5 Strategies for White Hat Link Building in 2022

It is fashionable to use words like “white hat link building” and “white hat SEO”. But what is white hat SEO and what strategies can you apply to be successful in link building? In this article, you will learn 5 white hat link building strategies that can be implemented in 2022 to improve your SEO.

What is white hat link building?

White hat link building is the process of getting relevant backlinks to your website without violating search engine policies. The main purpose of link building is to increase the authority of the website and get a better position in search engines. A backlink is an actual hyperlink that points to your website. The number of relevant backlinks a website has is one of the most crucial ranking factors.

Since we’re talking about backlinks, it’s a good time to mention that not every backlink leading to your website is good. Some links can harm your website’s authority or even lead to a Google sanction. So, what makes a link good? In simple terms, two important factors indicate a good link:

• Relevance – Your site should receive backlinks from relevant websites. Ideally, these are links from the same or similar business niche.
• Web Resource Authority – You should target relevant websites with good authority. To measure the authority of a website, it is best to use tools such as Ahrefs, where you can find an indicator called Domain Rating. It represents the overall strength of the domain’s link portfolio. The higher the authority of websites from which you get links, the greater the impact on your pages.

Before we get started, she gives an overview of the other side of white hat SEO techniques.

Search engines consider all of the following activities to be “Black Hat SEO”:

• Content automation
• Doorway pages
• Hidden links or text
• Keyword Fill
• Sneaky diversions
• disguise
• Create pages with duplicate content
• PBNs

These methods violate search engine policies and most of them can lead to a manual lowering of search results, often referred to as a Google sanction. In the worst case scenario, it is possible to remove your pages from the Google Search index.

The risks of using Black Hat SEO are obvious. So let’s jump right into the White Hat Link Building strategies…

guest blogging

Guest blogging or guest posting remains the best link building technique in 2022. Many companies find it a very effective and reliable link building strategy. Here’s how it works.

You offer your topic expertise on other websites and provide free content. In return, they will publish your article and post a link back to your web resource as a rating. The link can be placed in the body of the content or in the author’s bio section. Either way is fine, but we recommend placing links in the content text and using a relevant anchor text.

Here’s a tip from us. Try to avoid websites that openly offer guest blogging on their pages. Such websites are usually of low quality and will not provide any link value. Try to find high quality websites using link building tools like Ahrefs or Google Search to find sites that fit your industry.

The next step is to make a good pitch explaining why they should publish your content. Be honest and provide blog posts that add value to their websites. Usually website owners like guest posts about exciting statistics, solutions to problems and the results of experiments.

Also pay attention to keywords you want to use in your guest post and write about trending topics. You can use Google Trends to determine which keywords are more expected by readers. If your topic is covered in depth, you simply make your article better than the existing one. Analyze the articles at the top of search results and fill in the content gaps that other authors have missed.

Create a linkable asset

Creating valuable and interesting content is one of the best ways to earn free backlinks. This is a pure white hat link building technique. The idea is simple: people like content that helps them solve their problems, entertains or educates them. Creating content that provides real value to readers is the primary principle in producing ‘linkable assets’. Usually they are non-commercial assets, so product pages or landing pages for sale are not suitable for this.

These are the most popular examples of linkable items you can find on the web:

• infographics
• Tutorials
• to investigate
• Guides
• Instruction articles
• Free tools (calculators; constructors, analyzers)
• Videos

Once you’ve created a quality piece of content, many websites can reference it on their blogs for explanation purposes or use your data in their research. A good linkable asset usually brings shares and social media subscribers.

Here’s an excellent example of this:

Oberlo conducted in-depth research into the Google search engine and provided structured data as an infographic. It is easy to read and provides valuable statistics for SEM marketers.

View the full infographic here:

So Oberio just had a new link from us and probably got some authority.

If you link to other sites, in addition to the SEO value, you will also benefit from increased reach, brand awareness and access to a new audience. This is a signal to the search engine and readers. If the website links to another source, this is an indicator of trust for visitors. They can click the link and immediately become regular visitors to your website.

However, this approach also has its difficulties. Unless you’re a well-known news channel, even great content should be promoted. If you’ve just started your blog or any other type of linkable asset, you’re probably having a hard time handling the initial promotion of your content.

But there are some methods you can try:

• Use your own linkable asset in other blog posts (internal linking);
• Link to your entry from guest blogging content (we talked about guest blogging earlier in this article);
• Share your linkable assets with your email subscribers;
• Promote your linkable asset on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter);
• Reach out to influencers and offer them valuable information they can use.

