White hat link building is an SEO approach that uses high-quality inbound links to increase a website’s authority and organic search engine rankings.
Links from other websites, especially those with high domain authority, indicate to Google that your content is relevant, useful, and high-quality.
Websites with more backlinks tend to rank higher in search results because search engines regard them as a reliable source of information.
If you want your website content to drive tangible results, long-term success, and rank your business better, white hat link building can help you get there.
Read till the end to learn about the best white hat link-building techniques.
White Hat Link-Building Strategies
High-quality backlinks are one of the most successful SEO tactics for increasing your page rankings, but ethically, acquiring these links takes time and commitment.
While most backlinks are generated naturally when one website refers to another, certain white hat strategies entail reaching out to the proprietors of other websites.
Apart from these, various methods exist for successfully acquiring white hat backlinks for your website.
And rest assured, they all adhere to Google’s spam policies to avoid Google penalties. They include:
1. Guest Blogging On Other White Hat Websites
Guest blogging, also known as Guest posting, is the practice of writing valuable content as a guest author on another website.
It’s a common link-building tactic where you can insert a link back to your website when writing for another website that expressly mentions that it accepts blog and article submissions.
Looking for guest posting opportunities should be motivated by a desire to share information and build your skills rather than a desire for backlinks. Although it is a great approach to increasing your site authority through links, ensure your primary objective is sharing information and your experience.
Sharing your experience and knowledge through a guest post on other websites is highly acceptable because Google promotes experience as the newest element of E-E-A-T.
Also, you cannot trick the system by producing generic content to obtain a backlink.
Another advantage of guest posting is the increased organic traffic to your website if the content ranks well. This collaborative approach to content marketing develops relationships within your industry while increasing your website’s exposure and reputation.
Here is how you can start guest posting:
- Begin by compiling a list of websites to contact.
To identify websites that are searching for guest articles on your topic, search your topic keyword + “write for us” or “guest post.”
To discover genuine sites, you can use free link-building tools. It is important to note that many high-performing sites do not directly offer guest posting opportunities to everyone, and pay-to-post is unethical.
- Send a tailored email presenting yourself as an expert and providing your credentials and links to your content to demonstrate the quality of your work to the websites on your list.
Ensure you provide relevant post ideas for their target audience based on the topics covered on their current blog or website. Make sure your credentials are following whatever criteria they set for authors.
- When you’re ready to submit the guest post to the website, ensure your content is well-written and useful to the audience.
If your pitch succeeds, your blog post will be published on their website.
Remember, your guest post should not exist as an attempt to earn backlinks; rather, it should represent your expertise as a subject matter expert.
Over time, relationship-based backlinks are more important than basic link swaps, which search engines immediately detect. So ensure that you build a great relationship with these sites.
Finally, make sure you’re guest blogging on other white hat sites that aren’t charging you to post your blog. Otherwise, this may be considered a gray or black hat method.
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2. Developing Your Datasets
This is a very successful method for generating many white hat backlinks.
Statistics arouses people’s curiosity, and everyone enjoys sharing fresh and intriguing facts. So, having your statistics datasets for people to refer to is a great way to build white hat backlinks.
Doing research is an excellent technique to generate original and distinctive information that will appeal to readers and outlets that wish to quote your data.
To go about this, consider your market segment or niche and how it might be connected to a topic that is presently popular.
Take the notion a step further by asking individuals in your company and on social media what they would like to learn more about.
Then, gather information from consumers and social media users and put it into entertaining content.
But why in a piece of content? Why not raw data? You might want to ask.
This is because cold data alone is insufficient, so ensure that your content is written in an engaging manner with captivating titles and some creative photos or useful infographics that will make your content more interesting and shareable.
This increases the likelihood of your content becoming viral and gaining backlinks from high-DA sites.
3. Building Other Sites With Broken Links
A broken link occurs when a web page is relocated or removed, resulting in a 404 response code.
A broken link-building technique, similar to link reclamation, is based on requesting that websites restore broken outbound links in their content with a fresh link to your site to generate backlinks.
It is another collaborative strategy in which you assist another website to improve its content. Updating previous content to keep it fresh and relevant is critical to giving the readers a consistent experience with the content.
You can use an SEO tool to locate these broken or dead links and explore chances for backlinks. Once the tool has identified such websites, notify the relevant sites about the broken link and request that it be replaced with content from your website.
4. Producing High-quality Content
Creating relevant, high-quality, and organically link-worthy content that people are naturally drawn to is one of the simplest strategies to earn white hat backlinks. It does not involve outreach but does necessitate significant effort.
Focus on providing a fresh perspective when creating link-worthy content that marketers and industry leaders will want to mention in their content.
