Building links is a ranking factor and can boost your overall authority and rankings. It’s important to get high quality links with the right strategy. Explore nine proven white hat link building strategies that can help you achieve long-term success and secure your place at the top of search engine results.
There’s has been a lot of recent spam updates within the Google algorithms, meaning google has been strict with the quality of backlinks. The best way to build links that drive the best authority to your website, is to use white hat link building strategies.
It’s important to have white hat links since getting penalized by Google is a serious matter and can set back your SEO growth by months or even years.
We’ve put together a guide on the best white hat link building techniques you can implement within your link building strategy.
White hat link building is a link building strategy that follows search engine guidelines. A white hat link is the safest form of backlink that is least likely to have negative affect to your backlink profile, allowing you to rank high within the search engine rankings.
White hat strategies are slower than building links with other strategies. If you want high quality backlinks that stick in the long term, following this link building tactic can help increase search rankings in the long term. These link building techniques focus on providing value to users and building a website’s authority naturally, rather than manipulating search engine algorithms.
White hat link building and black hat link building have different link building processes and involve different strategies.
Black hat SEO techniques involve low quality links that are are created to manipulate the search engine results pages. Here are examples of black hat link building:
Spamming Comments Within Blogs
Buying low quality backlinks
Low quality guest posts
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
Link Farms
White Hat Link Building focuses on ethical practices that provide long-term benefits and align with search engine guidelines, while Black Hat Link Building involves manipulative tactics that can lead to quick gains but come with significant risks and potential penalties.
White hat link building provides multiple benefits that are sustainable and long-term. By earning high-quality, relevant backlinks through white hat strategies, a website’s ranking will see sustainable growth.
Having white hat backlinks from reputable sites will increase your overall domain authority. This means you will see an increase in organic traffic and search engines reward your content due to your site’s authority. (obviously, you still need high quality content)
Implementing white hat link building strategies to your SEO efforts will future-proof your overall success in the long run.
Now that you know the difference between white hat links and black hat links, we will focus on 9 white hat link building techniques that will make an impact to your overall SEO strategy.
Creating content that is high quality and implementing an internal link structure will help your content rank higher. Integrating a robust content marketing SEO strategy can further amplify your efforts by ensuring your content is optimized for search engines and targeted audiences. The higher your content is ranked within the search engines, the higher your chances of attracting backlinks that people can use to support their content.
Always look at your competitor’s backlink profile to get links and see how you can do the same for your website to find white hat links. You can utilize link building tools such as SEMRush’s Backlink Gap to compare multiple competitors’ backlinks, allowing you to pinpoint high-quality, relevant links that you can also pursue for your website.
Instead of targeting specific links, try to look for patterns of common backlinks your competitors have. This can help you start gaining backlinks that are low-hanging fruit to your site.
This involves searching through search engines to find broken links on relevant websites and offering your content as a valuable replacement. By doing so, you not only help improve the user experience on those sites but also earn high-quality backlinks to your site.
A good tool to use for broken link building is Ahrefs. Start with using the Content Explorer, and search for a topic that is relevant to your niche. and switch the search mode to “In Title” then filter for broken pages.
Once you find an opportunity to replace broken links, you can reach out to the admin of the site proposing your link and bringing to light their broken link.
Guest blogging is a popular white hat link building strategy where you offer another website to write a blog post for them.
Here are the benefits of writing a guest post:
Generate Quality Backlinks: Guest posts often include high-quality backlinks to your site, improving SEO and driving organic traffic.
Choose Where The Link Is Coming From: You can select reputable blogs for guest posting, ensuring backlinks come from authoritative sources.
Lead Generation: Well-crafted guest posts can attract potential customers, generate leads and drive referral traffic through valuable content and calls-to-action.
Here are some effective strategies you can do to find high quality guest posts:
Search for a topic within google that is related to your niche and adding the phrases “guest post” or “write for us.”
You can also identify a target website in your niche, then use an SEO tool to generate a list of other websites that publish similar content. This approach helps you efficiently find potential link-building opportunities within your specific industry for guest posting. You can use Ahrefs to eyeball the number of Authors a website has within the content explorer, which will indicate they accept guest posts.
Reactive PR involves swiftly responding to time-sensitive opportunities, allowing you to earn valuable backlinks and increase your online visibility. We suggest using JustReachOut. You are able to pitch to journalists from multiple sources that are looking for feedback to expert sources.
With strong brand awareness, it’s likely that your brand is being actively mentioned in people’s content.
You can use an SEO tool like Ahref’s Web Explorer and use the following within the search “[your brand] -site:[yourwebsite].com” This will help you identify unlinked mentions within websites for your brand.
Sharing brand news through strategic PR campaigns is a powerful white hat link-building strategy that can significantly enhance your website’s authority and visibility. By launching well-crafted PR campaigns, you can secure publications on reputable news and PR outlets, which in turn will generate high-quality backlinks to your website.
Utilizing statistics is a highly effective white hat SEO strategy that can significantly bolster your link-building efforts. By incorporating accurate and relevant data into your content, you enhance its credibility and make it more appealing to other websites.
This approach not only supports your arguments with concrete evidence but also increases the likelihood of attracting backlinks from authoritative sources. When other sites reference your statistics, they are more likely to link back to your original content, employing white hat link building techniques.
Being a guest on podcasts is a highly effective white hat link building strategy that can drive substantial traffic to your own site. By sharing your expertise and insights on relevant podcasts, you can generate high-quality inbound links as podcast hosts often include links to guest websites in the show notes. This approach not only enhances your white hat link building efforts but also increases your brand visibility and authority within your industry.
Building black hat backlinks are much quicker and easier, but will set your growth back by a long time. Which is why it’s important to implement white hat link building strategies for best and safest way for long term growth. For the safest link-building approach, rely on white hat strategies.
To ensure a stress-free experience, consider partnering with Sovereign, an NJ SEO Agency, to expertly manage your link-building efforts and help your business thrive.
