7 White Hat SEO Techniques to Boost Rankings (2024)

What is white hat SEO?

If you've been doing SEO for a while, you may have already heard of terms like White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO, Gray Hat SEO, etc. These are different SEO techniques that are used to influence search engine rankings. Since our topic is about White Hat SEO techniques, we are only going to talk about them.

White hat SEO refers to the tactics used to get the best search results for a variety of keywords. White Hat SEO methods are SAFE to follow and they all obey the guidelines given by Google, while Black Hat SEO involves risky tactics that will most likely penalize your site.

In a nutshell, white hat SEO strategies focus more on humans than on search engines. If you know a bit about SEO, you might already know that Google rewards sites that focus on user experience.

Here is a simple image that shows you the difference between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO strategies.

So in this detailed guide, we're going to talk about the list of the most powerful techniques you can follow to improve your search engine rankings.

Let's get into the details.

Best White Hat SEO Techniques.

1. Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique

If you're serious about generating high-quality links, it's very important to follow a systematic guide that really works.

Here is the skyscraper technique of a famous blogger, Brian Dean. He doubled organic search traffic to his site in just 14 days using this technique. He has had over 300,000 unique visitors to his blog.

You can follow the same procedure and check the results yourself.

Here are the 3 steps of the Skyscraper technique.

1. Find content that deserves to be cited

If the content is very useful, people automatically add a link to their site. Here are the 3 ways to find content that's worth linking to.

Find a popular site in your niche that generates lots of links. Go on Semrush, give the link to your competitor's URL. Click on the “top pages” button and look for the content and 25 different sites that are linked to it. This is the content that you can use as part of this Skyscraper technique.

Buzzsumo is also a great tool that helps you find content that may be related. Go to Buzzsumo, enter your keyword and choose “past year” under “filter by date.” You'll get a list of highly shared content.

Another powerful source for finding link-worthy content is Google search. Type in your keywords, take the top 10 results, and do a backlink analysis using tools like Semrush. Then check which have the most referring domains.

2. Taking existing content to the next level.

How do you take existing content to the next level? The 4 ways to make your content awesome.

• Just do it with long content. Yes, really long. For example, “25 foods to eat before your wedding day.”
• Take outdated content in your field and rewrite it with up-to-date information.
• More than just text content, visual content generates a lot of links and shares on social networks. Beautifully designed content creates a lot of buzz on social media, as long as it contains useful information.
• Use bullet points and describe each point in detail.

3. Email awareness

Reach out to people who have already linked to similar content. Here's how you can do email prospecting.

• First, export all of your competitors' links to a spreadsheet using tools like Semrush.
• Export the results in CSV format and import them into a spreadsheet on Google Sheets.
• Remove linked pages that don't make sense. For example, forums, contact directories, etc.
• Send an email to all links

Now get ready to get started with the Skyscraper technique and here's a great checklist made by Jeff Bullas.

2. Create a “long form of content” worthy of being cited in the links.

I don't know how many times I've mentioned the importance of long content here.

If you want to be ranked higher in search engines, start producing content that's over 2,000 words long. It is as simple as that.

There are different approaches to producing long content that is worthy of being cited by your readers. Everyone wants to publish the best content on their site. For this, it is important to know what to do to write perfect content.

If you don't write content with the right keywords, it affects your SEO strategy. It also determines whether you reach your goal or not. Let's look at some content marketing strategy tips:

1. Understand what SEO-optimized content is

You have the opportunity to earn millions thanks to the Internet. If you know how much money you are losing, it will make you sad and make you react. If you're in the marketing business, content marketing is what can make or break your business.

Here are the things you need to understand if you want to produce high-quality content for SEO.

• Keyword research. To generate more traffic to your site, you need to include terms that people are looking for in your content.
• Optimize your keywords. You need to know when and where to use keywords before writing content.
• Promote content. Producing content is not enough. You need to promote it. This allows links to be created for your content.

2. SEO content types

There are different types of SEO content. It is important to know each of them.