You can improve your content quality by:
- It matches the search intent.
- It covers the subject matter in depth via “how-to” articles, long-form tutorials, and list pieces.
- Creating evergreen content that remains relevant despite trends
To guarantee that your content remains current, update it often because the idea of value is what Google’s algorithm and method to rank sites are built on.
If your content is useful to others, it should automatically generate links.
Do not forget to use internal linking to other website pages inside your content to lower bounce rates and teach Google’s algorithm what your content is all about.
You may also build relationships with industry experts by connecting to their content, improving your chances of earning a backlink in return.
Finally, do not hesitate to get a good SEO writing service that can assist if you are busy and not currently producing high-quality and link-worthy content.
5. Linking Brand Mentions That Are Unlinked
When another website refers to your content, brand, or items without referring to your website, this is referred to as an unlinked brand mention.
If the website is complimentary to you, it makes sense to contact them about including a link to your website.
Unlinked brand mentions offer a straightforward path to gaining links from websites that are already familiar with your brand and supportive of your content or products.
You may also look for mentions of statistics or reports you’ve published and look for a guest blogging opportunity to expand the material on the published reports or statistics, providing you the opportunity for correct link credit to your brand.
This is most likely the quickest and simplest approach to creating high-quality white hat backlinks. You only need to use Google Alerts to track which sites discuss your blog or business in the news.
Unlinked brand mentions can also be found using tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, and BuzzSumo.
It should go without saying, but if the website does not speak well about your brand, do not request a link. Avoid requesting a link if the website is part of a private blog network, a link farm, or the website owner requests payment.
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6. Press Outreach
Press outreach involves contacting journalists, bloggers, or industry influencers to disseminate your content or news articles. You may acquire high-quality backlinks from credible sites by pitching newsworthy and exclusive insights to them to increase your site’s reputation and exposure.
It is frequently a numbers game. The more sites you approach, the more likely you will receive a good answer because link-building is competitive.
Journalists and newspapers receive many pitches daily, most of which are unrelated, but if you try to tailor your pitch to their site’s niche, you may quickly gain white hat backlinks.
As a result, if you want to connect with big-name sites and receive a response, you must devote time and effort to outreach. This may imply submitting a proposal to a major journal once a week or cold emailing 400 sites every month.
Once you’ve got an opportunity, the next step is to connect your content with that of the newspaper and tailor a column on your site to that news section.
If the reporter requests additional information, provide them with a link to an online press release from that section, demonstrating that you’re intentionally generating publicity and not just looking for fast backlinks.
While you’re doing it, make certain that your outreach content is top-notch. Your proposal must appeal to the target site’s editors to obtain a backlink.
Your outreach should persuade them that you can write an excellent piece.
Tools like the Ahrefs Content Explorer can help if you’re unsure which sites to target. Enter a keyword combination into the tool, and it will return a list of unique pages that are related to your area.
7. Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
HARO, very similar to press outreach, is one method for obtaining backlinks from well-known publishers.
If you’re a specialist in a particular subject matter, you may leverage your unique data and knowledge to become a source for other media. They can contact you for a guest post or link back to you via one of your quotations, earning you a fast backlink.
High-domain authority backlinks are one advantage of this strategy, but being a trustworthy source drives referral traffic to your site and increases brand recognition.
You don’t have to battle to get started because you can use free services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to connect with reporters or other bloggers looking for contributions.
Once you’ve registered with HARO, you’ll receive frequent email inquiries from authors in your field, and you’ll be able to react by email to the one that connects with your brand. Because these reporters get many submissions, timeliness is critical because it increases your chances of being spotted and chosen for the final story.
Pitch the journalists every day, and you should begin receiving backlinks within a month or so.
If you are chosen, you may receive an email informing you that the item is now up, and you may or may not earn a backlink.
However, as we have said earlier, you can still contact the reporter and request a connection to your brand mentions.
8. Utility Link Building
Utility link building is a technique that involves providing helpful tools or resources that are relevant to your target audience and encouraging them to share and link back to your site.
This might be in guidelines, tutorials, calculators, templates, or any other resource that tackles a specific need or problem in your niche.
Make sure to adapt your content to specific interests and requirements to increase the likelihood of it being shared and linked to. Also include social media links, embed codes for tools or infographics, and urge users to spread the word about the resource.
You can contact influencers, bloggers, and webmasters in your niche to show them your content or tool and explain how it will assist their audience for better outreach.
Over time, ensure you update and maintain your utility content or tools regularly to ensure they stay current and helpful. Outdated content may not draw as many links and hurt your website’s reputation.
Finally, with analytics tools, track the performance of your utility content, such as backlinks, user interaction, and other important information.
White Hat Linking vs. Black Hat Linking
You know what white hat linking is all about, but we also have black hat linking.
You can even guess what the latter means from its name. Yes, black hat linking is when you get backlinks in an illegitimate and unethical way, like spamming, link farms, etc., which is definitely against Google rules.
Black hat backlinks are often put on sites that do not offer value to the user or directly connect to the content.
The following key points will help you get a better understanding of the difference between these two types of linking:
- White-hat link-building procedures adhere to Google’s requirements, but black-hat SEO tactics aim to scam the algorithm system.
- White-hat link building strives to educate visitors, in contrast to the spam-oriented approach of black-hat link building, which attempts to attract traffic to a site without adding value to the content or improving the user experience.
- White hat link-building happens when quality, genuine backlinks are obtained while adhering to Google’s webmaster rules. In contrast, black hat link-building tactics include buying spam backlinks, utilizing link farms or private blog networks (PBNs), and putting links in mass-generated blog comments.
- White hat link-building strategies are the way to go if you want to gain Google’s favor, even though they demand more time and effort, while black hat link-building is frequently chastised as spammy and detracting from the user experience. This method is against Google’s webmaster rules and can harm your site’s authority and ranking in the long run.
- In contrast to black hat approaches, white hat link building can be labor-consuming, requiring website designers and content writers to focus on quality content before interspersing links to boost the page’s SEO value.
- White-hat link-building aims to improve the Web in the long run, while black-hat link-building strategies produce short-term effects.
- White hat link-building emphasizes ethical, search engine-approved practices, whereas black hat link-building employs deceptive approaches that might result in penalties.
There is also another type called grey hat link building, which falls halfway in the middle, employing approaches that are not technically against the rules but pose some danger.
Why not Black Hat linking?
Google’s main technique for detecting poisonous backlinks was introduced in 2012 as part of the Penguin algorithm, which was aimed at exposing websites that were gaining artificial, spammy backlinks.
With continual spam improvements, Google continues to change its algorithm for identifying backlinks more than ten years later.
In addition to these specific spam updates, Google’s algorithms are constantly modified to produce relevant, useful websites that are devoid of spammy backlinks.
While black hat methods may provide some short-term benefits, the danger of Google penalizing your website is just not worth it.
It should be noted that the phrases “black hat” and “white hat” have been recognized as non-inclusive language, and you should relate to them as “ethical” and “unethical” as descriptions of these techniques as time goes on.
Advantages of Employing White Hat Link-Building Techniques for Your Business
White-hat link building is vital because search engines utilize backlink data to determine page rankings, rewarding pages with more backlinks with higher rankings.
When several websites link to a page on your website, search engines interpret this as a signal that your content is relevant, useful, and of high quality.
Here are some of the advantages of using white hat SEO to get links for your company.
1. White Hat Link-building Increases Organic Traffic and Rankings.
The more high-quality links pointing back to your website, the stronger the signal you give to search engines that your site is trustworthy and authoritative, and the more likely you will outrank your competition.
White-hat links will boost your website’s rankings among search engines like Google through “organic” means that enhance users’ experiences by boosting the quality of content, broadening its scope through relevant links, and so forth.
2. White Hat Link-building Increases Credibility.
The best-quality links typically come from high-authority sites in your industry or niche.
White-hat link building helps you capitalize on these sources’ high domain authority since search engines like Google typically view them as trustworthy.
Always remember that people buy from people they trust. So, having a link from a highly trusted industry source can put you in higher esteem among colleagues and potential customers.
3. White Hat Link-building Boosts Conversions and Sales.
A nice perk of backlinking is that it can drive more conversions and sales for your business.
Backlinks increase the odds of potential customers landing on your website. Whether website visitors learn about you for the first time or return to your site, a backlink is the first step to building relationships with those people.
Ultimately, more website visitors means more chances for users to enter your sales process, whether by signing up for your email list, purchasing, or filling out a contact form.
4. White Hat Link-building Increases Exposure to Your Target Audience.
When you create high-quality, relevant links that boost your SEO, you also increase your discoverability by reaching a wider audience.
Additionally, white hat link building helps to strengthen connections between your website and other businesses, resulting in greater visibility and potential customers for all parties. It’s a win-win!
Wrap-Up
White-hat link building is a long-term approach to search engine optimization that helps your brand increase its visibility and rank for essential keywords that match the search intent of your target audience.
We have looked into the techniques that can help you with link-building and how they will benefit your business. Knowing them does not make them effective, but your execution will.
Try them out today and start your backlink profile journey now.
