18 White Hat Link Building Tips For Building Strong SEO

The most challenging part of SEO is convincing other websites to link back to yours. This is difficult because most websites don’t have a reason to link back to yours.

Using white hat link building techniques can help improve your domain authority quickly.

White hat link building

The goal of white hat link building is to increase your website’s authority and organic search rankings. This is done by creating high quality content and then conducting outreach to external websites with the goal of getting an inbound link from them.

There are two types of backlinks: white hat and black hat. White hat backlinks are earned links that follow Google’s guidelines. Black hat backlinks are spammy or attempt to game the system, which is against Google’s guidelines.

Here are a few legitimate link building techniques local businesses will want to consider:

1. Partner with other local businesses

Look for businesses near you that are in a similar line of work. For example, if you sell dog treats, look for pet groomers, dog walkers, veterinarians, and dog trainers. Talk to the business owners to see how you can help each other.

If you refer customers to other businesses or plan events together, you could offer referral discounts. Working together with other businesses can lead to natural linking opportunities, as well as other benefits you get from the relationship.

2. Sponsor local events

Research festivals, conferences, or other professional events that might interest potential customers in your area. Most events that you sponsor will have a link to your website on their event page.

3. Sponsor local organizations

This provides more long-term benefits than an event that only lasts a few days at most.

When thinking about which nonprofits to partner with, it’s a good idea to consider the values of your typical customers. This will help you choose organizations that align with the message you want to send to them. For example, if you own a health food restaurant, partnering with nonprofits that focus on improving healthy food access or sustainable food practices would be a good way to connect with your customers’ values.

4. Join local professional organizations with directories

You can often find a number of professional organizations specific to certain industries in most cities. In addition, chambers of commerce, some of which are focused on particular business owner demographics, can be found in most cities.

Some relevant professional organizations to those in the health field in some areas are the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association. Membership with these organizations usually comes with inclusion in a directory.

5. Host a charity drive or fundraiser

The nonprofit that you support can help themselves by promoting it on their own site. Local journalists and bloggers are also a great way to get the story out there. And any followers of the nonprofit or publications that cover the story may be inspired to share news about it to their own followers as well.

6. Write and promote local content

There is a lot of competition amongst businesses doing content marketing. However, you don’t have to compete with every business in your industry in the search rankings. You only have to compete with those businesses that serve the same local audience as you.

You can make your local business more successful by creating content that is useful and focused on local issues. Find topics that would be relevant to both your business and the local community.

7. Connect with local bloggers

Local bloggers in many communities write about things to do around the town or issues relevant to residents.

Look for relevant bloggers in your city and see if they would be willing to promote your business. You could offer a free visit in exchange for a review, or set up an affiliate-style arrangement where the blogger would make a commission on every purchase made by a reader they refer.

8. Look for relevant round-up pages

Consider what types of businesses your company could fall into and if there are any local roundup blog posts you would be a good fit for.

This strategy is unlikely to be very successful. The blogger would need to be willing to do extra work to include your business, and may not think you belong on the “best” list by their standards. However, if they are willing to give your business a try, it could earn you both a link and the beginning of a relationship with a new local blogger.

9. Write guest posts

Guest posting refers to the act of writing an article for another website in order to build links back to your own website. This tactic is considered to be a ‘white-hat’ technique as it provides value for both parties involved. Writing a guest post requires more effort than simply asking another website to add a link to your own, but it can be more beneficial in the long run as it helps to build a relationship with the other website.

Guest posting on blogs in your city relevant to your business can be beneficial. You may have to get creative with how you connect your business to the blog, but it can be worth it.

If you are an accountant, you don’t need to find blogs that are specifically about accounting. A local knitting blog may be interested in a post about all the things readers should know before monetizing their hobby. You just need to find blogs with enough of a connection that you can provide value to their audience.

10. Do broken link building

Try to find websites that are relevant to yours and have broken links pointing to something similar to what you offer. Contact the owner of the website to let them know about the broken link, and suggest that they use your site as a replacement. This will help them fix a problem on their site while also benefiting you.

Finding broken links on the internet may seem like an impossible task, but there are some SEO tools that can help. Once you find the broken links, you can email the website and explain why your webpage would be a good replacement.

