As you have probably heard by now, “to attract links you need great content.” But defining what it is exactly that makes great content is not always so easy. Bad content, however, typically follows the same patterns, making it easy to spot and avoid.
Here are 6 blogging mistakes that might be stopping your content attracting links.
1. Bad Title
An uninspiring title is often the first obstacle to attracting links. A snappy title catches the reader’s eye and makes them want to read on. Without one, most of your intended audience won’t even click. Good titles are also a useful way to define the type of back links you want to attract. If you want the term “Boutique Hotel” to be used as anchor text in back links for example, be sure to include it within your title to attract the right links.
2. Over Long
In the post-Twitter and text messaging world, it’s safe to say that our attention spans are dwindling. For this reason, it is difficult to attract links with overly long content. In most cases, keeping things short and to the point is key to attracting readers and all-important links.
3. No Hook
Fishing for readers is no different to regular fishing – you need a hook! In content terms this is anything that grabs the reader’s interest and drives them to learn more and share the content with others. A hook might be announcing something new (a new local attraction, a new resort facility) expressing an interesting opinion or maybe even a good story.
4. No Tone of Voice
Try to create and maintain a consistent ‘tone of voice’ throughout your content. This helps create a strong identity or personality for your resort, engages your readers, builds trust and makes them more likely to link to your content.
5. Badly Designed Website
This one is not so obvious, but the truth is, pages that are poorly designed and difficult to use attract fewer links. Good, clean designs which are easy to navigate help establish a sense of trust, which means that people are far more likely to link to the content contained within them.
6. No Social Sharing
Unfortunately, great content alone is not enough to build links. Even if you take care to avoid the above mistakes completely, you’ll still need to use social media to make sure your content is seen by the right people and linked out by the right people.
Are you guilty of any of these common blogging mistakes?
