white-hat link building

Today, businesses live and die by their search engine rankings. It’s no surprise that the SEO industry continues to grow by massive numbers, becoming an essential service for companies looking to increase traffic and, in turn, profits.

None of this comes easy, of course. If you’ve ever taken steps to grow your organic traffic, you know it can be challenging, time consuming, and expensive. As much as we’d all love to discover a magic wand for climbing Google’s coveted ranks, most services that claim instant and 100% guaranteed results are likely scams (and sadly, there are many of them).

Knowing where to focus your efforts, though, can yield the results you’re after. In this post I’m sharing a must-have SEO strategy for any growing business—white-hat link building—and a new tool that can help you acquire high-quality backlinks in a legitimate way.

White-Hat Link Building Is Essential for Business

First off, it’s important to understand the basics: what are backlinks and why do I need them?

A backlink is exactly what it sounds like: a link from an outside website back to your site. Google likes to see these because it means other people are sharing your content—AKA they find it valuable, and it’s likely that searchers will, too.

You can gain backlinks organically simply by producing great content (and quality content should always be priority number one when adding new material to your site). But you can also help the process along by making an active effort to get other sites to link to you. This is what’s known as backlink building.

After you’ve invested time to create high quality, search-worthy content on your website, most of your SEO efforts should then be spent building high quality and relevant backlinks to said content. While it’s true that excellent and unique content should always be the first priority, many website owners lack the understanding or the strategy to actually generate the traffic to their content, making otherwise great material nearly impossible to discover. The need for backlinks is therefore obvious to any business wishing to stay relevant and get found by would-be customers.

Here is where things can get murky. There are numerous ways to acquire backlinks, but not all of them are legit (this is where the terms “black hat” and “white hat” come in. Black hat = bad, considered spammy and punishable by Google. White hat = good, legitimate, quality methods of building backlinks). The cheap and spammy black-hat approach won’t get past the likes of Google—and so although it requires more work, the only guaranteed way to climb page ranks is by acquiring backlinks from reputable and authoritative sources.

Luckily, there’s now a much easier way to do this.

Link-able to the Rescue

Link-able.com is a unique platform that connects website owners and content marketers with talented and experienced content authors who can outreach and build backlinks on your behalf. I was introduced to Link-able by its founder, Jay, who approached me to share some insights on being a content creator while he was building the platform.  

I loved that he was tackling a real problem that business owners and website publishers deal with, and working with actual people in that target audience to create a useful, effective tool to solve the problem. Sign me up.

Link-able benefits both parties: website owners receive a strong boost to their organic traffic from high quality backlinks, and content authors receive a nice monetary bonus by linking to useful material that supports their work. Once Jay elaborated on how the Link-able platform works, I was sold on its merits. Here’s how it works.

How You Can Use Link-able to Acquire Backlinks

The process is pretty simple. Here’s how to use Link-able if you’re trying to build backlinks to your site:

1.Join Link-able as a Content Marketer. Once you’re accepted onto the platform, you can then log into your dashboard and begin posting projects. A project represents specific pages on your website where you want to grow traffic through backlinks.

It’s important to note that you can’t just sign up and start pushing sloppy, hastily created content. In order to use Link-able, you have to follow what we already discussed above: creating truly great, relevant content comes first, THEN backlink building.

2. Provide details of your project by telling authors what type of backlinks you want, what sites you want to get linked on, and how you would prefer to be mentioned by the author.

3. Review the proposals sent to you by content authors who wish to link to you in their own related work. These are authors who are writing about topics similar to your content, and looking for relevant information to share with their audience. Again, this is why it’s so important to first make sure that your content is actually super valuable.

4. Choose the links you want and then hire the content authors to build them. Now sit back and relax as your page receives a healthy boost in traffic through quality backlinks.

Is Link-able White Hat?

Yes. Think of Link-able as a streamlined approach to guest blogging. The platform exists as an easy way to connect you with content authors who utilize white-hat link building methods by outreaching to and writing articles for authoritative sites. Essentially, these authors are already in search of quality blogs to write for or valuable pages to link to; Link-able simply helps connect them to the sources they need all within one inclusive platform.

Link-able enforces strict rules that prohibit content authors from paying publishers for placing their links and vice versa. Additionally, each link built is also manually reviewed to ensure it meets the highest quality standards, is relevant and beneficial to readers, and never appears spammy, promotional or paid for in any way.

Link-able is a white hat SEO strategy that helps online businesses grow by using dependable and effective white-hat link building techniques in a way that’s easy and convenient.

Why Not Just Hire an SEO Agency to Build Links?

I won’t mention names, but through the years I’ve been surprised by the number of major SEO agencies that still resort to less than savory black hat techniques to generate traffic. These paid services claim to offer you valuable backlinks, but the way in which they’ll acquire them may give you serious pause.

When you partner with an SEO agency or link broker, for instance, they may promise you professionally written and high quality articles that link directly to your site. So far, so good.

What you might not realize, though, is that these “professional” articles have been outsourced to India, the Philippines, or Eastern European countries where the author has no knowledge or expertise of what they’re writing about and is only making a paltry $5­-$10 per article. The English is sub-par, and you can tell from a mile away that it’s not legit. This “content mill” approach obviously favors quantity over quality, which search engines have long since caught on to and now ignore.

