If you want to grow an online business, you have to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO). And if you’re serious about SEO, you must commit time, energy, and resources to link building.
But with so many different strategies and divergent schools of thought, do you know the best way to proceed for minimal friction and maximum gain?
What is White Hat Link Building?
Link building is basically the process of acquiring backlinks from external domains pointing back to your own website. Link building is important for two primary reasons:
- It communicates a sense of credibility and authority to Google and other search engines, which bolsters your SEO and usually improves search rankings.
- With each backlink, you’re essentially creating a new road to your website — a road by which internet users and prospective customers can access your website.
But not all link building is the same. In the industry, you’ll commonly hear about two categories: black hat and white hat. You can find more details about it on indexsy.
Black hat link building refers to link building tactics and techniques that attempt to improve rankings and traffic by exploiting loopholes or using spammy practices that game the system. These methods often result in penalties and poor user experience.
White hat link building, on the other hand, works within the rules and guidelines allowed by Google’s algorithms and best practices. The goal is to enhance search rankings by manually and organically acquiring backlinks from highly authoritative and relevant websites. In short, it’s the right way to tackle link building.
4 White Hat Link Building Tips
White hat link building can take longer to see results, but they’re sustainable and high returning. Here are a few tips you can use to win with link building:
- Create 3-5 Pillar Pages
Link building is a waste of time if you don’t have quality content (links) on your website. So before you invest time or money into white hat link building, you should begin by creating at least three to five pillar pages.
A pillar page is a high-quality piece of content that you create to garner links. It’s a piece of evergreen content that’s extensive (usually 2,000 to 5,000+ words), valuable, and easy to consume. It leverages multimedia elements and is useful to the reader. (Think “how-to” or DIY versus theoretical or technical.)
- Try Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to acquire high authority backlinks in a white hat manner. It involves writing blog posts for other websites and blogs with expressed permission to include a link pointing back to one or more relevant posts on your website.
Guest blogging works especially well when you’re writing for a website that has an audience that overlaps with your own. This allows you to benefit from both an SEO perspective, as well as with direct exposure and referral traffic.
- Hire a White Hat Link Building Service
There are a lot of SEO professionals who will try to sell you on link building services and packages. You have to be careful to vet them and choose the providers that actually offer genuine white hat services.
A good link building service will help you create content, identify potential publisher matches, and do all of the networking and relationship building for you — resulting in quality links at a cost-effective price point. Over a few months, this can result in significant improvements in both search rankings and traffic.
- Use Broken Link Building
Broken link building is an effective strategy where you find broken links and 404 error pages on the internet, then create high-quality content to replace these defunct hyperlinks. It’s a time-consuming process, but can yield some very authoritative links with a little effort and coaxing. When layered on top of a strategy like guest blogging, it can prove to be effective.
Putting it All Together
There’s no secret formula or framework for link building, but the line between black hat and white link building is clear. While black hat link building efforts might produce some quick gains, they’re usually short-lived (followed by penalties and other adverse consequences). White hat link building, on the other hand, takes longer to get up and running, but produces sustainable results that continually add value over years and years.
As you seek to grow your business, give white hat link building some consideration. When combined with the right content strategy, onsite optimization, social media, and advertising, the results can be quite impressive.
