Are you a digital marketing professional? Or perhaps you’re in the Search Engine Optimization game as a content writer, link builder or specialist. Whatever the case, it’s an exciting career. It’s an ever-changing landscape, and it pays to keep up to date with all things search engines and link building. You also get to help businesses and organizations rank higher on Google, resulting in increased profits for them and your pay, too.
But link building should be done ethically, and in a fashion that stays on Google’s good side. Google will actively penalize “black hat” link-building techniques and reward those marketers, SEO professionals and others who do the right thing.
So, if you’re interested in delivering a white label link building service that stays on the search engine’s good side, continue reading to learn more about this valuable topic.
What is the Ethics of Link Building?
First, we should explain just what the ethics of link building are. This means being responsible when building links and fairly earning them without cheating or gaming the system. It serves a dual purpose here: ethical link building will strengthen the target website’s authority and ranking on search engines while also ensuring the integrity of the World Wide Web ecosystem. Ethical link-building should be the focal point of any business SEO strategy.
This is because Google and other search engines actively reward ethical behaviour. As a marketer or a business owner looking to build your rankings, you can achieve this in part simply by practicing ethical link-building techniques.
Ethical link building focuses on positive user experience and delivering value to search engine and website users instead of attempting to manipulate the clever algorithms that search engines employ. It also means a long-term focus on sustainability rather than quick and dirty unethical techniques. These may cause a temporary spike in traffic, but they carry a significant risk of penalties in the long run.
Focus on Building Backlinks
A backlink is when a website that is considered an authority on a specific topic or type of content links to the website that you’re trying to enhance ranking for. For instance, if you sell pet products, having a popular pet or animal blog linking to your site is an ethical, excellent way to boost your rankings. You can usually do this by outreach, by reaching out to the site owner or editor to propose that you create an informative, user-friendly article for them.
Quality backlinks from authoritative, relevant and well-ranked websites can drive direct referral traffic to your business. People who come across the links to the target website on other sites will click on them to learn more about the business or topic, which generates potential leads and customers. This, in turn, increases the target website’s domain authority as the search engine can tell your website is valuable. Google will then rank the website higher. This becomes a perpetual feedback loop that will result in the website appearing higher on organic search engine results over time. This strategy is often a centrepiece of an ethical link-building strategy, but it is not the only weapon in your arsenal.
High-Quality Linked Content
The previous strategy will only work if the content that links to your website is of excellent quality. It needs to be well written, grammatically correct, factually accurate, easy to read and have all the correct alt text and other backend SEO configurations. Google will actively penalise poorly written content that is false, spammy, or even AI-generated. Part of a successful link-building strategy is ensuring that all outreach and backlinks content is good quality. Usually, this means engaging freelance writers who can guarantee excellent output and fresh, user-friendly and easy-to-read articles or website content. Some agencies also employ freelance writers or content experts to do this, both of which are valid approaches.
Use Infographics
You might be wondering how graphical content can be a part of ethical link-building, mainly as this article has focused primarily on written content so far. However, good-quality infographics can be an essential part of a comprehensive ethical link-building strategy. Website users love a good infographic that contains essential information about a specific topic that can help them to understand that topic better, quicker and easier.
The trick here is to ensure that the page containing the infographic links to the target website, so we’re using the sample principle of backlink building, but instead, we’re linking to the infographic. Again, as long as the content of the graphic is user friendly and high quality, Google will rank the linked website higher.
Inspect Competitors
Finally, another ethical link-building technique is to use available tools to inspect your competitors and see where they are building their links. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz and Ubbersuggest can do this. You can then approach these sites or find similar, authoritative sites to build backlinks from
An Ethical Link-Building Summary
This helpful article has shared some ethical techniques to build effective links to boost website Google rankings. These methods will help you to avoid penalties, and stay on Google’s good side. Follow these to rank higher, and do it in a way that is ethical and best practice.
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