Top 7 White Hat SEO Techniques to Boost Website’s Google Rankings

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Getting traffic from search engines is insanely important.

It doesn't matter whether you are blogging for fun or profits, without website traffic, you will burn out sooner or later. But here's the thing. Most bloggers struggle to boost their website's Google rankings.

Do you know why? They don't know where to start.

That's why I always focus more on sharing some of the best SEO techniques here are at Bloggers Passion to help YOU build a profitable blog that gets both traffic and money. If you're looking to bring more search traffic to your sites, I've a good news for you. In this guide, you're going to find out an incredible strategy called white hat SEO to boost your rankings.

What is white hat SEO?

If you're doing SEO for a while, you might already have heard about the terms like white hat SEO, black hat SEO, grey hat SEO etc. They are all various SEO techniques used to impact search engine rankings. As our topic is about white hat SEO techniques, so let's only talk about it.

White hat SEO refers to techniques that are used to get top search results for a variety of keywords. White hat SEO techniques are SAFE to follow and they all obey the guidelines given by Google whereas black hat SEO involves in risky tactics that most probably get your site penalised.

In a nutshell, white hat SEO focused on more on humans than search engines. If you know a bit or two about SEO, you might already know the fact that Google gives top rewards to those sites that focus on user experience.

Here's a simple image that tells you the difference between white hat SEO vs black hat SEO.

So in this detailed guide, let's talk about some of the most powerful white hat SEO techniques you can follow to boost your search engine rankings. Let's jump into the details.

White hat SEO techniques to follow in 2017 and beyond

#1. The Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique

If you are damn serious about generating high quality links, it is very important to follow systematic guide that really works.

Here is the skyscraper technique by a famous blogger Brian Dean. He doubled organic search traffic to his site in just 14 days with this technique. It got him more than 3 lakh referral visitors to his blog.

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

Here are the 3 steps to the Skyscraper Technique.

#1. Find content that is link-worthy. If content is very useful and helpful, people automatically add a link to their site. Here are the 3 ways you can find the content that is link-worthy.

Find a popular sites in your niche that generates lot of links. Head over to SEMrush, give your competitor's URL link to it. click on the "top pages" button and look for the content and 25 different sites linking to it. That is the content you can use under this Skyscraper technique.

Buzzsumo is also an awesome tool that helps you to find link-worthy content. Go to Buzzsumo and enter your keyword and choose "past year"under "filter by date". It gives you the list of  highly shared content.

Yet another powerful source to find link-worthy content is through Google search. Enter your keywords and take the top 10 results and do backlink analysis with the help of tools like SEMrush. Then check which has more referring domains.

#2. Take existing content to the next level. How to take the existing content to the next level? The 4 ways you can make your content awesome.

Just make it lengthy. Yes, really lengthy. For example, "25 food items for a wedding day".

Take an outdated content in your area and re-write it with up-to-date information.

More than a plain text content, a visual content generates lot many links and social shares. A beautifully designed content creates lots of buzz in social media provided it has useful information.

Use bullet points and describe every point in-depth.

#3. Email outreach. Reach out to the people who has already linked to similar content. Here is how you can do email outreach.

Firstly, export all the links of your competitor's onto the spreadsheet using tools like SEMrush.

Cut out the referring pages that don't make sense. For example, forums, contact-directories etc.

Email to all links using the below template.

Now, get ready to start the Skyscraper technique and here's an excellent checklist made by Jeff Bullas.

#2. Create link-worthy "long form of content"

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

If you want better search rankings, start producing long form of content with over 2000+ words. It's as simple as that.

There are various approaches to produce link-worthy long form of content to you readers.  Everyone wants to publish the best content on their site. For this, it's important to know what it takes to write such perfect content.

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

#1. Understand what SEO content is.  You have the ability to earn millions of dollars through Internet. If you know how much money you are losing, it will make you sad. If you are into marketing field, SEO content is what that can make or break your business.

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

Keyword research. To generate more traffic to your site, you need to include searchable terms in your content.

Optimize your keywords. You need to know when and where to use the keywords and at what times before writing content.

Do content promotion. Just producing content is not enough. You need to promote it. It helps to build links for your content.

#2. Types of SEO content. There are different kinds of SEO content. It is important to know about each of them.

