9 White Hat Link-Building Techniques That Still Work in 2024

What is Link Building in Digital Marketing?

Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO, including hyperlinks from other websites to your site. 

These hyperlinks are often considered backlinks or inbound links. They tell search engines about your website’s relevance, authority, and trustworthiness. 

Google and other search engines consider link building the most important factor in determining a website’s ranking in search results. 

One way this works is that search engines will rank your website better if you have a lot of fine backlinks from other sites. 

White Hat link building refers to the ethical approach of getting links for other websites such that your search engine would love it. 

It focuses on creating high-value content to attract other reputed sources to link to your site naturally.

Strategies for Effective Link Building

Conduct Research and Studies

Conduct research and studies to gather data, analyze patterns, and draw significant conclusions to gain valuable insights into your market or specialty. 

This approach can include quantitative and qualitative research methods like surveys, experiments, case studies, and literature reviews. Original research can reveal fresh results, trends, and patterns, making you a thought leader in your sector. 

Sharing your research findings in blog articles, whitepapers, or studies can also garner backlinks and brand credibility from peers, journalists, and influencers. 

When conducting research, you must utilize rigorous methods, assure data quality and reliability, and properly convey your findings in a compelling and accessible manner.

High-Quality Content Creation

Strong content is crucial for getting backlinks and engaging your readers. This requires developing valuable, relevant, compelling content that answers your audience’s requirements, interests, and pain areas.

Focus on providing value, solving problems, or offering new insights in blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and podcasts. Use rigorous research, interesting storytelling, and expert design and production to set your material apart. 

Optimize content for readability, accessibility, and mobile responsiveness to improve the user experience. By constantly creating high-quality, engaging content, you can build your brand’s exposure and authority in your sector through natural backlinks, social shares, and favorable reviews.

Guest Blogging on Relevant Websites

Guest posting is one of the next white hat strategies for building backlinks. But you need to select high-quality sites for backlinking. 

Paid guest posts should have  “Nofollow” and “Sponsored” links. However, guest posting on other people’s websites is perfectly acceptable and continues to be a strong strategy for obtaining white hat links. 

When pitching, try to find suitable sites using tools like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. 

Try to filter the English content with about 500+ words and try to choose the site with multiple authors. But don’t pitch to the sites that list the authors as admin or guest. 

It could be challenging to accept guest posts, as bloggers could get multiple pitches for a guest post, but it still provides value if executed carefully. 

Focus on selective sites, avoid exact match anchor text, prioritize relevance over Domain Authority, and diversify your link-building strategies.

Fix Broken Links

Fixing broken link building is a smart strategy to improve the quality of your website and build valuable backlinks to your site. 

So, in backlinks, you offer the value of another website, and in return, you get the backlink to your site. Thus, it’s a win-win situation.

The effective approach to performing broken link building includes:

• You can use tools like Ahref’s Content Explorer to identify content with broken links. Once you find such content, you can recreate it and propose your content as a replacement for broken links.

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• The next method is to target the resource page where the broken links are common due to infrequency updates. You can identify the relevant resource pages and then you can offer your content as a replacement for those broken links.

To fix broken link building:

1. Search using “inurl:” and “in title:” with terms like “resources” to find pages with lots of links.

2. Use tools like Check My Links to check for broken links on these pages.

3. Tell the owner of the site about the broken links and offer your material as a replacement.

4. Explain how your content can help their audience and improve their page.

Create Infographics

The lengthy piece of content could be so boring that your users will like the link and leave it without completely reading your content. Thus, you can go and add some visual content in your post that could grab the attention of your users. 

Infographics are the visual representation of data, information, and desired knowledge that presents complex information more clearly and quickly.

Thus, it’s a clever move to include visual assets in your content that can help you get more backlinks. 

Visual content is shareable, and it can attract links naturally. This makes them an effective tool for white hat link building. 

For example, when someone uses your visual assets, then they will link to the original source or, say give credit to your site. 

So, over time, infographics have become not only a way to present data or information but also one of the most valuable link-building strategies for digital businesses today.

So, how can you pitch for infographics?

Tip 1: Reach out to the site when you see they have shared similar infographics. 

Then, offer them to create an infographic for their articles or show your infographics for similar content. You can ask them to exchange the backlinks. 

This is a great way to build a link and a good relationship in your domain. 

Link Building to Resource Page

To obtain backlinks to your website, resource page link building entails submitting your material for inclusion on pages that list related resources. 

The first step is to provide a useful resource, such as an engaging infographic or blog post. If you’re not sure how good your material is, you can apply the skyscraper strategy or get ideas from your rivals to improve it. 

Use search phrases like “your industry + intitle:” “inurl: resources,” or “inurl: recommended links” to locate resource pages. 

Search for pages that have lists of links; these are frequently located on pages related to local government, education, and libraries. 

Prioritize websites with excellent content when targeting resource pages, and take into account variables like page authority, URL rating, and expected organic traffic. 

A page’s outbound link count should also be considered, as pages with too many external connections may not be as useful.

Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

Writers and journalists often search for expert quotes to enhance their articles, providing valuable backlinks from high-authority sources. 

You can find these kinds of quote requests at:

• HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
• Journorrequest
• Quoted and Soucre bottle

The major drawback of these platforms is that they could be flooded with responses, and thus, it’s crucial to stand out. Thus, try to respond clearly and concisely and ensure your pitch matches what the journalist is searching for. 

To make a pitch in HARO, try to keep your pitch short and make sure it stands out, ensuring it is highly relevant.

Social Media for Link Promotion

Social networking sites are excellent platforms for content promotion and backlink building. 

You can expand your content’s visibility and audience by posting it on many social media platforms. 

This will help your content reach a larger audience. Try to motivate your fans to interact with your content by creating polls, interviews, and more. 

Interacting with relevant social media groups and communities will increase your post visibility and draw additional backlinks. 

Participating in these groups and contributing insightful articles or other content will help you build authority and get links. 

Remember to optimize your social media posts and profiles with pertinent keywords and hashtags to enhance discoverability and increase the possibility of obtaining backlinks.

Building Relationships with Influencers

People with significant followers and impact in a specific sector or niche are known as influencers. 

Developing connections with influencers can help you build links since they can help you spread the word about your content and provide it to a wider audience. 

Find influencers with a sizable following who are pertinent to your sector or specialty first.

If you want to learn more about influencer marketing, including types of influencers, check out this article.

You can email them or send them a direct message. First, introduce yourself and indicate your interest in working together or sharing your material with influencers directly. 

When making a pitch to influencers, concentrate on adding value and presenting a compelling offer for their audience. 

Whether it’s working together on projects, taking part in collaborative marketing campaigns, or providing exclusive offers or insights, try to cultivate sincere connections based on respect and gain. 

You may use influencers’ platforms to boost your content and obtain significant backlinks by cultivating a close relationship with them.

Tools and Resources for Link Building

Ahrefs: A powerful SEO tool for backlinks, keywords, and competitor analysis. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer helps you find link-building possibilities by analyzing your and your rivals’ backlinks.

Another strong backlink analyzing and research tool is Moz Link Explorer. Moz Link Explorer’s Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) measures assess link chances.

SEMrush: A keyword, site auditing, and backlink analysis tool. Backlink Analytics from SEMrush shows backlink profiles, anchor text distribution, and referring domains.

BuzzSumo: Finds niche influencers and popular content. BuzzSumo can drive link-building content production and outreach by monitoring content performance and social shares.

Pitchbox: An effective outreach platform for discovering prospects, sending targeted emails, and tracking responses. Pitchbox manages guest posting, link requests, and influencer engagements via outreach.

Google Search Console: Shows backlinks, keywords, and click-through rates for your website in Google search results. Monitor your backlink profile with Google Search Console to spot faults or possibilities.

Check My Links: A Chrome plugin that instantly examines websites for broken links. Check My Links helps you present relevant material as an alternative to broken links on target websites.

Google Alerts: Set up notifications for industry-related keywords or subjects to be aware of fresh content possibilities, mentions, and discussions where you may contribute and earn backlinks.

Conclusion

In conclusion, building links is still an important part of SEO in 2024, and using only “white hat” methods is key to long-term success. 

You can get useful backlinks by doing things like research and studies, writing high-quality content, guest blogging on relevant websites, fixing broken links, making infographics, contributing to resource pages, using HARO, promoting your links on social media, and getting to know people who have a lot of influence.

A lot of businesses can improve their online exposure and authority by using tools like Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, SEMrush, BuzzSumo, Pitchbox, Google Search Console, and Google Alerts to make link-building easier. You can check the SEO services provided by TheLeadingSolution. Also, learn more about their pricing models and the services that are included in those models.

 FAQs

Does link building still work?

Yes, building links is still a good way to improve your SEO. Quality links from highly authoritative sites will increase your ranking factors in search engines. They tell search engines that other websites value your material enough to connect to it, boosting your site’s credibility. This can boost organic traffic and search engine rankings.

Is link building expensive?

The cost of link building depends on the strategy and tools. Costs vary depending on whether you hire an SEO agencies or in-house SEO experts or do it yourself. Content production, link management tools, guest post placement, and high-authority site backlink fees may be expenses.

What does link building do?

Links boost a website’s search engine rankings. Get links from other websites to yours. A strong link-building plan can boost domain authority, search rankings, organic traffic, brand recognition, and sales.

How do we do broken link building?

Broken link building involves locating broken links on other websites, producing related material, and then contacting the website owner to advise replacing the broken connection with a link to your new content. Webmasters can clean up their sites and acquire backlinks with this method. The process is as follows:

• Use Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to detect broken external links on specialty websites.
• Replace the broken link with good information.
• Get in touch with the site owner or webmaster about the broken link and offer your content as a solution.​