Ethical SEO Link Building: What You Need to Know

Are you considering the ethical side of SEO link building? Struggling to maintain a good ranking online? Maybe it’s worth reinvestigating the importance of maintaining integrity in the SEO industry.

An introduction to ethical SEO link building

Ethical SEO is user-forward and follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As Google crawls websites, it will determine how relevant the links are to the user, not to the search engine. And if it sniffs out manipulative link building attempting to sway search engine rankings, it will lower the traffic sent to the webpage.

Not only that, but it’s important to use common sense and build a website off ethical thinking. Don’t steal other people’s work. Don’t force keywords. Don’t focus more on ranking than on the user. Produce content with the best intentions and use these ethical SEO link-building strategies as a guide. Done correctly, a website will receive a higher volume of traffic, a brand will gain a better reputation and exposure, and there will be more successful organic visibility.

Black hat techniques

Of all the SEO techniques, the black hat type is the one that is both unethical and a quick way to get Google to drop your website into nonexistence. This consists of tactics that go against Google’s guidelines for link building: keyword stuffing (a huge no-no), cloaking, redirects, link schemes, scraped content, abused structure data markup, and doorway pages.

White hat techniques

White hat techniques are the ones to use and they’ll be further fleshed out in the next section. These tactics align with what search engines see as ethical links. The focus is on effort and long-running strategies, as opposed to cheats to get to the top quickly. White hat techniques will help build ethical SEO backlinks by creating user-centric pages that provide value, avoid spam, and make the content unique and significant to the audience.

Ethical SEO link-building strategies

Improve value in existing content

One of the easiest things to start with is the content already live on the website. Look at the behind-the-scenes of how those pages are performing. Does it need improved media? Refreshed keywords? A format change? 

These changes can help maintain evergreen content that continues to perform and leave room for backlinks. Internal link building can connect the moving parts of a website and direct users to other helpful information. If the content is particularly well done, other websites will want to link to it.

Create statistics and infographics

Don’t use other statistics or infographics because then you’ll have to link to other websites which are beside the point. Still fine to do, but to build backlinks specifically, run surveys, host interviews, or research to post unique data that other websites will link to since they won’t have that data anywhere else.

Include trending topics

A key to earning backlinks is writing with a journalistic approach. Meaning, write about current topics, trends, market changes, and updates that apply to the industry and audience in question. Everyone involved will want a piece of the action and will likely want to collaborate to share links about the news.

Use the competition

Many websites have pages that review other companies in the industry and link to them. The same can happen to you. See if others will write a review about your company and link to it. Also, look for broken links on competitors’ sites and offer a link to a piece of content that will replace that link.

Use other websites

Do some browsing and try to find pages that would benefit from a link to one of your content pieces. This is called link insertion, and it helps both you and the other business as they receive additional resources. Also, try writing a review of another brand. If it’s a positive review, they might want to link to that content to display to their audience their reputation. 

Leverage guest posting

Guest posting can happen in multiple ways. Guests can be industry leaders, researchers, audience members, or employees. They can also be influencers popular in multiple markets. When this sort of content is posted (interviews, videos, case studies, etc.) others will want to link to it to share the resources or the fame of the influencer.

Publish helpful guides

Guides help in any industry, for any topic. When putting together content, other guides are often consulted to see what other businesses are doing, what’s popular, and what’s missing. By publishing helpful guides, you provide an additional resource for other businesses to use in their content.

SEO link-building services

It can be easy to slip into black hat techniques even with good intentions. Perhaps you’re keyword stuffing and you don’t even realize it. Ideally, this blog and our related articles help establish quality backlinks. Either way, there’s a team of experts waiting to help at Pedestal Search with SEO link-building services.

One of the SEO link-building services we offer focuses on off-page SEO, i.e., backlinks. Backlinks pointing to a website are a core part of Google’s algorithm. The off-page audit catalogues all the links pointing to a website and analyzes the quality of the backlink profile. This also looks to analyze the growth or shrinkage of a link profile, the removal of spam links, and the identification of link opportunities that exist going forward.

Other services include running an SEO audit to: create a search benchmark assessment, analyze technical SEO, on-page SEO, and local SEO, and discover website presence performance through social media accounts where applicable.

Ready to start a conversation? Let’s discuss our SEO link-building services and how they can help achieve your search engine marketing goals. Get started.