7 White Hat Link Building Strategies That Actually Work

Link Roundups

According to Backlinko, “Link Roundups are daily, weekly, or monthly blog posts that curate (and link to) outstanding content.” Link roundups are often industry-specific, and they’re a God-send for many people looking to find some quality backlinks because the entire purpose of these pages is to link out to other websites. This offers a great opportunity for you to pitch your content and get a backlink. So, here’s what you need to do. Find link roundups specific to your industry. Go to Google and enter some of the following searches:

“KEYWORD” + “LINK ROUNDUP”
“KEYWORD” + ROUNDUP
“KEYWORD” + “BEST OF”
“KEYWORD” + THIS WEEK

Remember to include the quotation marks where appropriate – adding quotation marks to a search term tells search engines that the words must appear as an exact phrase. Once you’ve found the perfect link roundup result, find a way to pitch your content. Now, you obviously don’t want to send the site owner some generic or needy message like, “Hey, can I have a backlink pleeeeeease?” You don’t want to send anything that appears spammy either. Instead, try something like this:

Hey [Site Owner], I recently found your [Roundup Name]. You have some excellent resources here – great work! I wanted to contact you about something I’ve recently published. [Content Description]. I think it would make a great addition to your page. [Your URL] Anyway, keep doing what you do. Thanks, [Your Name]

Make Yourself A Good Resource For Bloggers & Reporters

Getting backlinks from authoritative news sites and blogs in your industry is one of the best ways to rank on the first page of Google. Sounds difficult, right? Well, yes and no There’s a site called HARO that you should become familiar with. In their own words, “HARO connects journalists seeking expertise to include in their content with sources who have that expertise.” If your content is good enough – that is to say, well-researched, comprehensive, and in general, high in quality – HARO can connect you with journalists seeking source material. This is a great way to get backlinks to your website. I won’t sugar-coat it – this strategy can be difficult, but the pay-off is worth it.

Broken Link Building

This sounds a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Almost like negative SEO. But it isn’t. The strategy is to find a website from which you want a backlink and find a way to add value to it in exchange for a link. In this case, that value would be to alert the site owner of broken links on their site. There is a free Google Chrome extension you can use called CheckMyLinks. It’s incredibly easy to use; just install it and run it on any given page and it will highlight broken links. Now, if you don’t have any particular sites in mind, simply Google various keywords that are relevant to your industry – the top results are great places to get backlinks from. Find a site and run CheckMyLinks. Then, alert the site owner to these broken links and offer your own content as a replacement. You see the strategy here? You first offer something of value to the site owner – a way they can improve their content – and then pitch your content.

.EDU Resource Page Link Building

.edu links are incredibly valuable. Fortunately, many .edu sites have pages dedicated to resources that are useful for their students and faculty. Simply find .edu resource pages with links relevant to your industry. Search things like this in Google:

SITE:.EDU “YOUR KEYWORD”
SITE:.EDU “YOUR KEYWORD” + “RESOURCES”
SITE:.EDU “YOUR KEYWORD” + INURL:LINKS
SITE:.EDU “YOUR KEYWORD” + “OTHER SITES”

Find a site that looks like it could benefit from a link to your own. Now, it’s pitch-time. As stated above, you want a personable, friendly message that doesn’t seem spammy, pushy, or desperate. See if you can add value to their site by finding broken links and alerting the site owner to them.

The Moving Man Method

Look for sites with outdated content, debunked content, or simply websites of businesses that no longer exist. Next, look for sites that link to them (you can do this by using ahrefs.com). Finally, email the sites that link to them, let them know what they’re doing, and of course, offer your own content as a replacement. If you already have the content that would make the perfect replacement, great! If not, create it!

Podcast Link Building

Obviously this technique is a mixed bag – for some people this offers an exciting opportunity for backlinks, but for others (either due to limited exposure or simply intense introversion) finding a way to get on a podcast (and getting through it) can sound like a herculean effort. Whatever the case may be, podcast link building is one way of getting not only more traffic to your website, but also some high quality backlinks. Simply try to become a guest on as many podcasts as you possibly can. You’re sure to get a spike in traffic as well as a variety of different backlinks from the podcast hosts.

Guest Posting

You may have heard it time and time again: Guest Posting for SEO is dead. But is it really? Well… yes and no. If you run a website about physical fitness and then write a guest post for a website about DIY electronics projects, then yes, that’s going to look spammy and your content frankly won’t be very good. However, say you manage to write an awesome, comprehensive article guide on bulking and cutting and send it to another website in your niche in exchange for a backlink – that’s a strategy that still works, and works well. So, how do you find the right sites for guest posting? The answer might surprise you: Google Images. That’s right. Find a blogger in your niche that does a lot of guest posting. Find his or her image that they use in their author bio and copy the image URL. Next, paste the URL into Google reverse image search. This will bring up results of websites on which this person has guest posted. Find the websites you want links from and reach out to them.

White Hat Link Building Is Difficult, But It’s Worth It

Black and grey hat link building can still provide value, but that value is dwindling. It definitely doesn’t work as well today as it did in 2010 when black hat link building was all the rage. Nevertheless, link building is an essential part of SEO. If you want lasting value from your backlink campaigns, use one, some, or all of the above white hat link building strategies described above. It takes time, it takes effort, but the reward is well worth it.