There are many misconceptions when it comes to comparing “white-hat” SEO with “black hat” SEO.
We’re here to decode all the jargon associated with the various “types” of links, which ones are safe and which aren’t, and everything else people wonder about white-hat backlink profiles (including how to do outreach to get them).
Let’s discuss the different colours of “hats” and what they mean.
What is the difference between White-Hat and Black-Hat Backlinking?
When people discuss SEO, they prefer to break it down into different groups called “hats” – some that engage in black-hat methods of building links and others that are pure and compliant with Google “the white hats.”
Here are some methods to differentiate the two.
Strategies for SEO that are white-hat:
- Follows Google’s guidelines
- Good user experience
- Provides relevant, high-quality Links
- Increases trust in websites
- Organically, it can achieve high rankings.
- Long-term work
- Ethical techniques
Strategies for SEO that are black-hat:
- Infractions to Google’s guidelines
- Bad user experience
- Links of low quality
- Reduces trust in websites
- It is only effective in the short term.
- Uses unethical techniques
- Good chance of being penalized.
As you’ve probably observed, the main reason to choose white-hat over black-hat SEO is that it is a cleaner, more ethical SEO link-building method.
What Are the Benefits of White-Hat Link Building Techniques?
Both black-hat and white-hat seo strategies can rank a website higher in the SERPs. White-hat SEO offers strategies that follow Google’s best practices and guidelines instead of strategies to target an audience to increase visitors.
Google could disqualify black-hat techniques, and you risk getting a penalty. However, white-hat methods are generally more secure, better for businesses, and improve your search engine rankings. To stress the importance of white-hat SEO, Google states that their search engine’s two most important signals are high-quality content and link building.
Here are the top advantages of using White Hat SEO Links:
- Cost-effective
- Create excitement and build friendships
- It is easily shared.
- Lower risk than black-hat
- More robust to Google algorithm changes
Utilizing white-hat SEO techniques will save you time, money and effort. This strategy is ideal for long-term goals and can create a great organic and natural way to connect with others.
This allows search engine results to serve great content to its users. The benefits of white-hat methods are great once implemented and don’t have to be as well-maintained over time, saving you an added expense.
Black-hat SEO strategies are based on spam and shady deals. In contrast, white-hat SEO strategies are designed to last, creating long-lasting good relationships and the reward of increased consumer desire to be associated with companies and well-known brands.
If you choose to use black-hat SEO strategies, do so at your own risk as it is an extremely risky method and as soon as the algorithm for search engines changes or an additional competitor is introduced. You are at risk of losing your ranking in SERPs.
White-hat strategies can give the organic ranking of your site. They will be effective regardless of changes to search engines.
White-hat SEO strategies might take longer than black-hat strategies; however, they are more secure and will continue to boost organic traffic over the long run.
There are numerous advantages of white-hat SEO strategies for small businesses and small-time bloggers. It’s a huge portion of solid SEO strategies that increase your conversion rates, traffic, and visibility.
How to Find White-Hat Links
White-hat links are difficult to expand. It requires lots of work in the form of SOPs, training, manual outreach, and time to ensure your digital marketing strategy is in order.
Luckily, we’re extremely adept over here at Snap SEO!
Out of all “white-hat” link-building techniques among them, one of the most efficient and most efficient methods is Guest posting.
The concept behind guest posting is to contact bloggers who run blogs within your area and ask them if they’d like it if you write an article for publication on their blog. Then, create an article that includes hyperlinks back to your website. This is among the most common SEO strategies to increase backlinks.
If you follow this procedure correctly If you do this correctly, you’ll receive:
- 1. An excellent quality content link
- 2. Great diversity
- 3. Actual traffic is coming from this link
- 4. Improved rankings
This may seem like an enormous amount of work, but as you’ll be trying to connect with high authority domain websites, just one or two of these links could yield excellent results.
The benefit of this is that it is as clean as you can get.
As I mentioned in the preceding section, It’s something that every client would want to see to promote their business – even enterprise clients.
Make a piece of linkable content
This part is optional, but this makes the process much easier.
First, you need a piece of epic content worthy of linking to. Visuals like infographics would do well here. A recent study that took place in 2021 from ViSenze suggests that 62% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers want visual search more than any other new technology.
It is typically an informative resource, a guide, a tool, or simply something interesting and useful (not the sales page or a home page). It doesn’t need to be an entire masterpiece. However, it has to be well-crafted and have enough value to your target audience or search engines to consider it helpful and useful for users.
