If you’re currently in the middle of your website’s SEO, you probably know that having content is not enough for a win. You also need to know how important it is to build links. Link building has become stepping stone in getting more visibility on the web. You need to be able to acquire links that you could use for your website in order to help you gain backlinks. There’s really no formal education in link building techniques. This is why a lot of SEO start-ups fail on their first try. Some SEO experts either learned from other SEO gurus or are self-taught. Pursuing links is not an easy task. It tends to be tedious and time consuming. This is why it’s hard to thrive online if you don’t have enough determination to succeed. In order for someone to be good at link prospecting, they need to have a creative mind and lots and lots of patience. If you don’t have these qualities, it’s more likely that you’ll fall into making the same mistakes over and over again. Here’s my personal list on the common mistakes people make in link prospecting: Research is the most essential part of link prospecting. Or any other link building steps for that matter. It is the key element to the success of SEO. The problem I see in this situation is this: Most people usually stop doing their research when they think that they have enough resources to use for their website. They sometimes do not bother to look at what’s behind the curtain of their potential prospects. In order to determine whether you are prospecting a good website or not, you can look for these qualities:

The value and purpose of the website is clear and should be easy to identify.

The content being promoted should have a clear and unique selling point.

The quality of the website’s design as well as its user experience (UX) should be convincing.

The owners/administrators have clear contact information.

You have to remember that when doing research will help open up other opportunities so don’t limit yourself to just enough resources. Find more! While doing so, try and look for websites with the qualities listed above. Conducting a competitor’s analysis will help you find high-quality link prospects. Chances are the links you find on your competitors’ websites could also be relevant to your site as well. A lot of people involved in SEO often overlook the fact that one of the best places to look for link prospects is their competitors’ websites. As a result, this method keeps getting skipped. A lot. A lot of people pursuing link opportunities have a tendency to focus on searching for common keywords. As a result, they end up linking some websites they thought was related to their content. Links that are totally unrelated to the site’s cause doesn’t really help in boosting rankings. In order to locate links that would be perfect for your website, you have to be more specific in the keywords you use in searching. This is where your creativity comes in. It pays to be specific in link prospecting. Finding the right words to use can help speed up finding the right prospects and ultimately the link prospecting phase of link building. Having the right strategy would be extremely helpful for you if you want to beat your competitors. But without having the right tools, overpowering other websites would be close to impossible. Though Google is the most used tool in link prospecting because it is easy to use, a lot of other tools for link prospecting are available out there. These include:

Link Prospector — a highly-acclaimed tool that finds and organizes your potential link opportunities.

BuzzSumo — finds sites and influential people within your niche.

Tinyeye — for reverse image searching.

AllTop — helps you in finding the most popular news within your niche with its associated influencers.

Swayy — finds contents that will most likely be relevant and helpful to you through machine learning algorithms.

What every aspiring SEO expert needs to understand is that building links is a trial and error process. Every step requires time and dedication, especially link prospecting. You shouldn’t stop at every mistake you make but instead, turn it into an experience that will help you work harder.

Guest post by Kherk Roldan