I am an avid guitar player. I have been playing guitar for almost 10 years now and I don’t allow one day to go by without playing it, although I’m far from practicing as much as I used to a few years back because of the time constraints.

What does that have to do with link building? Well, when I do something, I tend to notice its artistic side and link building is no exception. How can link building be an art? Well, I simply see it like that and as a matter of fact, it very much resembles the act of playing a good song on the guitar for me.

Play all the right notes, and the song will reveal itself bit by bit. Similarly, get all the right links, and in the end your site will reveal itself in its full potential. Also, the more you practice, the better you get (ok, that’s a truism, because you can say that about anything).

This post could have also had another name: the difference between link building and smart link building. Google has become better at detecting spam with each passing day. I for one am very glad about this. It will separate the amateurs from the professionals. Ultimately, only people who really know what they are doing will stand a fighting chance. So how do you do smart link building? How do you fine tune your website in such a way that it will be a success in the end?

First of all, you need to know about a few mistakes that I did when I was starting out in this business.

1. Too many links at once
When you are starting out, besides hearing about the importance of title tags, you also hear about the importance of links. That’s when you start bookmarking, submitting articles, commenting on blogs, everything at once. When commenting on blogs, maybe you also end up with a few sitewide links from blogs that have the recent comments plugin. Hundreds of links all at once. That should be good, right? WRONG!

This is one of the worst things you can with a new site, be it in a non competitive niche. Google will filter your site out of the search results, no questions asked. I’ve had one site in a competitive niche filtered out for more than a year because of this. Usually, the more competitive the niche is, the longer your site will get filtered out. This is also the reason why I don’t believe in this experiment. You may get away with it if the site is old and established, but if you are not very sure about its authority, it is a gamble.

The authority of the site is very important in determining whether your site will get filtered out or not when getting many links. The more authority a site has, the more it can get away with. I will invoke the boring snowball example here, but which exemplifies this idea the best. The bigger a snowball is, the more snow it can attract when going down a slope.

Solution for this problem: When the site is new, start by getting a few (I said a few, not tens or hundreds) good anchored backlinks in the first month. From my experience, usually months 2 and 3 in the life of a website are the most critical and that’s when your website is most vulnerable to being filtered out.

2. Same anchor text
Anchor text is extremely important, and it is one of the essential factors that will get you rankings. So, it is only logical that you should only anchor your links with the targeted keyword, right? Again, WRONG!

This is another thing that will get your site filtered out. A good way to see this is with the help of the “allinanchor” operator. Use this in Google. Allinanchor:keyword. Do you see your site in the top 10 or 20? If yes, that’s where your site should rank for your keyword. If it doesn’t, it may have been filtered out either because of reason 1 or because of too much of the same anchor text.

Solution: Obviously, get links that have other anchors besides “blue widgets”. You need to also have unrelated anchors in your link profile. Keep it as natural as possible.

So can you now see the similarity between playing the guitar and link building? They both require tuning and playing all the right notes. Make sure that you always “listen” to what your website is telling you. If it is out of tune, you need to tune it up. If it is humming a beautiful song, you are on the right path.