Link building has to be one of the most misunderstood search engine optimization (SEO) techniques today. For a long time, SEO consultants and website owners had leeway on linking for better ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). During this era, link buying, link wheels, and other black hat SEO techniques became the order of the day. Website visitors were highly disillusioned by such practices, and it was only a matter of time before the Google algorithm caught up with the practice. With the recent real-time Google rank brain update, things are even trickier for webmasters and website owners because they have to be very cautious in their link-building activities.
Link Building in Brief:
Finding external pages to link back to your website has always been considered among the ever-mysterious ranking factors. This is because such links are like an endorsement for your website. This is how the SEO industry valued the quantity of backlinks before Google algorithms intervened. A recent survey by Moz reports that backlinks are the most influential SEO factors. Your backlinks are a quality signal to search engines.
When used in the proper way, backlinks have very many benefits. This ultimate guide to white hat link building emphasizes the proper use of link building, which focuses on quality and not quantity. Your links should be from high-authority websites that are closely related to your niche.
Advantages of White Hat Link Building –
Some of the benefits of white hat backlinks include:
- Increased visibility for your website on SERPs for ranking keywords
- Boosting your brand authority due to high-quality incoming links
- Faster indexing on search engines
- Increased traffic numbers from other quality websites.
- Boosting ranking on SERPs
- Higher conversion rates
White Hat Backlinks Building –
Truth be told, running a successful link-building campaign is tough, and it is no wonder that most SEO consultants resort to risky black hat techniques. You have to appreciate that link building is a long-term strategy that will earn you a loyal customer base and boost conversion to your website. Among the tactics to use include:
- Creating fresh and customer-focused content
- Emphasizing quality over quantity
- Research intensively on your backlinks targets, strategies your competition uses, and individual link targets available.
- Focusing on the relevance of backlinks to your website
- Creatively using anchor texts by avoiding over-optimizing
The importance of quality cannot be gainsaid in link building. You have to consider the authority of the linking page and linking domain. Look for links from high authority websites and also place your links on clickable sections for them to carry more weight.
Other link-building strategies you should try include guest blogging, infographics link building, broken link building, and link reclaiming. You also have to be on the lookout for what is trending and ride on it. Some trending practices include link building with images, content repurposing, directory link building, press releases, blog and forum participation, local citations, and sponsored questions.
Using the service of a reputed SEO agency helps in areas such as link building, outreach, web monitoring, content research, competitor and link research, and much more.