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5 Myths About Building Links You Ought to Dump

5 Myths About Building Links You Ought to Dump

Link building has long been a popular tool for lifting search engine rank in Google. However, if you do link building incorrectly today, Google will eventually catch on and penalize your site.

If you hold onto any of the misconceptions below, you could be courting trouble. 

City Names In Site Anchor Text Boost Your Rankings

Many SEO companies think that putting the name of your city in the anchor text will help in Google rankings. But others have argued that Google doesn’t regard keywords in this way.

At Google, the thinking goes that a city name is a location but not a keyword. Google can find your website’s IP address or physical address to identify the region your company targets.

If you include the name of the city in the anchor text, you’re waving a red flag that says you are likely engaging in SEO. 

Another reason to avoid putting the city name in the text is that it looks unnatural. Google’s focus these days seems to have shifted in the direction of natural text. If a keyword phrase sounds unnatural — that is, if people don’t usually talk that way — it could become a strike against you.

Capitalization In Anchor Text is Powerful

A frequent SEO mistake is to make the first word in the keyword a capital letter. The problem here is that anchor text typically turns up in the middle of sentences.

In the real world, you’d never capitalize a random word in the middle of a sentence. If the keyword phrase isn’t a proper noun, then you shouldn’t capitalize the initial term.

Capitalizing each word in the keyword phrase tells Google you’re trying to do some “cool SEO stuff” that doesn’t look natural. This isn’t what you ought to be doing.

Link Building To Promotional Web Pages Works

If you want to signal to Google that you’re doing some hard-core SEO stuff, build links to pages that sell goods and services. Keep in mind that you want to develop a natural-looking backlink profile so Google will choose to put you higher in their rankings.

Your services pages are all promotional. The only reason they exist is to tell people what you’re selling so they’ll buy your wares. No one is going to link to such pages naturally; people are going to be far more interested in the pages that feature interesting or valuable information. 

The proper link-building technique, one that will make service pages rank appropriately, is to create excellent brand trust. After that, build power pages that offer unique, informative content to your readers. Finally, you may link to your promotional pages from that enticing content.

Guest Posts of 500 Words Get Traffic

The most familiar default for guest posts is 500 words. We aren’t sure why this has become popular. But it’s undeniable that 500 words are easier for writers to compose.

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Google Trust

It doesn’t take a lot of time, so the writers make more money. The challenge is that it’s difficult to write a highly informative article when you’ve got only 500 words to work with. Usually, Google concludes these short articles aren’t worth much.

Also, there are a million websites with 500-word blog posts that link to just a single site. Some have suggested that Google looks for blog posts that are only 500 words or so, and that have only one external link, as a method of assigning little value to them.

This isn’t to assert that it’s impossible to achieve SEO success using short blog posts. But if everyone is doing the same easy thing, you probably want to stand out from the crowd by doing something different. 

Writing Great Content Means You’ll Get Links

Write great content, and people will find it: Many believe this is the dumbest thing that SEO services prescribe.

There’s just one way that this can be true: If you have a big audience who loves your site and is waiting for a new post, then yes, it will get shares and links. 

In most cases, no one will read or link to a post you have written unless you promote it. That’s what proper link building is all about.

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