“For people to discover your website these days, you need to build pathways and big, flashy signals that lead them there. In the realm of digital marketing, this means – you need links, links, and more links.” – Luisito Batongbakal
Imagine investing $3,000 each month in producing high-quality blog posts for six months straight – only to later realize that none of these posts contributed to your website’s search engine rankings in any way.
That’s $3,000 x 6 = $18,000 you’d have wasted by the end of six months.
And this is not just a what-if scenario.
Most businesses make the same mistake over and over again.
Despite investing thousands of dollars in content marketing, I’ve witnessed most businesses struggling to rank for relevant keywords at the top of search engines.
And there’s one BIG reason behind this – none of them prioritize their link building efforts.
Some don’t consider link building at all.
Data fetched from uSERP indicates that 95% of web pages have zero backlinks pointing to their website.
As stated by Andrey Lipattsev, Partner Development Manager at Google, in a Q&A session, the top two ranking signals Google considers when determining rankings include content and backlinks.
This was later confirmed by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, via a Twitter post:
According to uSERP State of Backlinks report, 58.1% of SEO professionals believe that backlinks have a gigantic-sized impact on search engine rankings. As stated by 59% of respondents, backlinks will reportedly have an increased impact on rankings as Google updates its algorithm.
Let’s look at the number of backlinks top ranking pages on Google have for different keywords. I like to use Ahrefs for checking backlinks, but there are other great link building tools like Moz that you can also use as well:
Keyword – “influencer marketing”
Keyword – “digital marketing”
If you look closely, each of these top-ranking pages has thousands of links pointing to them. So if you want to gain that much-desired #1 position on Google, you need to prioritize your link-building efforts.
Not only that – but you need to focus on links from relevant and high-quality websites.
There are many shady black hat link building tactics out there that people use to inflate their backlinks in hopes of ranking. Not only are these tactics a waste of time and money, but they also go against the search engine guidelines. They may result in Google penalizing your website.
Don’t believe me? Just look back at the search engine ranking pages for the keywords from before. You’ll notice that having the most links doesn’t always mean getting higher rankings – the quality and relevancy of links are arguably more important (more on this later).
Building backlinks without breaking webmaster guidelines is the only way to go if you want your business to succeed in the long run. And that’s what white hat link building is about.
In the following few sections, we’ll get into:
- What is white hat link building,
- The importance of white hat link building and,
- 3 proven white-hat link-building strategies.
Let’s dive in!
What is White Hat Link Building?
“White Hat” Link Building is the strategic White Hat SEO process of using the right set of link building tactics to acquire backlinks from different websites to your own.
These tactics adhere to the Webmaster Guidelines and don’t manipulate Google’s algorithm for better rankings.
On the other hand, “Black Hat” tactics do not adhere to Google’s guidelines. They’re tactics people use that try to manipulate the search rankings and attempt to game the system, such as:
- Buying Low-quality Links
- Link farming
- Irrelevant anchors
- Blog and Forum Comment Spamming
The Importance of White Hat Link Building
Of course, Black Hat Link Building tactics seem easier, cheaper, and quicker.
I’ll be honest here – these tactics may even help you achieve the desired results.
But at the end of the day, they won’t withstand the test of time.
As we all know, Google keeps updating its algorithm. If you get caught, your website will get penalized – which will set you back months or years and even risk losing everything you’ve created.
And even after spending days or months trying to correct things, sometimes you’ll find yourself fa