Examples of linked content could be:
The Ultimate Guide to More Rankings for WordPress Websites (Yoast)
How to Start A Blog (Impossible to get HQ)
the Ultimate Reference to Earning Money (Ramit Sethi)
These are all guides (sometimes known as the ultimate guide) which would be very easy to include as an internal link within an article. It is normal to hyperlink to them instead of only the homepage or a sales page.
Find potential targets
There are many ways to identify potential candidates for guest posts. There isn’t one method that works for everyone. It is also possible to do blog comments. Actually, the former Google employees Matt Cutts claims that he makes frequent comments on blogs.
Whatever way you choose, you’ll need to create a long list.
An excellent place to find search engine operators is this article written by Optimize Smart.
There are tons of amazing operators that can help you identify opportunities.
This can be done by using scrapebox or simply searching for the word “Google” and using the following search engines:
keywords + “ guest blog “
Keyword + “guest blogger “
Keyword + “guest Column”
Keyword + “guest article”
Keyword + guest post
keyword + guest author
Keyword + “write for us”
keywords + “write for me”
keyword + “become a contributor”
keywords + “contribute to this site”
keyword + inurl:category/guest
keyword + inurl:contributors
Keyword + “ guest blog ” + anchor: Contact
keywords + “guest blogger ” + anchor: Contact
Keyword + “guest Column” + inanchor:contact
Keyword + “guest article” + inanchor:contact
Keyword + “write for us” + anchor: contact
keywords + “write for me” + anchor: contact
keyword + “become a contributor” + inanchor:contact
keywords + “contribute to this site” + anchor: contact
Enter them in Google, and you’ll see an array of websites which could be worth a shot to connect with.
This is an illustration:
Find guest post targets.
Create an Excel spreadsheet listing all of the possibilities.
We utilise Moz Domain Authority, a service from Link Explorer to determine which websites are useful to use in an SEO strategy. This number usually correlates with how valuable in terms of SEO the post will be but also gives an indicator of how much traffic the site could give us.
Here’s a quick guide:
DA10+ – Authority at entry level
D20+ Good Authority
D30+ Better Authority
D40+ High Authority
Therefore, you should aim for anything higher than 10, but the ideal is 20+. Anything less than that won’t be worth the effort to chase.
Go through each website and then contact the webmaster
It is important to scrutinize every site to ensure that it’s not a low-quality website. Take a look at a few articles, look around and be sure that you’re getting a legitimate opportunity.
Then, you can contact the editor or the website owner and ensure that they accept guest postings so that you don’t lose time. It would help if you asked them about the requirements for posting (each site is unique). Then, pitch your idea to them to make sure it’s suitable, and they will be happy to publish it.
Write an amazing piece and include hyperlinks
Take the site owner’s requirements and make an awesome article out of it. You’ll want to link out to more sources than just yourself, so it’s not spammy or an obvious SEO tactic.
If you completed step 1 above, it makes it much simpler too.
It is important to add hyperlinks in a manner that’s as natural as possible. Don’t attempt to create the exact anchors you want when it’s not a good fit. Never try to insert the name of a city and keyword in the same sentence as “Edmonton SEO” because it seems odd. The anchor must be seamless in the sentence.
A majority of editors on top websites have been around the block for some time and are able to smell an SEO from a distance. It’s not enough to just put the exact anchors you want to use in there. It is necessary to include your hyperlinks naturally (which is simpler if you own an article that can be linked to).
Get the post published
Send your post to an editor. Some adjustments could be needed, but the editor will typically publish it quickly (as if you’ve completed all formatting properly and adhered to the guidelines for guest posts).
Kaboom! You’ve got an attractive, in-content, genuine link on a legitimate blog.
If you’ve completed the process properly, you’ll be able to acquire a top-quality link that is not just high-quality and has SEO merit but can actually bring visitors to the site.
What kind of links Are You able to Get?
It’s not easy to secure a guest post; however, the rewards of blogger outreach are worth the effort. Once you’ve got this process going and you’re able to start getting incredible links like these:
As you can tell, this is quite a lot of work. This post can be used as a model to obtain the kind of links you want. You can also make use of the blog guest posting service.
With Snap Blogger Outreach services, we’ll do everything for you. We’ll reach out manually to websites in your industry and secure a guest blog post, write an awesome article which includes your link naturally, and then publish the post to the site’s blog.
It’s 100% manual and contains real websites with real traffic. These are corporate links that are difficult to find elsewhere.
Find out more about Snap Blogger outreach here.
If you have questions, please drop us a line.
