Why White Hat SEO Link Building is the Key to Long-Term Success

Link Building remains an essential strategy for driving organic traffic to your website. But not just any link building strategy – we’re talking about “white hat” SEO link building.

In this blog, we look into white hat SEO link building, the techniques you can employ and the crucial difference between white hat and black hat SEO techniques.

Let’s get started!

I. So, what is white hat SEO link building? 

White hat SEO link building is a term used to refer to a link building strategy that works within the expectations and rules of search engines like Google.

Unlike the spam-oriented tactic of black hat link building, white hat SEO link building aims to educate users, offer value and enhance their on-page experience. 

Search engines like Google reward this “organic” link building as it benefits users’ experience.

Why does it matter in an SEO strategy?

In any SEO strategy, white hat link building is a component which must be considered, and here are a few reasons to why;

• Improving search engine rankings: White hat SEO link building involves creating high-quality, relevant links that help search engines understand the content and context of your website, which will improve your website’s ranking in search engine results.
• Driving traffic: By linking to relevant, interesting content, you will see an increase in web traffic. Users who find helpful content on your site through a link will stay on your site longer, increasing your site’s discoverability and reach.
• Building credibility and authority: White hat SEO link building will increase your website’s credibility and authority. When other high authority websites link to your site, it signals to both users and search engines that your content is trustworthy and valuable.

The components which create a white hat SEO link building strategy may seem labour-intensive; however, unlike black hat SEO tactics, which may provide short-term gains but can lead to penalties, white hat link building focuses on long-term success. It’s about providing genuine value, which can lead to sustained growth over time.

II. White hat SEO techniques for link building 

When it comes to improving the discoverability of your website, using white hat SEO techniques is the way to go. 

Now, let’s look at some effective white hat SEO link building strategies in detail.

The techniques

Keyword research

• Understanding your audience: Keyword research helps you know your target audience’s terms and phrases in which they find products, services, or content like yours. Allowing you to tailor your content better to meet the needs and interests of your users, improving engagement and driving more organic targeted traffic to your site.
• Content creation: Once you know the keywords your audience uses to search, you can start creating engaging, relevant content around those keywords. This helps your website rank higher in search engine results, building credibility and authority.
• Improving website ranking: Search engines rank websites based on relevance to a search term or phrase. Using the right keywords in your content, meta tags, and URLs can improve your website’s discoverability on search engine results pages (SERPs), driving more organic traffic.
• Competitive analysis: Keyword research can also help you understand what keywords your competitors are ranking for. This can help you identify gaps in your content and give you ideas for new content to help you compete more effectively.
• Long-tail keywords: Keyword research also helps you identify long-tail keywords, which are longer, more specific phrases that people use. While these might have lower search volumes, they often have higher conversion rates because they’re more precise.
• Local SEO: If you have a local business, keyword research can help you identify location-specific terms and phrases that your local customers use. 

Link Insertions

Link Insertions, also known as Niche Edits, involves inserting a link into an existing article, blog post, or page on a website. 

These links are different from guest posting, where a whole new article is written and published with your links inside.

• Relevance and Authority: The primary benefit of these links is that they allow your links to be placed in existing content, indexed and ranked by search engines. This means that the content is already considered relevant and authoritative, which can increase your website’s authority when it receives a backlink from these pages.
• Natural Link Profile: Unlike building new links, these links contribute to a more natural link profile. Google, value a natural link profile where the backlinks pointing to your site come from various sources and methods, not just new content.
• Cost-Effective: As there’s no need to write a new article, niche edits can a more cost-effective strategy. 
• Traffic Benefits: If your link is inserted into a page that already receives a good amount of traffic, you will see some referral traffic from that link. It will only work if the content is highly relevant to your own website.

Guest Posts

Guest posts or guest blogging are arguably the best white hat SEO link building technique. 

It is a content marketing tactic where a writer contributes an article to another website or blog. The aim is to generate backlinks, boost website authority, and driving traffic to your own site.

• Authority and Trust: You can establish yourself or your brand as a thought leader by guest blogging on leading industry websites. Your target audience will begin to trust you as a reliable source of information when they see your content on high authority sites.
• Quality Backlinks: Guest posts on high authority sites can improve your site’s search engine rankings, as Google considers these backlinks a vote of confidence from other websites. This improves your site’s discoverability and organic search traffic.
• Reach a Larger Audience: Guest blogging allows you to tap into the publisher’s audience. If their audience finds your content valuable and interesting, they are likely to visit your website or blog, increasing your web traffic.
• Increased Brand Awareness: Guest blogging will get your brand in front of new audiences. A well-written article can make a strong impression and lead readers to check out your website, increasing brand awareness and potentially leading to more leads.

