I'm often contacted by clients who complain that their link building efforts don't work. I tell many of them to re-evaluate their strategy first of all. What I've experienced is that most of the webmasters and small business are making some common link building mistakes. Though creating explosive content is the best way for building more top quality links the natural way, there are also a couple of other things that you should keep in mind so that you get faster results.

Given below are five reasons that can make your link building efforts almost fruitless. Make sure you avoid these mistakes.

#1. Your Links Lack Relevance
In terms of link building, what search engines are really concerned about is relevance. It's not actually the number of links that matters. Instead, it's the relevancy that makes a real difference. If your link building isn't bringing you the desired results, it's just the right time to analyze whether those links pointing back to your domain have any relevance. Relevance in a conversational term will mean why one site should link to another.

#2. Link Variety is Missing
The variety of links is the second most important thing that you should focus on. If you want to climb up the ladder of organic ranking, you should try to bring good variety to your site's links. When the inbounds links pointing to your domain belong to many different sources (that are also relevant), it sends good signal to search engines. While building links for your site, you should try to get different types of links including links from blogs, links from Wiki directories .net links, .com links, .edu links, .org links, blog comments links, no-follow links etc.

#3. You Manipulate Anchor Text
This is one of the most common link building mistakes that I see many webmasters make. If you're obsessed over the use of exact match anchor text, you should say goodbye to this mindset right away. Instead, you should try to diversify the anchored text as much as possible. You can use your brand name, URL name, long tail keywords or short tail keywords to diversify the anchor text. If your anchor text link looks manipulative, you can get your site quickly penalized by search engines like Google.

#4. Your Links Don't Look Natural
The pattern of your links should also look natural. Remember the best links are those that you get unasked. This is because these links look very natural. There are different dubious link building schemes. If you use any of such link farming schemes, you'll make search engines suspicious. Getting 1,000 links in a day is never something that can happen naturally. Make sure your links look natural to attract the maximum attention from search engines.

#5. You Are Not Consistent
This is again one of the most common problems that I've noticed. If you think link building is a one-time task, you're making the biggest mistake. You can never expect good results until you are consistent in your link building efforts. You'll see no improvement in your site's SEO if you build a couple of links and then sit idle. Search engines like Google also pay close attention to the pattern of links as they build over time.

Are you ready to reassess your link building strategy? Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts and opinions.

The tactics of link building are fast changing. Therersquo;s one thing that you can be pretty sure about is that there's no shortcut to SEO. You can no more depend on one blog or link network for building backlinks for your site. And you can't build too many links too fast the unnatural way. So, how do you build links?

The best tactics to build links is to build them naturally. If your link building efforts look manipulative, search engines can become suspicious quickly. In one single update, your blog can go straight to hell.

Don't worry though.

Here're four creative ways that you can use to build backlinks for your blog the natural way. Search engines will love these links too.

#1. Publish Book Reviews
This is a proven strategy. Writing reviews of books (relevant to your audience) is a wonderful tactic to generate quality backlinks. If you cover all the best things about a book and talk about the author in your blog post, the author is most likely to link to your page in their sitersquo;s media or press section.

Writing a book review sounds a lot of task for too many bloggers. But the effort that you put into writing the piece can bring surprising results. Before you start writing the review, don't forget to think about the readers.

#2. Offer Free Webinars
A webinar is an awesome relationship building tool of the modern day. Webinars work because your attendees can hear you and interact with you. Most of the professional bloggers conduct free webinars to build email list, create awareness about their product, share interesting ideas and create a sense of community. If your webinar is truly useful, attendees will be compelled to share it with others. This social sharing can generate a good amount of quality backlinks.

#3. Share Infographics
Infographics are all the rage today. Infographics are a lot more attention-grabbing than text-based posts. If you've the required resources, you can create your own useful infographics and publish them on your blog. If your infographics truly hit the chord with your audience, the results can be extremely surprising. You'll soon want to create more of them.

There are several free tools that you can use to design your own infographics. Some of these include Creately, Wordle, Inkscape, Visual.ly etc.

#4. Create Resource Pages
Creating a couple of resource pages on your blog is also an excellent idea to get others to link to your blog. But do you know how to create resource pages? Well, it begins with selecting those blog categories that have too many useful posts. Then you can hand-pick the best posts from a specific category and create a new page on your blog with those links (add only the post titles and link them to their respective pages). You can also group them under different suitable subheadings to increase readability. In any case, don't forget to add a good introduction to that page. Resource pages work really well.

Have you tried any of these tactics to generate quality backlinks for your blog? Please feel free to talk back in comments.

Backlinks are the backbone of just about any effective SEO campaign, but how do you go about finding the sites where you can get these backlinks? There are paid links services like Text Link Ads, but Google has a much easier time detecting those than the more "organic" links that you would get through interacting with the site owner directly.

A simple Google search in your niche is one way to start, but Erin Everhart has come up with at least five other ways for you to find those valuable link partners. She outlines these strategies in a recent blog post published on Search Engine Land.

