Link building is a tricky deal. Links may either shoot up your website popularity or raise red flags with search engines standards and make your site slide down in search results.

But why link building cuts both ends when it comes to website optimization and what’s the point behind it all?

Years ago link building was just about getting as many links as one could. But the times have changed and link building is a different beast today. Now Google makes everyone who is engaged in link building process sweat the big stuff. It practices the quality approach evaluating each link to numerous criteria to surface the sites having only premium quality backlinks profiles. That’s why every website promoter must keep in mind: one must either do link building right or don’t do it at all.

However some folks are tempted to get quick results overnight. They utilize link building practices that may actually hurt their SEO campaigns a great deal over time. Here is the list of 5 commandments that will help you avoid committing 5 deadly link building sings.

1 Keep it relevant

No matter how many links are pointing to your website they won’t mean squat if they are sitting on irrelevant industry websites. The point is that Google tries to think like an ordinary website visitor. If a visitor sees the link pointing, let’s say, to the website about second-hand cars on the site about dieting pills he is unlikely to click it. Google acts the same way that’s why such a link is not going to bring any SEO benefit. Google made large strides to enhance relevancy criteria in its algo, so that unscrupulous website promoters can’t blanket links across vast amounts of irrelevant sites any more.

2 Check who your neighbors are

Always take care of your web-neighborhood. Keep away from the places called Link Farms or FFA sites! It may be tempting to get some links fast and free but that may slash your link building efforts and you’ll have to start everything from scratch. Neighborhood with sites that have bad reputation (e.g. porn or spam distributing websites) can negatively reflect on your website’s rankings. Google may automatically assume that you are one of the bad guys and lower your positions in search results.

3 Avoid mass link exchange

Never rush when running link building. If you send mass link exchange requests you may get the reputation of a spammer. And if you get lots of links within a short time period that may raise suspicion with search engines as they consider this a counterfeit way of getting to the top result pages. Keep your link building natural, don’t run link exchange at high speed and make sure you exchange links with really worthy websites.

4 Properly place your links

One shouldn’t get links pointing to their homepages only. Getting deep links to any other webpage may significantly improve your website rankings. The approximate ratio of all links on a website’s backlink profile should vary between 30-40% of links pointing to a homepage and 60-70% being deep links.

5 Don’t forget about the anchor text

The backlinks with the right anchor text can help search engines understand what your website is about. Anchor text is like the nuggets of gold that search engines look for in a river of content. If there are lots of backlinks pointing to your website with the appropriate anchor text that may significantly increase the chances to get high rankings in search results.

And mind that doing careful backlink research and planing out link building activities few steps ahead, not only lets you make your link building campaign manageable, but also keeps your link building program on track.

Besides there are lots of SEO tools that can be a real leg-up in link building. They can help you run all-rounded competition research to discover the juiciest link sources, evaluate each links in terms of SEO-usefulness and manage all your links. Among the most popular links for link building are IBP, SEO PowerSuite and Market Samurai.