• Articles : This type of content is mostly seen in newspapers and magazines.
• Guides : These are longer articles with in-depth content. This type of article is useful if you want to generate leads.
• Slideshows : This type of content uses image sets rather than plain text.
• Blog posts : These are blog posts. They engage the user at a higher rate than most other options. They allow you to educate your prospects in order to take them little by little further in your sales funnel.
• Product pages : If you have an e-commerce site, you need to focus more on these types of items. A big product page acts like a PPC landing page too. Make sure you won't write any grammatical errors as it affects your business a lot.
• Glossaries : They are intended for particular niches like cooking, fashion, etc. and usually contain a lot of information on this subject.
• Repertoire : This is the place where you will give a lot more links related to your niche.

There are a variety of ways to approach content needs. You need to find the right mix and create the content.

3. Content creation

To maintain your online business, you need to write quality content. You need to know the answers to the following questions: What length of content is good? How do I search for keywords? The quality of the content? Etc.

We are going to look at each of them in detail.

Most people say that content should be 500 words long.

But no, the short form of content is dead. You should write at least 1000-1500 words at the very least.

If you want to get the best results, you need to do effective keyword research.

Go to Google's keyword planner and enter your keywords. Check monthly search volumes and select keywords that have a high search volume and use them in your content.

In order to create great content, make sure you know these three things.

1. The first is the “freshness of the content.” Search engines are constantly looking for brand new content. So the more content you produce on a daily basis, the more likely you are that Google will recognize your content.
2. The second is “content quality.” Never forget that it's the quality of your content that attracts readers. So, produce content that is useful and practical.
3. The third is “content search.” If you are new to this business model, analyze your competitors and observe the tone of their writing and the keywords they use.

Be sure to follow all of these tips when creating content. It's quality that counts, not quantity.

3. Attracting natural backlinks with infographics

Creating backlinks through infographics is one of the best SEO techniques you could EVER use.

Visual content gets more attention on social networks than simple text content. In the SEO world, backlinks are very important. Without quality backlinks on your site, it is very difficult to see growth in your business.

The most viral content on social networks is infographics. If you want to build authoritative backlinks, start creating infographics. Learn how to create viral infographics. With these common elements, creating viral infographics is very easy. Use good design and include statistical data, then promote your infographic.

How do I create links using infographics?

• Pick a topic and see what infographics already cover that topic. You can use Google search for that. For example, “infographics about yoga poses.” Just type the same thing into Google and it shows which type of infographic is the most effective for acquiring backlinks.
• Gather all of the information related to your infographic and use your unique approach to solving your readers' problems. Remember to cite your sources if necessary.
• Once you have all the information, it's time to incorporate that data into a stunning design. The combination of quality content and design is viral and allows you to earn backlinks.
• Go to visual.ly, Visme or Canva and create infographics from a variety of templates. If you have the money, you can hire designers to create infographics.
• Once created, publish your infographic on the website and make it easy for readers to share. To increase backlinks and shares on social media, create an embed code for your infographics. You can get it through the Siege Media integration code generator. Add the generated code to your site.
• Make it easy to share your infographic on social media using the Sumome Image Sharer app. This plugin displays social media icons when your readers hover over the infographic.
• Promote your infographic. Share it on all of your social media accounts and submit it to directories, press releases, and more.

Once your infographic is published and promoted, check Google Analytics to find out which website the traffic is coming from.

4. Rephrase your existing content to create links

You might be wondering what reassignment is. It's about reworking existing content or content already written on your blog for a specific purpose.

How can you refocus your content?

• Combine some of your articles in an e-book.
• You can record the audio version of your articles and publish it as a podcast.
• Convert your key points in the messages into different visual content.

What are its advantages?

• It helps to increase your brand awareness.
• It saves you a lot of time.

Here's how you can refocus your activities to create connections.

