SEO link building strategies: White hat vs. Black hat
To get a rank for a website on the search engines, two main processes are performed by these search engines. The first process is the ability of the search engine to get around the site (crawling). The other process is getting the page in the search engine’s index (indexing).
In order to optimize your web page on the search engines, you should consider some points while building your website. While trying to optimize your website, you could either use tactics approved by the search engine to increase your rank. These are known as White hat strategies. Or you could use unscrupulous tactics to raise your website’s ranking illegitimately or lower the ranking of your competitor’s website. These are known as Black hat strategies. Search engine providers can now detect these Black hat tactics. This may finally result in lowering your rank or even getting you banned or penalized by the search engines and affiliate sites.
One of the tactics used in optimizing your page on the search engines is link building tactic. This is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Link building can be either used in a good way which is then considered as White hat; or it can be used in a devious way making it a Black hat.
Here are some dos and don’ts to consider while building links to your website. These will help you get a position on the search engine rank page (SERP) without violating the search engine’s rules.
Dos (White hat):
- One of the best things that you can do is adding link of your page to relevant sites. This can be done by creating and posting relevant content. The links can then be put within a piece of writing, such as an article, infographic, or press release. The best way for gaining links is by using targeted keywords within the content which should be relevant to site.
- Another thing that you can benefit from in building links is commenting and posting in forums and blogs. It is good to sign up and participate in blogs and forums related to your industry. You can take part in discussions, and post your comments; but you must make sure that your participation is relevant and adding value to the topic discussed. You can then add your site’s link / URL in your signature. This may attract people to visit your website and learn more about you.
- One more very good tactic is making use of broken and dead links. Broken links are links to pages that have moved or changed. Dead links are those giving you 404 error (“page not found notification”). As a savvy online marketer, you can look for such links on relevant sites and on your clients’ sites. Once you come across one of those links, contact the website owner and inform him about this broken link and offer them an alternative link within your site. You should also track any 404 pages on your own site and make sure to redirect them to a similar page.
Dont’s (Black hat):
- What you should avoid doing while creating your content is not having duplicate content on your site.
- You also shouldn’t use irrelevant sites or blogs. Don’t try to mislead people by irrelevant content, or try to mislead the searching engine by using the keywords repeatedly in an inconvenient way.
- When participating in forums and blogs, first of all, you should make sure that you are not participating in a low-quality blog. You should also make sure not to post irrelevant content on irrelevant sites. Don’t spam those forums and blogs with your links and don’t put your link only as signature in the comments.
- Don’t deal with link brokers who sell links on various websites to online marketers to improve their ranking on Google. Buying such links from link brokers is a direct violation to Google’s guidelines which may lead you to getting penalized by Google.
Finally, we advise you to follow the White hat tactics on your website. The results of those tactics may be slow, but they are long lasting. Just remember: “Slow and steady wins the race.”