Why is there even a section on white hat link building? If you followed Google’s rules you wouldn’t be here in the SEO Revolution membership. Supposedly they want you to create content which naturally gets links. We all know that method does not work, you have to actively market your content and your site and hustle to get links. Let’s face it, link building is a pain and it doesn’t work for 90% of people because they have no strategy.
There are only a few strategies to great white hat link building. Baiting, prospecting, sponsorships, reviews, scholarships, media manipulation, etc. They still take a lot of time, and most SEOs are very inefficient at finding these links quickly. While analysis is important to figuring out your goals, it can also be used to directly “steal” many of the great white hat links a competitor has. For more information on analysis, check out the analysis section. This page is only going to talk about real white hat campaign strategies that make you think outside of the box.
None of these methods typically require paying for links directly.
Baiting & Trades
How many “Best Of” lists can you create? How many “awards” or “recognitions” can you give out to companies that you want a link from? This method is exhausting, and requires you to be enough of an authority for the receiving party to even care enough to link back to you. You need a legit sounding name for it to even work. Even then, the link is never going to a money page, and will only increase the overall domain power. That’s true of most all white hat link building methods.
Some large e-commerce sites try to be recognized as a retailer on both manufacturer and distributor pages by offering some extra piece of information (like videos of how to use a product). It’s an option that you may be able to utilize.
Sometimes you can get out of your local area or niche entirely for trades. If the site has a beautiful design, or a logo, try to get a link from some design blogs, the designer, etc. It requires a little more out of the box thinking. Maybe your site is hosted with a decent company that has a testimonials section, offer to give a testimonial in exchange for a link. The possibilities are endless, but each piece of juice can certainly help.
The bottom line is most companies and organizations you deal with at some point down the road in normal business activities can turn into a link. You just have to think outside of the box, and focus on getting links from the domains with real power. Assuming all organic rankings in SEMRush are equal, it’s much better to chase a single PR6 retailers page than 10 PR1 domains from designers and testimonial pages.
Widget Baiting
Widgets are turning grey hat, but Google hasn’t really cracked down on them yet as they do serve a real purpose for the blogs they are hosted on. It is easier to build a widget than you think, it’s just focusing it on your market that is the tricky part. It has to be cool enough that people want to use it.
Example:
If you have a health and fitness blog, consider making a widget for people to proudly show off their mileage on runs, how many calories were burned, etc. Maybe go a step further and create a “Dollars for Distance” donation widget that charities can use (research and contact them first obviously). Make it have a link back to your brand somewhere obscure and out of the way.
Yes it costs money to be developed, and there is not a clear monetization strategy out of it.
Research:
Consider going to a site like CodeCanyon.net and looking for popular tools. See what you can have someone from oDesk recode (or just buy the full license to have access to rebuild it yourself) and turn it into the plugin you can use to promote. This way you know it already has a useful purpose and an audience, the wireframe is already there, and can save you time and headaches.
Directories
Most directories are dead because of Panda. BOTW is even hit on some categories now, while other pages remain strong. However, the minimal amount of juice some have remaining may be worth chasing if you are further along into your link campaign.
We have shifted our directory strategy into a both competitor analysis and prospecting strategy. In other words, we only submit to directories if the directory has some power (passes Copy/Paste test, has solid ratios in SEMRush) and has our competitor listed. The rest we ignore. As for prospecting, read that section further down.
Prospecting
There are three great tools for prospecting. One is built into our favorite competitive analysis toolset, Link Research Tools. The other two are an absolute requirement for any great white hat SEO.
1. Link Prospector
This tool is incredibly powerful and can save you hours in prioritizing which links are worth going after. While we could turn this “white hat” section into a long list of advanced search queries that this tool essentially runs, it would take you hours to even find them all. Save yourself the time and use their tool. It covers everything from links pages to giveaways.
If you think $27 or $47 a month is too expensive, you are in the wrong business. This tool easily saves 10 hours of doing work by hand. If your time is not worth $5 per hour, then you need to focus on the business section.