• Write a series of guest posts based on your blog post. Rewriting your blog post into a series of guest posts and presenting them can improve the authority of your page. Optimize each guest post for the right keywords before publishing. This allows for greater exposure to high authority sites and good quality backlinks.
• Create slideshows from your articles. Some users prefer to see slideshows rather than read content. So, converting your articles into slideshows helps acquire backlinks. You can use Powerpoint or Canva to create slideshows. Visual content always works better than normal content.
• Convert blog posts into e-books. The advantage of e-books is that it is not necessary to have original content. So take related blog posts and convert them into an e-book using Microsoft Word, Adobe Reader, or Google Docs. Create a landing page to promote the book and promote it on social media. This naturally attracts backlinks.
• Create an infographic based on your article. In point 3, I mentioned how infographics attract backlinks. Create an infographic based on your article and promote it.
• Post on Linkedin pulse. Take one of your existing blog posts and summarize it in 800 words. Give your content a different title and publish it on Linkedin Pulse.
• Create interviews with experts. This step takes a bit of time but it's worth it. If done right, it will help you rank for your keyword. Take an interview with an expert on the same subject you wrote a blog post about. Conduct a proper interview and ask no more than 10 questions, then post on your blog and optimize it for the main keyword.

Repurposing existing content makes it possible to reach as many people as possible, to increase traffic and, above all, to be ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs).

5. Creating broken links

You'll often hear the term “broken link building” used in the SEO world. This is nothing more than identifying external broken links on websites and this broken link points to content that is similar to your blog post.

So you need to find these broken links and replace them with the link in your article. This not only helps you get backlinks, but also helps the site owner get their page fixed. It takes time but it is well worth it.

Here are tips for detecting broken links.

• Find relevant sites that you like to get a backlink. Refine your search like, “keyword” intitle: resources, “keyword” inurl:edu -. Pdf, “keyword” intitle: recommended (inurl: keyword returns results where the keyword is in the URL, intitle: keyword returns results where the keyword is in the title).
• Once you've found relevant sites, copy all of the URLs from those specific pages and paste them onto a spreadsheet.
• Now you have a list of all the URLs and it's time to find out if they have broken links. You can use SEO Minion which is a chrome extension that analyzes all the links on a page, shows you the broken links.
• Here are other tools you can use to find broken links. Ahrefs site explorer, Check my links, Screaming Frog, Xenu link sleuth.
• Another way to find broken links is to check for quality pages in your niche. This process is time consuming but it is certainly useful. Check the top 30 sites related to your niche and analyze them based on these factors. If the page has too many outgoing links, spammy backlinks, a low word count, and content that isn't useful, content that isn't related to your niche topic at all, then don't target those pages.
• Once you have a list of all relevant pages with broken links, use Hunter.io to get the contact information of the site owner.
• Now send an email.
• Try different variations of your model based on your niche or search for models on Google.
• Start your awareness campaign.

6. Create links from link lists

You need to spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% promoting it. Yes, the real challenge ultimately lies in sharing and promoting your content.

Getting links from link lists is beneficial for 2 reasons.

1. It brings new visitors to your site.
2. You will gain backlinks for your site.

How do I appear in link lists (roundups) and get backlinks?

1. Write really great content.

If you don't have great content to share, don't write it at all. The more you try to write articles, the more other bloggers will feature them on their blogs.

2. Let bloggers know

Reach out to bloggers in your niche. Here's how you can do that.

• Mention other bloggers in your content by providing a link to their posts.
• When you write exceptional and useful content, it goes viral and will be noticed by top bloggers.
• Tweet posts from other bloggers
• Send a personal email to bloggers in your niche. However, the response from top bloggers is very slow.

Now find bloggers who post link lists.

Search with “link roundups” + your niche keyword, “inurl:roundup” + your niche keyword.

Sort all the blogs by the amount of traffic they receive. You can find that out by using Ahrefs Rank.

7. Steal backlinks from your competitors legally!

Who doesn't want to increase their search traffic? So you need to build backlinks. First, analyze who your top 5 competitors are. Add links to their websites on a Google Sheet.