Other Techniques

• Ask for links from friends and clients: This is one of the easiest ways to build good links for your website. Friends, relatives, clients, and partners with their own website or blog can be a good sources of backlinks​.
• Directory submission: Listing your blog or website on various web directories or business directories can help you create backlinks. However, ensuring that the directories are high quality and not associated with spam links​ is important​.
• Turn mentions into backlinks: If people mention your business without linking to it, these can be turned into backlinks using social listening tools​​. These “tools” can be testimonials, reviews, suggestions, and recommendations posted on social media or other platforms that aggregate thoughts and opinions. 
• Find backlink opportunities from your competitors: Auditing your competitor’s websites and analysing their backlink sources can help you discover new opportunities for backlinks​.
• Write testimonials: Writing testimonials and reviews for high authoritative brands and sites can earn you good links for your business​.

How to apply these techniques

Keyword Research:

• Use Keyword Research Tools: Tools, like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, or UberSuggest are great for researching keywords. They can show you search volumes, keyword difficulty, and your competitors’ keywords.

• Understand User Intent: Try to understand what your target audience wants when they use these keywords. Are they looking for information, products or services? This can inform your content creation.
• Prioritise Keywords: Not all keywords are important. Choose the most relevant ones for your website and content. If you are starting out, try using long-tailed keywords or questions. 

Link Insertions:

• Identify Opportunities: Look for existing content on your own or other websites where a link to your site could naturally fit.
• Reach Out: Contact the website owner (if it’s not yours) and ask them if they’d consider adding your link. Be sure to explain why it would add value to their content.
• Monitor Backlinks: Use SEO tools to monitor your backlink profile and ensure any inserted links remain in place.

Guest Posts:

• Identify Potential Sites: Find websites in your industry that accept guest posts. You’ll want sites with high domain authority.
• Pitch Ideas: Create content ideas that would be valuable to the site’s audience and pitch them to the website owner or editor.
• Write Quality Content: If your pitch is accepted, write high-quality, unique content with a link to your site.
• Follow Up: Make sure the post is shared on social media and interacts with any comments to increase engagement.

Other Techniques:

• Ask for Links: Reach out to friends, partners, or customers with websites and ask them if they’d consider linking to your site.
• Directory Submission: Choose high-quality, relevant directories and submit your site for inclusion. Ensure your listing includes a link back to your site.
• Monitor Mentions: Use social listening tools to find mentions of your brand or site online. Ask the person to add one if a mention doesn’t include a link.
• Competitor Analysis: Use SEO tools to analyse your competitors’ backlink profiles. You might find opportunities where you could also get a link.
• Write Testimonials: Offer a testimonial for a product or service you’ve used. If the website owner publishes your testimonial, they’ll often include a link to your site.

III. White hat SEO link building examples 

Case study 1: Successful use of a link building strategy

Company: A company in the men’s lifestyle niche.

Objective: To increase online discoverability, drive organic traffic, and improve domain authority.

Strategy: 10 Links were built monthly from January to March.

Steps:

1. Identify Opportunities: We searched other highly authoritative websites where a link would naturally fit.
2. Outreach: We contacted the website owners with an outreach marketing programme asking if they would consider adding a link to point to this website.
3. Monitoring: We monitored the backlinks from January to March to ensure any inserted links remain in place.

Results: In March, traffic increased by 100% compared to February, and by May, there was a further 300% increase compared to April.

Case study 2: Effective link insertion strategy 

Company: Hospitality, established hotel brand.

Objective: Increasing website traffic to generate more leads.

Strategy: Built 35 links in June/July.

Steps:

1. Identify Opportunities: We searched for highly authoritative websites where users would benefit from a link to this hotel brand.
2. Outreach: We got in contact with the website owners, asking if they would like to add an established hotel brand name to their websites.
3. Monitoring: We monitored the backlinks to ensure that all inserted links remained in place.

Results: Within 8 weeks of building 35 links, the website traffic for our hospitality client had tripled and so had their leads. Traffic increased from 80,000 unique visits per month to 245,000.