The latter requires a good pitch, but if your content offers real value and is unique, you are more likely to get a positive response.

Advertise linkable item

At MotherLink, we focus on promoting valuable content rather than promoting our products. We believe that social media news feeds are overloaded with annoying ads that people feed on. But when you provide valuable information rather than a sales pitch, your brand interacts with and engages your audience.

People spend their time reading informational content rather than watching ads. In addition, they can subscribe to your channel and become your customer in the future. This is one of the foundations of building customer-brand relationships in 2022.

Another great benefit of paid promotion of linkable items on social media is that you can target ads to your focus group. That means only a certain group will see your content in their news feeds. It could be who you want to select as your target audience. Try to target people who may be interested in reading this type of content. If you know your audience and target your ads correctly, people will like it and are likely to link to your item.

Design your linkable asset

Last but not least, it’s not just about the text. Make sure your content looks good. If it’s an article, add some custom images or ask your designer to create illustrations to help with reading. Don’t use stock photos because people are familiar with them and it could be seen as negative.

Group sentences into small paragraphs and separate them with interesting subheadings. You can also add bullet points about facts or steps in a process. This helps the reader consume the content evenly and keeps your text from looking as boring as a refrigerator manual.

In addition, make sure that the font you use is large enough to read. No one wants to strain their eyes while reading, even if it’s interesting content. If you don’t take this into account, visitors will leave your website.

Broken link building

Broken link building is a strategy where you find a broken page with links pointing to it. You then create content on the same topic. Then contact websites that link to that broken page (404 page) and ask them to replace that link with yours.

It’s no secret that referencing “404 pages” is bad for SEO, and most website owners know that. Try to avoid broken page links and broken pages on your site. That’s why we love broken link building. You are helping other websites build links at the same time. It’s a pure win-win situation.

Here’s how to do it with Ahrefs. We don’t promote the tool, but we really recommend that you use it. Let’s get into detail!

While using Ahrefs, go to the Content Explorer section and type a topic about which you are considering creating content. In our case we chose ‘Link Building’.

Then add a ‘Referrer domains’ filter and set the minimum value to 5 to ensure each page has at least five unique backlinks.

Then filter the broken pages.

Now check what content was on the “dead page”. This will give you an idea of what your subject should be. Click the ‘root’ next to the website URL you chose and click ‘View on Archive.org’. You’ll see what was on that broken page before he died.

To see all websites linking to the broken page, click the ‘root’ next to the URL and select ‘Backlinks’.

Now you will see all the websites you can contact that offer link replacement. We just found over 90 potential link building opportunities for ourselves and this article (you are reading now) as a replacement for the white hat link building topic.

Don’t forget to prepare a good pitch and state that the main reason you are contacting them is that their website links to broken pages, hurting their SEO. Then tell them that you created a new article on the same topic and that it is a good replacement.

Link Building Resource Pages

Another white hat tactic for building links is to use resource pages. Resource pages are a kind of navigator, their main purpose is to point to different resources and help visitors get to the right page more easily.

Here’s a simple trick you can use in the Google search bar. Type without parentheses:

intitle:source inurl:source.html [any relevant topic]

You will see many pages on the chosen topic. Check the pages to see if they are real source pages. Next step: contact those you want to publish to. Typically, webmasters add new resources without any problems.

HARO link building

HARO means helping a reporter.

Here is the website: https://www.helpareporter.com/.

HARO is a special service that connects journalists and news channels. It is a service where they can request information from experts. If you have knowledge, you are an interesting person and you can share it with them.

To make that happen, register and subscribe to topics you want to write about. Then you will receive daily emails with a list of topics to which you can add value and share your expertise with journalists. If you are deployed as an expert, a backlink to your website will be added.

We recommend setting up the free Google alert service. This way you can see if your opinion has been accepted by one of the news sources. As soon as they publish an article and mention you, a warning comes your way.

What have you learned about white hat link building?

You have learned that there is “white hat” and “black hat” link building. Black hat link building is dangerous because every year Google is getting smarter and cracking down on such promotion methods. White Hat Link Building techniques are stable options that produce tangible results with work. And that you can use one, several or all five to further the needs of a link building campaign. Whatever your ultimate goal, methods like guest posting are tried and tested, so what are you waiting for? Bookmark this article and give them a try!