The Shark Tank

If I had a penny for every time I heard a myth surrounding link building, I’d probably be quarantining on my own private island. Myths often deter DIYers from building valuable backlinks to their sites, but you don’t have to be afraid of link-building, just educated on it. Here are a few myths we’d like to set straight to help you better understand how link building can help your brand and build good relationships for your business.

1. High Domain Authority is the End All Be All

A common misconception about link building is that only the links with high domain authority are worth pursuing, and anything else is considered to be less than ideal. This isn’t true. For example, when attempting to rank locally, a link from a low domain, yet very legitimate, small business in your town is extremely valuable. While not a high traffic or highly authoritative site, this endorsement tells Google that you’re trusted in your local community.

2. You Have to be a Tech Wizard

Absolutely false. You don’t need to be a coding genius to work with links and build them for your business. In fact, the key to building links is actually being a problem solver, persuasive, and a smooth operator of sorts. Building valuable links is a result of fostering actual relationships with other organizations offline. Using an outgoing personality, you’re able to not only build an initial relationship, but go the extra step to ask for a link from another organization’s website to yours.

If you’re not looking forward to being charming in order to create relationships and gain links, there’s good news. Another great way to achieve links without being a tech wizard is by creating enriching content that others want to share with their audiences. If you have coding and web design ability, that’s great, but it isn’t required to be successful. Having unique, attention-grabbing pitches to sell your content is really what’s needed to build links.

3. Follow Links all Have the Same Value

Follow links are not all created equally when it comes to building your network of links and your ranking. Some links have a higher value than others, and having this relationship with your site can in turn help build up your search ranking. The diversity of your link portfolio is just as important as having follow links.

4. Anchor text should match

The anchor text of a link should not be an exact match to the title of the page it is linking to. This almost never comes across as natural. It is very important to make sure the anchor text is related to the content the link will take a user to, but you should not be too spammy, and you should also give the Google bot some credit!

The anchor text should flow with where it appears in the context of the page. Creativity is important here to be sure it makes sense while still benefiting the SEO. A bonus tip for anchor text is that you want a variety – not all of your anchor text should be branded, and not all of it should be keyword heavy. A healthy balance is important.

5. The Sole Purpose of Link Building is Algorithmic

While building links does have an algorithmic purpose, it’s not the only value to be reaped from a solid backlink. Link building serves to improve your brand visibility and attract valuable traffic to your website. The more sites you appear on, the more people grow familiar with your brand. These relationships serve you in the future as you work to improve your ranking and create discoverable content.

Link building is a very valuable business tool when trying to improve your ranking and domain authority. It is important to really understand it as a relationship-building tool and not just something for coders and webmasters. With creativity and solid persuasive pitches, any business can improve their sites backlink profile to further grow their brand’s visibility. Now get out there and go build some online relationships.