One tool is called Listorious and it is used to find a list of people tweeting about a certain topic. This is more robust that sifting through hashtags and you can even search for Twitter lists instead of just individuals. Erin also recommends looking through the Facebook likes of pages in your niche to find related businesses and webmasters. Curated lists are another way to go, as are the blogrolls you find on sites that are already in your industry.

Another strategy is to search through LinkedIn. This won't lead you to a directory of websites that could be potential link partners, per se, but it will lead you to the people who are in that niche. You can sift through based on companies, locations, keywords, and so on, finding just the right people in just the right positions. And finally, Erin talks about utilizing guest blogging communities like My Blog Guest and Blogger LinkUp for the same purpose.

What strategies do you use to find potential link partners? How do you ensure you're getting a quality backlink from a quality website?

The SEO community continues to evolve. Many of the old links building tactics are entirely out of date today, while new opportunities arrive knocking at your door. Google is launching algorithmic updates (last year's Panda and the very recent Page Layout Algorithm), one after another. Though such updates are revolutionizing the face of the SEO industry, link building still remains to be the trump card for high search engine rankings.

Under these circumstances, it's pretty easy to make mistakes while building links for your blog or website. Given below are seven of them that you need to open your eyes to and avoid them at any cost.

#1. Manipulating the Anchor Text
Search engines have now become quite suspicious about the anchor text thing, as it can be easily manipulated. If you were playing the anchor text game to obtain high search rankings till now, you need to stop it right away. Manipulating the anchor text of a link makes the backlink profile look 'unnatural', and that's the reason why search engines have started to devalue the same.

#2. Mass-Submitting to Junk Directories
Bot-powered directory submission is another big mistake that link builders can easily make. Gone are they days when you could rank a website at the top of search results overnight by submitting to thousands of directories at once. Web directories as a means of building links are fast becoming extinct. Many generic directories are already of out of business.

The point is quite simple - no ranking algorithm will provide any weightage to web directories that aren't used by people, and only exist as a means of blind link submission. Eric Ward of Search Engine Land throws more light on the very topic in his article - A Few Link Building Predictions for 2012.

#3. Not Using Guest-Blogging
Guest blogging carries high significance, because it's an excellent strategy to place your links on niche-related websites. Apart from creating 'link juice', you can use guest blogging to generate website traffic, create awareness about your brand and establish your expertise. Guest blogging can bring you a higher rate of success if you target the right kind of blogs.

#4. Limiting Your Social Media Efforts to Only Facebook and Twitter
Therer's absolutely no doubt that social media is a powerful platform to build links the natural way. However, social media is not just about creating a Facebook or Twitter page for your brand, blog or website. There are many other social platforms that you need to use to reach out to new audiences. Any place where your target audience spends time is a best place to be.

#5. Not Asking Niche-related Authority Sites for Links
Keep asking, and you'll get it. If you really want to survive in the race of search rankings, you can never ignore the potential of building high quality links by requesting authoritative websites for a link to your website or blog. Asking will, however, will bear fruit only when you have some top quality content published.

#6. Not Linking Out
Linking out brings huge benefits both in terms of SEO and networking. Outbound linking can immediately help you build the authority of your own blog or website. However, you need to link out to only top quality and authority sites. The attention that you attract by observing this exercise can result in the generation of quality backlinks for your own site. And search engines love this practice as well. So, be generous!

Are you making these mistakes? Please don't hesitate to share your own thoughts and views on this topic.

There is a lot of conflicting information about link building in the Post-Panda climate of Google's ranking algorithms. The fact is, no one truely knows exactly how Google is evaluating inbound links to any one website. This has always been the case as Google has worked hard to protect their algorithm metrics and the specific changes they constantly make to improve search result quality.

But, we have learned that many 'old school' and previous SEO techniques are no longer successful and can possibly bring harm to your websites ranking ability. This can lead to being sandboxed or just getting all your links devalued or even de-indexed. Basically, you wasted a little or a lot of time getting backlinks that are negative or useless toward your ranking results. To make sure you don't make any of these mistakes lets take a look at some of the "negative" SEO tactics currently.

Poor and Detrimental SEO Practices:

• Content duplicating, spinning, stealing
• Link cloaking
• Keyword spam, keyword stuffing
• Canonical tags for redirects, stick with 301's and limited use
• Hidden keywords, img tags, etc
• Non-relevant backlink building

What does Panda want to see?

• Quality, unique content
• Relevant and quality inbound links
• Participation with your community, forums, blogs, and more
• Media incorporation: videos, images, etc
• High PR backlinks from relevant sources

Please make sure to stop and remove any old "black hat" style SEO techniqus that are incorporated on your webpage, these will only harm your potential to rank on the search engines. Especially as the Panda algorithm keeps being pushed through the results, adding, deleting, and altering results for better user quality.

Focus on writing quality content for your site AND for your backlinks. Then you'll be able to distribute this content throughout the web, helping you gain strong contextual linking and anchor text that is integrated with unique content that speaks to your specific market and niche. If you do not have the time to put forth quality efforts, make sure to browse the web and find a quality SEO company.

About the Author:

Mason Stoller has been working in the internet marketing industry for over 8 years, starting with small business consulting and now working with major corporations across the United States with SEO Influence.com. Check out his personal SEO Tips blog at SEOBestTips.com.