are sharing these with the rest of the world. The 3 biggest social bookmarking websites on the Internet are StumbleUpon, Digg and Technorati. Once again, these sites are continuously indexed by search engines so leaving backlinks here is totally worthwhile.

Knowing that there are many sources of backlinks is great, however, they must be used carefully and in compliance with the most important SEO rules of them all. This is covered in the following section and must be thoroughly understood if you want to do off page SEO correctly.

The Most Important SEO Rule

When it comes to getting backlinks for your website, the most important rule is that these backlinks must be created as naturally as possible. I cannot stress the importance of this enough!

If you are still wondering what I mean, here’s an example.

Let’s say that the target keyword of my website was “beauty salon” (following on from the example in my previous post). If you go out and get 50 backlinks with the keyword “beauty salon” in every anchor text in just 1 week, then this is not natural. Smart search engines such as Google will detect this and they will interpret this as the work of a robot. For them, if it doesn’t look like the links came naturally, then the link benefit will be drastically reduced and your website will most likely be pushed down the rankings for that target keyword. Instead of helping to improve your ranking, you will jeopardise it.

Even 25 backlinks in 1 week may be excessive.

It all really depends on both the variety of anchor text and link sources. Write this down on a piece of paper and stick it on your wall.

When building backlinks, make sure that you always have:

• anchor text variety
• link source variety

Anchor Text Variety

Anchor text variety refers to a mixture of keywords in the anchor text of your backlinks. For example, instead of using “beauty salon” in the anchor text of 50 backlinks, you can divide it up among a variety of keywords.

You can have 10 backlinks with “beauty salon” in the anchor text, 10 backlinks with “beauty salon tips”, another 10 backlinks with “beauty salon business” with the remaining 20 backlinks being divided between “beauty training”, “beauty services”, “beauty images” and “beauty day spa.”

It all comes down to choosing a list of 10 keywords which was discussed in the first section.

Link Source Variety

Link source variety refers to a mixture of sources for your backlinks. For example, don’t just get all your backlinks from article marketing, go and get some from video marketing, blog commenting, social bookmarking and social media too.

Once again, the search engines find it more natural that backlinks are derived from a wide range of sources instead of just one source. This will only help you improve your website ranking.

It’s Time To Take Over The Search Engines

With the valuable SEO information presented in this post and in my previous post, you are more than ready to take over the search engines with your websites.

It’s now all about doing the necessary work. If you are able to perform both on page and off page SEO on a consistent basis over a lengthly period of time, there is no doubt that you can reach the top of the major search engines.