Be aware of your link building mistakes.

Link building is oh so important in SEO. Experts are becoming more and more creative in finding ways to get those links. And discussions are rising in forums on which links are best, which links might get your site penalized, which links are quick, and how much is each link worth translated in dollars.

The answer to all these questions can be given very simple; you don’t just need lots of them, the best, the most expensive. You need all of them!
Here is what you should NOT do while going out to get those links:

• Do not forget to check your internal links. All webmasters know that links are important. Some work hard to get those links, some focus on quantity, some on quality, but many fail to check their internal links. Internal links are the most important links on a site and what is more? You have them in control! Check if you used relevant anchor texts and positioning of those links.
• Do not forget to get some low PR links. Because everyone is looking for the quick fix and tries to get links from high PR sites, many webmasters forget to look on a long term basis. Those PR0 sites are very easy to give a link to you, and some of them will the PR4 and PR5 sites in the future. Besides that there are two more reasons to get the low PR links as well: PR0 is not nothing, it all counts. And it is more natural to have incoming links from all kind of PR sites.
• Do not forget your outgoing links. Don’t worry about PR juice leaking away. You can see it in two ways: each good article or statement shows the source of the information. And if you want to get something, you need to give something.
• Do not forget to monitor your inbound links. If you have done a links exchange, content exchange or bought a link or won a link, check regularly if it is still in place and if it is a real do follow link. When you have done a trade, don’t forget about it as soon as it is put up. Monitor your link partners.
• Do not use useless anchor texts. If you have the opportunity to choose an anchor text, use a relevant keyword for it. It is a big failure to just choose your URL or company name as anchor text. It is very likely that nobody is searching for that. Find out your keywords under which you want to rank and choose that as an anchor text where possible.
• Do not leave paid linking marks. Even though paid linking is not recommended, it still works in many cases and the temptation will always be there. Just make sure that you do not leave big marks behind that are easy to track. Do not make it too obvious that you are paying for links.
• Do not forget to check the relevance of a link. There is not much point in receiving links from totally unrelated websites. Try to focus on sites with a related or similar topic to get your links from. And get some real links from that site, not somewhere from the 20th page of their link exchange program. PR isn’t everything, relevance and positioning are.
• Do not add ‘no follow’ to your outgoing links. Just as you expect a genuine link to your site, you should give genuine links as well. PR juice is really not leaking to anywhere if your links are genuine. Only pages that consist of links only and are irrelevant to other pages will lose their PR very quickly, but this has nothing to do with a leak.

Link building is a very time consuming and frustrating job. Remember: nobody really likes it. You send out 100 emails, fill in tons of forms and receive only a handful of links back. That is the way it is, but if done right, it is totally worth it. Good links will last a long time.