Link building may be one of the oldest tricks of the trade in SEO. For those wishing to improve their search engine standing, drive more traffic to their sites and ultimately expand their businesses, building links is essential. With more than two decades of link building practices to analyze and consider, picking the right advice can feel overwhelming. Instead of what must be done, we want to make sure you’re not doing the wrong things at the onset. Today, we’ll review a few mistakes and errors some people make when building links that can truly cost your brand valuable exposure.

Using Videos for Link Building

Rich content is in high demand across the internet. As search engines and social media networks alike prefer to feature videos and other more interactive forms of content, many are turning to this as a solution for everything. With respect to link building, however, pinging links to videos may not generate the results you would like. Why is this? In most case, it has everything to do with attribution: rather than actually linking back to the website of the creator, other sites simply embed the video. This does absolutely nothing to help you build links and can sometimes feel like a waste.

Creating Content with a Specific Link Purpose

All too often, our research yields plenty of ideal targets for link building exercises. After a careful evaluation of the site(s) in question, we put ourselves to work generating content that these entities will find appealing. In many situations, this is an absolutely bad idea that will not result in a productive number of links. The reason for this is simple: most brands do not want to deal with excessive collaboration that comes with such an act when they can easily create their own content in-house. Even if the content is excellent, it may not be worth the brand’s time. In the event they do not bite, then you’ve created content that may or may not have any other purpose – and on top of that, you still didn’t build a link.

Delving Too Deep into Local

When attempting to build links through local outlets, it may be tempting to create content that features or focuses on local events. While this is where many successful link builders have dominated, there is risk involved. In many cases, local content automatically reduces the number of opportunities you have to build links. By pinging links to content that is local, you only have so many natural targets. If they all turn you down, where do you go from here? It becomes very easy to find yourself in a position where nobody is interested when you focus on building links locally, so be careful.

While link building remains a very important aspect of SEO, marketing and building traffic avenues in general, some methods do not provide as much benefit. By avoiding the three major mistakes above that many link builders make, you can focus your efforts on strategies that are more likely to yield results. If you have any successful link building stories to share, let us know below in the comments.