White Hat Link Building – What is it?

What is White Hat Link Building?

White Hat SEO is an approach to driving traffic to a website through smart SEO techniques, such as linking to other relevant content on the internet while staying within Google’s guidelines. While Black Hat SEO practices often result in short-term wins, the websites that try to manipulate search engines will often find themselves being penalised and pushed down the rankings when Google realises what they are doing.

By focusing on creating a good on-site experience, adding engaging and valuable content to the internet, and putting your users first, White Hat SEO can help to boost your rankings. By including links to other high-quality websites with good domain authority, you are showing Google (and your users) that you care about giving them as much information and help as possible – making search engines think that your website is a good place to direct traffic.

Types of White Hat Linking Strategies 

There are two main types of white hat link building strategies: internal and external linking. Internal links specifically target other parts of your own website. So, for example, if you have an eCommerce website, you can link your product pages to similar items or link back to products that you highlight in a blog.

External linking is to direct traffic to other domains that are not your own. An example of this would be if you were quoting an article or using a statistic from somewhere else on the internet. Whether you are linking back to an original source, endorsing a company that you partner with, or simply directing traffic to websites that will help them, search engines like to see this. 

It’s also very important that you remember to only link back to reputable sources and websites that are trustworthy. Search engines don’t want you to direct people towards bad websites. You never want to associate your website with insecure, spammy or untrustworthy sites!

What Are The Benefits of White Hat Linking?

White Hat SEO techniques are beneficial for users, business owners, and search engines too. It helps search engines to quickly find answers and check a sites trustability. It can help business owners by rewarding them for putting their users’ needs and on-site experience first, and it helps consumers to easily find the information they are looking for.

By now, you are probably wondering what the exact benefits are. Here are just a few –

It improves your rankings & traffic.

Marketing campaigns that adhere to Google’s best practices, such as creating high-quality content, matching landing pages with relevant keywords, and using reliable backlinks, will improve your rankings. If you focus on backlinking to bloggers within your industry, many of them are often happy to link back to your website too, meaning they direct some of their traffic to you in return.

You can save money in the long term.

Using trusted, proven and Google-approved SEO strategies and not trying to “hack” search engines with Black Hat techniques will take a while to produce results, but once you’ve got into the swing of things, it will provide long-term results that mean you can drive traffic without expensive advertising campaigns. The investment is worth it in the long run, and it will also land you in Google’s good books.

It helps to elevate your content.

By producing hard-hitting value-led content, users will recognise that you are a thought-leader within your industry and ultimately reward you for it. Whether you are a restaurant sharing recipes and backlinking to popular food bloggers, or a plumber highlighting ways to fix a blocked drain and directing traffic to a DIY YouTube video, this keeps your audience engaged and confident that you are putting their needs first. By focusing on backlinks, you are forced to create high-quality content, rather than a quick blog you’d written in fifteen minutes as you had some time spare on the train. You need to consider how you can tie your content in with other websites to work in harmony and give your users a complete experience.

It prepares your site for updates.

Even though you may have no idea what Google’s next big update will happen, ensuring that your website provides a good customer experience will immediately align you with one of Google’s goals and protect you from potential issues. For example, in 2015, Google rolled out an update referred to as “Mobilegeddon”, where websites that were not mobile-friendly massively dropped in their rankings. This update rocked a lot of businesses who had not thoroughly thought out their customers’ on-site experience. With White Hat SEO, you can rest easy, as your website is already following all of Google’s guidance. 

Black Hat SEO – No, No, No! 

As we briefly mentioned earlier, Black Hat SEO techniques may look tempting. You can easily purchase a bulk of backlinks for a low cost, but they go against Google’s guidelines and are never a good idea. Trying to cheat the system for quick wins by using paid-for links, keyword stuffing, link-driven content of poor quality, and continuously spamming blog comments will result in your website being classified as untrustworthy on search engines. If this happens, it will take considerably more time and money to try to redeem yourself than it would have cost if you played by the books to begin with.

Using tactics that put you against Google’s guidelines always backfires. So effectively, you will waste time, money, and effort creating lousy quality content that will turn the system against you, landing your site with severe penalties and put your rankings at high risk. As I’m sure you can guess, all of this would dramatically drop your traffic and conversion rate.

Need Some Help?

It’s very easy to get confused and overwhelmed when managing all of your marketing alone – trying to improve your SEO, debunk and understand your bounce rate, keep on top of your website maintenance – the list is neverending!

Cheshire Cat Marketing has supported countless SMEs and Startups, helping them grow, develop and reach new heights with both their online and offline marketing. 

With the help of our bespoke packages, we can support businesses of any size and budget. If you would like to have a free marketing consultation, get in touch, and one of our experienced team members will be more than happy to provide you with some free advice.