Furthermore, many SEOs or link brokers utilize their own Private Blog Networks (PBNs) where they can cast subpar content across a wide, spammy net of publications. Not only do search engines frown upon this, but real-life users will receive nothing of value when visiting content on these blog networks.

This type of link building can actually harm you and push your site lower down the search results if you use it. I truly don’t understand why anyone still tries it!

Link-able, on the other hand, does things differently.

How Link-able Helps You Build Better Links

With Link-able, you can expect greater and more reliable results from your link building. Rather than choosing the dark path of SEO because of its easy promises, consider the following benefits of using Link-able.

Only the Highest Quality Links

As mentioned above, most SEOs can get you links. Where those links come from is a whole different story. On Link-able, you’re connected only to vetted talent with a proven track record of quality work and experience. These authors are experts in your particular field and can provide content that is both relevant and valuable to your readers.

This means no spammy tactics. No PBNs. No cheap outsourcing. Link-able partners only with the highest caliber of talent who regularly contribute to esteemed publications. A backlink from one of these sources is worth far more than the content mills associated with most SEOs or link brokers.

Better still, Link-able’s extensive network of authors can exceed the reach of even the most well-connected SEO agency.

Although a good SEO can and should outreach to reputable sources to obtain a relevant backlink, it’s a time consuming and costly effort, which is why they often stick to their own PBNs.

On Link-able, however, there’s likely an independent content author who’s already contributed to the platforms you desire most. You can then leverage that author’s connections, allowing him or her to outreach for you to build backlinks that a limited SEO agency couldn’t obtain.

Organic Traffic

One of the benefits an expertly written article can bring is an influx of organic traffic from genuinely curious and interested readers. Since the article is relevant and valuable to a particular audience, readers are more likely to follow links within the content in order to learn more about the topic.

Even if the backlink you acquire is nofollow, the surge in organic traffic you’re likely to experience from a high quality source is worth its placement alone.

Wider Network of Links

Consider also that high quality content stands a much better chance of being linked to from other sources as well.

Whereas an SEO agency might be able to add links within their PBN, that’s about where things will end from such a weak source. Again, this is how connecting with outstanding content authors pays off. Their work commands attention and inspires readers to share it across the web. So while your page may have a link in just one article, there could be dozens of additional articles that link to the content you appear in.

white-hat link building

You’re in Control

You place a great deal of trust in SEO agencies to build the links you need. What happens to those links, though, when you part ways with that agency? What about when Google eventually detects that agency’s PBN and penalizes them?

With Link-able, your SEO investment isn’t left up to chance. You are in full control of how you build your backlinks.

You get to decide which websites you want links on. You also don’t need to worry about links being unexpectedly removed by the SEO, because Link-able has no control over the links being built. Furthermore, they have a 1-year guarantee that the author’s work will remain published with your link.

Results You Can See

Here’s a scary thought: some SEOs won’t even show their clients the URLs to the links they build them. Um, what?! You can probably imagine why, though…

Even SEOs are fully aware of the rampant lack of quality on these spammy blog sites. So they’ll spend all their efforts to ramp up the domain authority of their PBNs, hoping that the minuscule boost in page ranks they provide will be enough to satisfy most clients. But you’re savvy enough to realize the truth: no one reads an article that’s worth $5.

Link-able guarantees articles that are written by dependable, talented authors. Their work is monitored and reviewed to ensure it supports your site in a natural, relevant and useful way. And, of course, you’re able to view the finished article and see where and how your link is placed.

It’s Good PR for Your Brand

This is something I preach again and again: some results cannot be easily quantified with numbers. Whereas page views and unique visitors can be accurately measured, brand recognition is perhaps a more abstract, though no less important, accomplishment.

Building awareness and trust usually requires sustained effort over a long period of time—but don’t underestimate the power behind word of mouth. Just one positive mention from a respected source can cause a ripple effect for your brand.

Sure, you could chisel away with the PBN approach in hopes of spreading effective PR. Or your brand could spread faster, farther and with more credibility by using Link-able.  

Less Work Involved

Website owners traditionally have to perform extensive outreach trying to get links from reputable websites. Link-able turns the tables on this arrangement by instead allowing the outreach to come to you. Your life as a content marketer just got significantly easier!

Link-able has already amassed an extensive network of professional writers who actively seek relevant material to link to, and this network will undoubtedly continue to grow. Expect no shortage of talented writers who can help you build quality backlinks from your preferred publications.

Better Search Engine Rankings

White hat link building = better placement on search engines.

By connecting with journalists, bloggers, and influencers across a wide variety of industries, the links you desire from authoritative domains are now within grasp.

Conclusion

We all know that SEO is big business, and that perhaps the biggest driving force in the industry is backlinks. Just because you’re willing to invest in acquiring those backlinks, however, doesn’t always mean that what you get will be sustainable, valuable, or recognized by search engines.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of some SEO agencies or link brokers, you must ensure that your backlinks come from reputable, authoritative, and relevant content authors. Link-able helps to streamline this process in a way that was made for website owners like you.

To check out Link-able, click here. If you do, I’d love it if you left me a comment to let me know what you think!

Tami Brehse

Tami is a television news anchor turned digital marketing consultant who helps small businesses achieve their PR and marketing goals.
Tami Brehse
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