2. Broken Link Building
If you haven’t experimented with broken link building, you need to start. It’s one of the best white-hat tactics. This can help you focus your content creation on things that are practically guaranteed to land you great links.
This tool is a little more expensive, $75 for ten runs. We can almost promise you will screw up the first 5. But once you understand this tool, you should be able to easily get your worth out of it. You should easily find 10 quality contextual link opportunities with $75. How does 10 permanent links for $75 + content cost sound? That’s why this tool is a little more expensive. It’s still very much worth it.
Tips for Using Citation Labs Tools
Go very broad on your keywords. When it says “keywords” it doesn’t mean your money phrase that you are trying to rank for. It really means “what niche are you interested in?” So if you are targeting “cheap web hosting” then your keywords would be “tech” “savings” “cheap”, etc. You can attempt “web hosting” and “cheap web hosting” but the amount the prospector will find is limited. If you run these queries by hand, you will quickly see why the results are so limited.
We had Garrett French (founder at Citation Labs) teach us how he uses his own tools for clients. He has to pay for links every now and then himself even on these white hat campaigns. But the content is so well-written that we would not even be able to identify it as a paid link. Keep that in mind while being white hat. Maybe you have to phrase it to yourself as “I’m paying this webmaster for his time to update this old article with accurate information. Otherwise it wasn’t a top priority for him, and I want to be a partner with his company in the future.”
Sponsorships
You should sleep with good karma on the money spent for paid sponsorship links. First, make sure there is a worthy sponsorship page to be involved with (does their company/organization actually have a site that ranks and passes Panda Copy/Paste Tests?). Usually companies will run yearly events that you can sponsor. Take the lowest priced one on the page that gets a link.
Scholarships, College Clubs & Discounts
Don’t spend a dime on buying .edu links from brokers, or creating Wikipedia spam. Find your opportunities by doing some real work. Do some prospecting queries, use alumni relationships, think like a job recruiter.
Scholarships can be expensive. But $10,000 in a scholarship prize can easily yield 20 college high PR contextual links on very prominent pages for a year. Try to stay on topic to what the brand is about.
College clubs are constantly broke. They also usually have a website right there on the college domain. They need sponsorships to help fund their events. Free pizza at a few meetings will make these clubs extremely happy. Sometimes they have a trip they are trying to fundraise for, and you might be able to donate something they can auction off.
Discounts are a little harder to push. Usually companies try to turn this into real sales tactics. For example, some insurance companies send snail mail to alumni offering special rates. Alumni associations always want to prove their worth. If you can give them a significant discount on a product, you might be able to get yourself a nice .edu link.
Media Manipulation – Press Tactics
Ryan Holiday is the king of media manipulation. His book, Trust Me, I’m Lying explains how to create a viral storm in a step-by-step process. It’s not easy for all business types. But the perspective it gives on how to “trade up the chain” is how you can turn one decent link into ten great links. This is a RCS strategy that encompasses your full marketing vision for the brand. It’s not something to just lightly experiment with, you must fully apply it to get the benefit of it.
Press Releases
Press releases are turning grey hat. PRWeb, BusinessWire, etc. all face a particular problem that keeps them from becoming great in the long-term, Panda. Syndicating a single release to 50 sites is not the same as getting 50 sites to link to you because the content is all duplicate. At best, you can target a particular city.
HARO
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is now under the same umbrella as Vocus, who now has their hands in every area of press from releases at PRWeb to social media. HARO is great for building a personal brand for the founder or president of a company. Sign up to the email list, and keep an eye on it every day. The window for replies is very short. It’s just a reporter looking for commentary on an article they have to publish.
Avoid the small-time blogs. Some are just content farms. Look for the big names. They are there if you keep your eye on them. All you might get is “John Doe at (Company Link Here) said he…” But it’s great to build contextual links and real authority in a market. The advantage is it doesn’t require a lot of time to track them down as the work is done for you.