Link Building Prohibition Bill That Should Govern Your Off-Page Optimization Campaign

Your link building campaign should be guided by the trio: highly targeted, high quality links - placed in the right spot on the page - with the right anchor text.

Most certainly, along the way you'll be tempted to make use of some practices that promise to deliver quick results but that also tend to raise some red flags with Google's quality standards.

Although beneficial on the short run, these gray and black hated backlink acquisitions will harm your SEO campaign and delay sustainable traffic from showing up in your charts.

List of "don't do"s to take into consideration:

1. Don't outsource your link building project unless you verify those you outsource to and they are qualified and aligned with your methods.

2. Don't search for "keyword phrase" and "submit site" in Google. The vast majority of results are garbage sites.

3. Don't just get links to your home page, get deep links to any page you want to rank well in Google; the ration should be 30~40% of links going to home page and 60~70% being deep links.

4. Don't use link building software or send mass emails for links.

5. Don't hire services which "guarantee" links or allow links added through automation. These kind of services are most likely intricate link farm consisting of a network of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.

6. Don't automate link submission on your webpages; manually approve all link requests.

7. Don't approve a link request until you ensure that the site has not "faked" its PageRank. Also, verify the page has a current cache date in Google.

8. Don't burst the link volume on short periods of time. You want to make sure the number of links matches the amount of traffic you're receiving. Until your site is getting 500 unique visitors per day, I would stick to 5-10 acquired links per day max. In other words, avoid disparities between the number of backlinks to your website and the amount of traffic you're receiving.

9. Don't make backlinking decisions based on PageRank. Instead, build backlinks to provide complete solutions to your prospect's needs.

10. Don't go after generic keywords which are on the wrong end of the buying cycle. These depict a wide market without addressing specifics which the searcher has in mind (e.g. "buy car").

11. Don't search link partners among websites that are competing for the first 100 keywords in your niche market; the chances of getting a link from them are very slim because they are your direct competitors; descent to the next 300-500 keywords, instead.

12. Don't link to the home page of the directory you've submitted to; instead, link to the page where your listing appears.

13. Don't create so-called a "links page" where you build a page and stuff a bunch of links to "recommended resources", "links" or "get more information".

14. Avoid three-way linking schemes. Search engines are getting better at detecting and discounting these links. Google in particular has aggressively begun to target and discount three way links.