5 White Hat Link Building Strategies that Work in 2022

March 21, 2022

In today’s world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), it has become 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 policy. The main goal of link building is to increase website authority and get a better position in search engines. A backlink is an actual hyperlink that refers to your website. The number of relevant backlinks a website has is one of the most crucial ranking factors.

As 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 result in a Google penalty.

So, what makes a link good?

In simple terms, two main factors point to a good link:

• Relevance – Your site should receive backlinks from relevant websites. Ideally, these will be links from the same or similar business niche. That’s why we’ve created a category indicator in the MotherLink platform. This will help you determine which domains are best suited to build links for your website.
• Authority of the web resource – You must focus on relevant websites with good authority. To measure a website’s authority, it’s best to use tools like Ahrefs, where you can find an indicator called Domain Rating. It represents the overall strength of the link portfolio of the domain. The higher the authority of websites you get links from, the better the impact on your pages.

Before we begin, I would like to overview the opposite side of white hat SEO techniques briefly.

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

• Content automation
• Doorway pages
• Hidden links or text
• Keyword stuffing
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaking
• Creating pages with duplicate content
• PBNs

These methods are against search engine policy, and most of them can result in a manual decrease of search rankings, often referred to as a Google penalty. In a worst-case scenario, the removal of your pages from the Google Search index is possible.

The risks to using Black Hat SEO are clear. So, let’s get straight to the White Hat Link Building strategies…

Guest posting

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. Essentially you can do link building in-house or outsource. Here is how it works.

You offer your topic expertise to other websites and provide free content. In exchange, they publish your article and place a link back to your web resource as appreciation. The link can be placed in the body of the content or the author’s bio section. Both ways are good, but we recommend you place links in the content body and use a relevant anchor text.

Here is a tip from us.

Try to avoid websites that openly offer guest posting on their pages. Typically, such websites are low quality and will not bring any link value. Try to find high-quality websites using link building tools like Ahrefs or Google search to find sites that match 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 would be more expected by readers. If your topic is extensively covered, just make your article better than the existing ones. Analyze the articles at the top of the search results and fill in the content gaps that other authors missed.

Creating 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 straightforward: people love content that helps them solve their problems, entertains, or educates. Creating content that provides real value to readers is the primary principle in producing “linkable assets.” Usually, they’re non-commercial assets, so product pages or sales landing pages are not suitable for this.

Most popular examples of linkable assets you can find on the web:

• Infographics
• Tutorials
• Researches
• Guides
• How-to articles
• Free tools (calculators; constructors, analyzers)
• Videos

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

Here is an excellent example of one:

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

See the full infographic here:

https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics

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

If you’re linking to other sites, in addition to SEO value, you also benefit from increased reach, brand awareness, and access to a new audience. This is a signal for the search engine and readers. If the website refers to another resource, it is an indicator of trust for visitors. They may click the link and immediately turn into regular visitors of your website.

However, this approach also has its difficulties. Unless you’re a well-known news outlet, even great content has to be promoted. If you’ve just started your blog or any other kind of linkable asset, you’re probably finding it difficult to handle 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 asset from Guest Post content (we talked about Guest Posting earlier in this article);
• Share your linkable assets with your email subscribers;
• Promote your linkable asset in social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter);
• Reach out to influencers and offer them valuable information they can use.

The last one requires some good pitch, but if your content provides real value and is unique, the chances you will have a positive answer are higher.

Advertise linkable asset

We at MotherLink focus on promoting valuable content rather than advertising our products. We believe that social media news feeds are overloaded with annoying ads that people feed off. But when you offer valuable information instead of a sales pitch, your brand interacts with your audience and engages them.

People are more likely to spend their time reading informative content than watching adverts. As a complement, they may subscribe to your channel and become your client in the future. This is one of the foundations of building customer-brand relationships in 2022.

Another great thing about the paid promotion of linkable assets in social media is you can target ads to your focus group. That means that only a particular group will see your content in their news feeds. It can be whoever you want to select as a target audience. Try to target people who might be interested in reading this kind of content. If you know your audience and target your ads correctly, people will like it, and probably link to your asset.

Design your linkable asset

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

Group sentences into small paragraphs, separating each with interesting sub-headings. You can also add bullet points about facts or steps in a process. This will help the reader consume the content evenly and keeps your text from looking as dull as a refrigerator manual.

Additionally, ensure that the font you use is large enough for reading. No one wants to strain their eyes when reading, even if it’s interesting content. Not taking this into account will lead to visitors abandoning your website.

Broken link building

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

It’s no secret that referring to “404 pages” is bad for SEO, and most website owners know it. Try to avoid linking on broken pages and having broken pages on your site. So that’s why we like broken link building. You are helping other websites at the same time as building links. It is a pure win-win situation.

Here is how you can do it using Ahrefs.

We are not promoting the tool, but we really do recommend you consider using it. Let’s get into some detail!

While using Ahrefs, go to the Content Explorer section and type any topic you are considering creating content about. In our case, we picked “Link building.”

Then add a “Referral domains” filter and set the minimum value to 5 to ensure each page has at least five unique backlinks.

Next, filter the broken pages.

Now check what content used to be on the “dead page.” This will give you an idea of what your topic should be. Click on the “carrot” next to the website URL you picked, and click “View on Archive.org.” You will see what was on that broken page before it died.

To see all websites linking to the broken page, click the “carrot” next to the URL and select “Backlinks.”

Now you will see all the websites you can contact and 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 mention the main reason you are contacting them is that their website links to broken pages, harming their SEO. Then tell them that you have produced a new article on the same topic and it is a good replacement.

Resource pages link building

Another white hat link building tactic is using 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 is an easy trick you can use in the Google search bar. Type without brackets:

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

You will see lots of pages about the chosen topic. Check the pages to see if they are actual resource pages. Next step: reach out to the ones you want to publish on. Typically webmasters add new resources without any problems.

HARO link building

HARO means help a reporter out. Here is the website: https://www.helpareporter.com/. HARO is a special service that connects journalists and news outlets. It’s a service where they can request information from experts. If you have knowledge, you are an individual of interest and 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 you can add value to and share your expertise with journalists. If you are used as an expert, a backlink to your website will be added.

We recommend setting up the free Google alerts service. That will enable you to see if your opinion was accepted by one of the news sources. As soon as they publish an article and mention you, an alert will speed 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 Google is getting smarter every year and is cracking down on such promotion methods. White Hat Link Building techniques are stable options that offer, with work, tangible results. And that you can adopt one, multiple, or all five to advance 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!