January 2021

Backlinks are one of the top factors in Google’s organic ranking algorithm, it is, therefore, important to make link building an important part of your SEO strategy. Link building is getting links from external sites back to your website. Google uses these backlinks to evaluate your authority and relevance of your site for particular search terms.

To help you secure high-quality links, here are some things you should know:

• Why link building matters: The reasons to focus strongly on link building are: Your website will rank higher on Google and other search engines. It will become easy for Google to find new pages on your site easily. You will gain credibility as external links are often seen as a vote of confidence from other websites.
• Different types of links: A great link building strategy starts with understanding the different types of links and the value they add to your website. Contextual links — those placed in the body of a web page’s content instead of the footer or sidebar — and topical links —- links from websites and content that is closely related to your own site’s topic — hold value. At the same time, directory links are of little use to users and, thus, are considered low-value link.
• Outreach for links: In order to acquire backlinks from other websites, you cannot wait for them to find interesting content on your website. Proactively reaching out to other websites (other than competitors) bloggers, influencers and webmaster can help you gain explore opportunities for them to cover your content. When you reach out to other websites for link acquisition, it is important to understand their domain authority. There are several tools available in the market that can help you know the authority status of any domain or keyword.
• Use your connections with reporters to create backlinks: Press publication links are a great way to earn high-quality editorial links. Using your PR tactics, you can reach out to journalists to cover stories that are relevant to your brand and backlink to your website in their stories. Earning editorial links isn’t as easy as it sounds. You will have to create a pool of engaging content that you can pitch to the press.
• Do a backlink gap analysis: Wondering why competitors land with high-quality when you don’t? Well, there are many tools that can help you compare your backlink profiles with that of your competing websites. This will help you understand the gaps in your link building strategies. These tools also help you to find out which are the most linked-to pages, giving you valuable insights to shape up your SEO strategy.

While you are running a business, balancing efforts across multiple channels can be quite difficult. As a full-service digital marketing agency, our SEO experts can help you monitor page performance and develop an effective strategy. Hiring a digital marketing agency like ours will help you focus on your core business, while we take care of your digital marketing needs.

SEO has over recent years has become a significant revenue channel. The right applications of SEO techniques can help make progress with your marketing goals. SEO methods are constantly evolving due to search engines’ developments and consumer behaviour changes. However, when SEO techniques are implemented incorrectly it take some time to recover.

To make sure that you don’t make these mistakes, we share 8 common SEO mistakes

1. Ignoring HTTP status and server Issues: HTTP status codes are crucial to determine how your website is accessed by visitors and spiders. If there are technical issues with your website related to HTTP status, it is best to get them fixed at the earliest. Due to this problem, you may not only lose out on traffic but also damage your rankings on Google.

2. Not creating right title tags & meta descriptions: Title tags and meta descriptions tell search engines and users what your site is about. Therefore, it is important that you create the right title tags and meta descriptions using the relevant keywords. Optimised title tags and meta descriptions give your website the chance to maximise its impact in the SERPs by encourage users to click on the website. Ensure that you don’t create too many pages with same titles and descriptions — it will make it difficult for search engines to properly determine relevance and, thus, it will affect the rankings.

3. Not addressing crawling issues: If a website has crawling issues, some of the pages on the website might not be as accessible to Google. Crawlability is the foundation of your technical SEO strategy and thus you must get crawling issues resolved.

4. Indexability: Good indexability is crucial for SEO. if a page is not indexed, it won’t be seen by a search engine and, therefore, it won’t be seen by users. Duplicate meta data and content are some of the factors that can make it difficult for search engines to identify which pages to rank for certain similar search terms. Low word count, too short or too long title tags, and hreflang links are some of the factors that can affect the indexability of your site.

5. Ignoring internal and external link optimisation: Internal links direct the reader to a page within the website, whereas an external link directs the reader to a page on a different website. While internal links keep the users engaged on your website for longer, external links are seen as a vote of confidence by others. When other websites provide external links to your website or content you have posted, it boosts your site’s ranking.

6. Pages are not mobile friendly: Mobile-friendliness has become ranking criteria for both mobile and desktop for Google last year. To enhance your search performance make sure that your website complies with Google’s AMP guidelines.

7. Not evaluating site performance: Knowing how your website is performing helps you identify areas of improvement. There are many tools like Google Analytics that helps you with things like traffic, demographics and how much time the users spend on your website. Make use of these tools to continue to improve the web experience for your users.

8. Not updating your website: SEO is an evolving field and you must keep yourself abreast with all the latest happenings. Google keeps bringing out new updates and if you miss out on a major one, then your website rankings may suffer and you may lose out on valuable traffic.

Committing any of these SEO mistakes can hold your website back. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can help you ensure that your website follows the best SEO practices.