11. Create and give out awards

If you give out awards to individuals or businesses in relevant categories, it’s a good way to get the attention of the people you honor who are then likely to share about the award to their own audiences.

Giving your customers a way to engage with your business by providing awards can be beneficial to both parties. The customers get a way to connect with businesses they love, while the businesses that win the awards are more likely to link back to your page. This tactic can be a great way to get more exposure for your business.

12. Apply for local awards

There are already many businesses and organizations in your community that give awards to professionals and businesses. You may be eligible for some of these! Look for as many relevant local awards as possible, and nominate your business or employees for any that you are confident you are a good fit for.

13. Identify local discount listings

There may be websites in your city that have a list of businesses that offer discounts. You can get a link from these websites.

Try to find as many examples of discounts as you can and then contact the website owners to tell them about the offers you have. This added information will make their list more useful to readers, which will encourage them to include you on the list.

14. Perform a survey

If you can provide local bloggers and journalists with useful statistics, you’re likely to gain a number of links from it.

Design a survey about problems or issues in the area. Distribute it through email and social media. Ask businesses, organizations, and people with a lot of influence to promote the survey to get more people to respond, which makes the data more reliable.

15. Promote your projects to local press

Always send out a press release whenever you do something newsworthy and always contact journalists that are relevant to your topic whenever you do something that falls under their beat.

It might be a good idea to hire a local PR professional to help with this. They probably have established connections that could get you coverage for your tactics quickly. In addition to helping you build links, this could be a good way to raise your brand’s profile with local audiences and get more people to pay attention to your business.

16. Content contributions

Guest posting, also known as guest blogging, is a great way to build links using white hat techniques (especially when trying to improve search engine rankings for software as a service). We’ve found that it’s much more effective than broken link building.

If you want to get your blog post published on someone else’s website, you should contact websites who have a blog and pitch a topic to write about. If they accept your pitch, your blog post will be published on their website, which will help increase traffic and brand awareness.

You’ll earn high-quality backlinks from guest posting or article submission sites by submitting great content.

Your company or personal brand can earn new backlinks and increase brand awareness by getting in front of new readers.

The content you create for these opportunities can help improve your website ranking and increase referral traffic for years to come.

So, how do you get started?

You can use free link building tools to find guest post opportunities on high-authority domains.

Look for websites that don’t have a “guest post program” advertised. These are usually websites that are over-saturated with low-quality content and charge you to publish. This isn’t a good strategy if you want to maintain a good reputation.

Email websites you admire and explain why you like them and how you think you could contribute.

17. Create unique and original data

The data I personally find most valuable is unique and original. I think it’s the best way to get white hat backlinks on a large scale, and it can help power your SEO strategy.

In other words, a marketer asked a group of SEO professionals how important backlinks are for ranking in search engines, both for their own website and for their clients’ websites.

They received links from sites like CMI and AppSumo within days of publishing their report, which drove thousands of visits to their site as well as link equity and direct leads for their services.

It is important to identify your areas of interest before embarking on a research project. What topics are you comfortable researching and what would you like to learn more about? Interesting statistics about your chosen focus area can help you to direct your research and make it more enjoyable.

Instead of starting with trying to get links from high-tier media sites, work backwards and talk to customers, readers, or colleagues. See how you can relate your niche to a current trending topic using Google Trends. This will increase your virality potential.

There are platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn where you can collect survey responses. You can then use these responses to create a content piece with custom images that people will want to share.

18. High-volume cold outreach

Although outreach link building is still a viable strategy, it has become increasingly difficult to get responses from potential link partners.

Building links to improve your website’s ranking is competitive. Everyone is trying to get links from high-quality websites. If you want to get links from big brands in your niche, you need to send a lot of emails.

You need to send a lot of emails to get a response from most sites.

If your outreach campaign is well thought out and promises to deliver high quality content to the target site, you will see an increase in responses. However, if your outreach is poorly planned and the content you deliver is sub-par, you will not earn any backlinks.

The goal is to send 400 emails per month to websites related to your niche. If your niche is too narrow, you can expand it by using a tool like Ahrefs to look into specific topics.

Go to Ahrefs and use the content explorer tool. Type in a specific topic or niche to explore. While your focus may sound like a seemingly small niche, and there might not be 400+ blogs directly on your topic, there may be over 400,000 unique pages discussing the topic: