In order to dominate a niche market your website needs to have a backlink portfolio that meets these three requirements: highly targeted, high quality links – placed in the right spot on the page – with the right anchor text.

Of course, in the process of attaining this goal you’ll be tempted along the road to make use of some rather unproductive shortcuts.

This post will show you what practices resemble more to jumping from a cliff rather then ensuring a pleasant ride.

Backlinking practices you must avoid

1. Don’t outsource your link building campaign UNLESS you verify them  and they have a white hat background and keep a transparent business conduct.

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

3. Avoid three-way linking schemes. Search engines are getting better at detecting and discounting these links. For Google, at least, this is child play. Psst! The way they do it, is they look for common players in multiple schemes, and once unmasked, there comes mass link demotion for all members.

4. Don’t just get links to your home page, get deep links to any page you want to rank well in Google; the ratio should be 30~40% for home page and 60~70% – deep linking.

5. Don’t use link building software or send mass link request emails. The only instance where automation is allowed (with reference to off-site optimization) is for article distribution; for such tasks it can be used a dependable article submission software.

6. Don’t hire services which “guarantee” links or allow links to be added through automation. These services are most likely intricate link farm with inflated link popularity to be sold to SEO fools.

7. Don’t automate link submission on your webpages; manually approve all link requests.

8. Don’t approve a link request until before if the PageRank is real or faked. Also, verify that the page has a current cache date in Google.

9. Don’t burst the link network volume on short periods of time. Make sure the number of links matches the amount of traffic you are 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.

10. Don’t make backlinking decisions based on PageRank. Instead, build backlinks to provide competent solutions for your visitors.

11. Don’t go after generic keywords which are on the wrong end of the buying cycle.

12. 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. Obviously. Descent to the next 300-500 keywords.

13. Don’t link to the home page of the directory you have submitted to; instead, link to the page where your listing appears.

14. Don’t create  “Links” page or disguised as  “Recommended Resources” or  “Get More Information”. They are a waste of time and, depending on the number, damaging for your site’s ranking power.

Have something to add to this Off-Page optimization checklist? Leave your advices below.