Acquiring links is a valuable tool that should be a part of any SEO campaign. SEO link building services allow you to extend the reach of your brand beyond your website while increasing your site’s credibility in the eyes of major websites such as Google. However, you need to be careful when it comes to managing your link building campaign. Not enough people realize the importance of backlinks monitoring and how much damage that poorly managed links can do to your SEO reputation.

Google and other sites will punish sites if they have links on their website that have been changed or deleted within a short time frame; for the search engines, this is a clear signal that these links have been collected in unnatural ways. The best method of building link popularity is through natural links that appear to the result of other sites posting your links because of the high-quality content that exists on your pages. When a link partner suddenly deletes or changes your links at the same time, this is flagged as a potentially unnatural behavior by Google and could impact your site ranking.

You need to be willing to check your links on a regular basis to make sure that your link partners are keeping your links up and holding up their end of the bargain. In some cases, links can be deleted because the owner of another website has deleted a page on their site and accidentally forgot to move the link; in other cases, the partner might have deleted the link after a short period of time to make room for new links.

Manually checking backlinks one time a day or more is time consuming. One way to work around this is to automate the process with one of the many SEO tools available that do backlink checking. You can purchase and use one of these tools yourself, or you can work with an SEO company like eVisible who can do it for you. Once you’ve determined which links have been deleted or changed, you need to act on it by contacting your partner and convincing them to live up to their end of your deal and restore your link.

Google has recently updated its newest algorithm. This has left many SEO companies and online marketers scrambling to determine how to best comply with Google Penguin requirements. However, attempting to pin down specifics about a Penguin update and craft content to fit might be missing the bigger point of effective search engine optimization: it’s about proper on-site SEO practices along with content.

So what are some of the steps that you can take to assure that your on-site SEO meets the best practices for Google?

Check for malware: You don’t engage in black-hat SEO, but if you have malware or someone running a rogue site through your site, the damage could be just as severe for your SEO reputation with Google.

Write short titles and description: Don’t have them go on too long or repeat information. Keep them short and don’t over-optimize tags.

Check your anchor text: Much like with title tags and descriptions, you want to avoid overusing your keywords or optimizing them too often.

Axe spammy user content: Comments on blogs posts are a good thing for organic search engine optimization; however, Google is now punishing sites that allow spam postings on sections of their site such as blog comment sections.

Increase page speed: A fast-loading site makes Google work faster; therefore, page speed optimization makes Google happy and it appears to improve a website’s SEO.

Cut useless optimization: Don’t bother over-optimization sections like headers and footers with the hope that “more is merrier.” It won’t help your ranking and in fact will likely lead to penalties.

Review your links: Penguin 2.0 has reduced the threshold of what they consider too many “spammy” inbound links on a site from 80 percent to 50 percent.

Check internal cross links: It’s easy to have links on one of your sites go to another site you own or partner with; check your links so you don’t get punished by Google.

Be smart with your alt image attributes: Put more of your content marketing services into alt image attributes than you are now: Google can give it as much weight as actual text.

Don’t overload ads: Having too many ads on your site – especially high – is frowned on by Google.

Add 301 redirects: Links that lead to dead ends tell Google that your site is not properly maintained.

Review crawl rates: Make sure that Google spiders are able to follow your site correctly.