White hat link building is an approach to driving traffic to a website through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, such as relevant linking to other, relevant content on the Web. White hat links boost a website or webpage's rankings among search engines like Google through "organic" means that enhance users' experience by boosting the quality of content, broadening its scope through relevant links and so forth.
Unlike the spam-oriented tactic of black hat link building, which attempt to drive traffic to a site without adding value to content or enhancing user experience, white hat link building aims to educate users. Unlike black hat tactics, white hat link building can be labor intensive, requiring website designers and content writers to focus on quality content, then interspersing links to bolster the SEO value of the page. This "organic" type of link building to various sources around the World Wide Web is beneficial for the online community as a whole, which is why search engines like Google reward this practice in terms of a website's search engine rankings. While black-hat link building tactics offer short-term results, white hat link building strives for long-term enhancement of the Web as a whole.
Quality backlinks to your website are a trust signal to search engines because they show that others value and recommend your content to their readers.
Yet, despite their importance, 94% of content on the internet never gets backlinked.
That’s because unless you’re ranked #1 on Google or have a high domain rating, they’re very hard to come by organically. It’s why some brands would rather buy backlinks through black hat SEO techniques, regardless of the major repercussions.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinking occurs when one website links to a page on another website. Other common terms for SEO backlinks include inbound links, one-way links, and incoming links.
For example, here is a link from USA Today to our website, Drive Research.
Popular search engines like Google and Bing see backlinks as a “vote of confidence.”
In other words, if several websites are linking to the same page, then it must mean that the content of the page is valuable, trustworthy, and meets readers' expectations.
These are all qualities search engines look for when determining what pages to rank higher than others.
It’s why pages with more backlinks often have higher organic search engine rankings.
In fact, websites that rank #1 on Google have 3.8x more backlinks than the rest of the top 10 sites.