IV. White Hat vs Black Hat SEO 

Definition of black hat SEO 

Black hat SEO is the strategy of improving a website’s search engine rankings through practices not approved by search engines, often involving deception and violation of search engine guidelines​.

Techniques commonly used in black hat SEO include; Spamdexing (which is the practice of repeating unrelated phrases to manipulate the relevancy of resources indexed by a search engine), Keyword stuffing (packing long lists of keywords without proper formation), Invisible text (using white text on a white background to make keywords visible to search engine spiders but not human user), Doorway pages (creating a fake page the user never sees, constructed only for search engine spiders to trick them into indexing the site higher) and using Invisible iFrames (sometimes used unethically to download software onto a user’s computer in the background without the user’s knowledge)​.

Differences between white hat and black hat SEO 

The difference between white hat and black hat SEO strategies lies in the technique used to enhance the search engine ranking of a website or webpage. 

White hat SEO strategies are designed to improve a website’s ranking, working within search engine guidelines, focusing on creating content for users rather than search engines.

Risks and consequences of using black hat SEO

While a black hat SEO strategy might sound tempting due to its potential to fast-track results, it comes with considerable risks. 

These practices can lead to a website being banned, de-indexed, or heavily penalised for unethical practices. Black hat SEO methods often yield only short-term results​. 

Google has introduced updates like Penguin, explicitly targeting black hat SEO techniques, leading to penalties for thousands of websites.

Benefits of working towards a white hat SEO strategy

White hat SEO practices follow guidelines created by the likes of Google, ensuring that all content indexed by search engines aligns with the content a human user would find useful.

This strategy emphasises readability, content relevance, and well-structured, well-written content that would be useful to people who read it. 

White hat SEO link building focuses on cross-linking pages internally on a website where appropriate, and building relevant inbound links from trusted and high authority sources. 

While this strategy may take longer to improve search rankings, it can enhance a site’s ranking through good content, appropriate keywords, and a combination of smart marketing strategies, providing long-lasting results​.

V. How does link building help your website SERP? 

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page that users see after they search for a query on a search engine like Google or Bing. 

The SERP typically includes both organic search results and paid ads. Organic results are ranked by the search engine’s algorithm, which considers various factors to determine the relevance and quality of web pages with the user’s search query.

How links influence SERP ranking 

Search engines use links to discover new web pages and to help determine how a page should rank in its results. 

This is done through a process known as “crawling”, where search engines follow links from one page to another, indexing the content as they go.

The number and quality of links pointing to a page are significant factors in determining that page’s rank in the SERP. This is because links are seen as a signal of trust and authority. When a page has a lot of high-quality links pointing to it, it’s an indication to search engines that the page is a reliable source of information. 

This principle forms the basis of PageRank, an algorithm used by Google to rank web pages in their search engine results.

Importance of high-quality links 

The quality of a link is more important than the quantity of links. 

This is because search engines aim to provide users with the most relevant and high-quality content possible. 

So, they prefer links from trustworthy and authoritative sites.

In the context of SEO, high-quality links typically come from sites that:

• Have high authority: Sites that have established their expertise and credibility within a particular niche are often seen as more authoritative. Authority can be domain-wide (the entire site’s authority) or page-specific.
• Are relevant to your content: If the linking page’s content is related to your content, the link is more likely to be considered high-quality.
• Have a good link profile themselves: Sites that have a natural, high-quality inbound link profile are more likely to pass on link equity.

Ways to track and measure the impact of link building on SERP

There are several ways to track and measure the impact of link building on SERP. These include:

1. Ranking changes: One of the most direct ways to measure the impact is to monitor changes in your site’s ranking on the SERP for specific keywords. If your site starts to rank higher for these keywords after you’ve begun your link building efforts, it’s a good sign that your strategy is working.
2. Traffic: Increased organic traffic to your site can indicate successful link building. This could be due to improved rankings or more visibility in the SERP.
3. Link metrics: Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz can provide detailed information about your site’s backlink profile. These include the number of backlinks, the quality of these backlinks (using metrics like Domain Authority or PageRank), and the anchor text used in these backlinks.
4. Conversions: Arguably, the most important goal of SEO and link building is to drive conversions. Therefore, an increase in conversions can be a strong indicator that your link building efforts are positively impacting.

VI. Conclusion

White hat SEO link building is more than just an SEO strategy; it’s about committing to ethical, user-focused practices that bring long-term benefits to your website.By embracing these techniques, you’re not only improving your site’s discoverability, but also contributing to a better, more informative web for for all users​

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