You can use Semrush to find your competitors who are ranking well for your keyword.

Now you have the list. Let's see how to steal backlinks from your competitors.

1. Gather all the information about your competitor

You can do this by setting up backlink alerts. Go to Ahrefs, click on the 'alerts' tab. You can create backlink alerts for each of your competitors. You get notified every time they are mentioned online. This makes it possible to track the link building and online marketing of your competitors.

2. Find sites that have links to more than one competitor

Go to Ahrefs, click on the “tools” tab and then click on “link intersect”. Enter the first 5 domains and click on “show link opportunities”. You'll get a report of the sites that link to all of the domains you've entered. Check the individual links where it shows which site they are linked to. If it displays a forum next to your competitor's link, go to that forum and promote your products or services (taking care not to appear too promotional so as not to be banned from these forums or groups in a matter of minutes).

3. Check invited articles from your competitors

The Guest blogging allows you to create backlinks to your site. How do I find opportunities?

• Use Google search. Try to search for “author name” + “guest post” - site:domainconcurrent.com -site: https://domain.com or you can try to search, “author name” + inurl:author.
• Use Ahrefs. To find content written by a particular author, use the Ahrefs content explorer. Just enter, author: “author name”

4. Find your competitor's most popular content

Find their popular content and create even better content, then promote it. It's one of the best ways to build backlinks. Go to Ahrefs, click on the “site explorer” tab and enter your competitor's link. Under the “pages” tab, click on “best by links” and also “best by shares” to find out the most shared content from your competitor.

When you're ready to promote your content, simply enter your competitor's URL under “Site Explorer.” To find their backlinks, click on “Referring Domains.”

5. Fix your competitors' broken backlinks

You can check information about your competitors' broken links by going to Ahrefs > site explorer > enter domain. Under the “backlink profile” tab, you will find “broken”. All you have to do is export all of these results. Now take each result and plug in the check my links chrome plugin. It confirms the multiple broken links on this page.

Now contact that site, tell them about their site's broken links, and offer your site as an alternative, provided it has similar content.

Don't rely too heavily on your competitors to get backlinks. By doing this, you will not only get backlinks but also topic ideas that will help you create unique campaigns. This allows you to increase search traffic on your blog.

FAQs

What are the different types of SEO techniques?

There are mainly four types of SEO techniques, namely Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO, Grey Hat SEO, and Negative SEO.

What is Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is a set of SEO techniques that can help your site reach the top of Google more quickly, but are contrary to Google guidelines. White Hat SEO techniques follow Google guidelines, but generally take longer.

Why is white hat SEO better than black hat SEO?

White Hat SEO is the ethical way to increase the visibility of your site in Google. On the other hand, if you follow Black Hat SEO practices, it means that you are going against Google guidelines. This means that your site may get penalized or banned from Google sooner or later.

What are the best white hat SEO techniques ?

Brian Dean's Skyscraper technique, creating a “long form of content” worth linking to, attracting natural backlinks with infographics, reorienting your existing content to create links, creating broken links, creating links from link aggregations, and legally stealing backlinks from your competitors are some of the best White Hat SEO techniques.

Is Yoast SEO considered white hat SEO?

You can certainly use the Yoast SEO or Rank Math SEO plugin to create titles and meta descriptions for your blog content.

What is the difference between Gray Hat SEO and White Hat SEO ?

Gray Hat SEO can be seen as a compromise between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.

So be careful when using Gray Hat SEO techniques, as they can cause you problems.

What is a negative SEO attack?

Negative SEO consists of using illegal and unethical SEO techniques (hacking other people's websites, creating spammy links to their website) to affect the search engine rankings of their competitors.

Summary.

If you want to increase your search traffic, using white hat SEO can really help.

Don't focus on improving your SEO quickly (getting links, increasing rankings, etc.).

SEO is a big ocean. Trying to do too many things at once can wear you out. So start small by little, apply one technique at a time and that's how you'll improve your search engine rankings.