SEO Articles. We mostly this type of content in newspapers and magazines.

SEO Guides. These are longer piece of content that has in-depth content. This kind of articles are useful if you want to generate leads.

SEO slideshows. This type of content uses series of images more than the plain text content.

SEO blog posts. These are the blog posts that are related to SEO. These engage the user at higher rate than most other options.

Product pages. If you have e-commerce website then you should concentrate more on these type of articles. A great product page acts as a PPC landing page too. Make sure that you won't write any grammatical errors as it affects your business a lot.

Glossaries. These are for particular niches like cooking, fashion trend etc. it usually holds much information related to it.

Directory. This is the place where you will give much more links related to your niche.

There are different ways to approach SEO content needs. You need to figure out the right blend and write the content.

#3. Creation of content. To sustain in online business, you need to write high-quality content. You need to be aware of answers for the questions like How much content length is good? How to do keyword research? About the content quality? Etc.

We will see each in detail.

Most of the people say the content length should be 500 words. But no, short form of content is dead. You need to write minimum 1000-1500 words.

If you want to have optimal results, you need to do effective keyword research. Go to Google keyword planner and enter your keywords. There check monthly search volumes and select keywords that has high search volume and use that in your content.

In order to create quality content, make sure you know these three things. One is "content freshness". Search engines consistently look for brand new content. So, more the content you produce daily, more the chances that Google recognizes your content. Second one is "content quality".Always remember, it is the quality of your content that attracts readers. So, produce useful and helpful content. Third is "content research". If you are new to business then check your competitors and observe their tone of writing and the keywords they use.

Make sure you follow all these tips while creating content. It is the quality that matters not the quantity.

#3. Attracting natural backlinks with infographics

Building links through infographics is one of the best white hat SEO techniques you can EVER use.

Visual content attracts much attention in social media than plain text content. In SEO world, backlinks are very important. Without having quality backlinks to your site, it is very difficult to see growth in business.

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

How to build links using infographics?

Choose a topic and see what infographics already covering that topic. You can use Google search for it. For example, "yoga poses infographics". Just type the same in Google and it says which kind of infographics performed better for backlink acquisition.

Gather all information related to your infographic and use your unique approach to solve your reader's problems. Remember to quote cite sources if needed.

Once you have all the information then it's time to put that data into a stunning design. The combination of great content and great design goes viral and earns backlinks.

Go to visual.ly or Canva and create infographic from the vast number of designs. If you have budge, you can hire designers for creating infographic.

Once created, publish your infographic on website and make it easy for readers to share it. To increase backlinks and shares on social media, create an embed code for your infographics. You can get that from Siege Media embed code generator. Add that generated code on your site.

Make your infographic easy for sharing on social media by using Image sharer app from sumome. This plugin shows social media icons when your readers hover mouse on infographic.

Promote your infographic. Share it on all of your social media accounts and submit to directories, press releases

Once you publish your infographic and promoted, make sure you check Google Analytics to know from which website much traffic is coming.

#4. Repurpose your existing content to build links

You may be wondering what is this repurposing. It is re-working on your existing content or already written content on your blog for some purpose.

How you can repurpose your content?

Merge some of your posts into an ebook.

You can record the audio version of your posts and publish it as podcast.

Convert your key points in the posts to different visual content.

How it benefits?

It helps in increasing your brand awareness.

It saves much of your time.

Here is how you can repurpose to build links.

Write series of guest posts from your blog post. Re-writing your blog post into a series of guest posts and pitching them can improve your page authority. Optimize each guest post for right keywords before publishing. This brings more exposure on high authority sites, good quality backlinks.

Make slide presentations from your post. Some users prefer to see slideshows than reading content. So, converting your posts to slide presentations helps in acquiring backlinks. You can use powerpoint or canva to create slideshows. Visual content always work better than normal content.

Convert blog posts into an ebook. The one good thing about ebooks is, it is not necessary to have original content. So, pick up related blog posts and convert them into an ebook with the help of Microsoft word or Adobe reader or wordpress plugin Beacon. Create a landing page to promote the book and also promote on social media. It naturally attracts backlinks.

Make infographic from your post. In #3 point, I mentioned how infographics attracts backlinks. Create infographics from your post and promote it.

Publish on Linkedin pulse. Take up any of your existing blog post and summarize it up to 800 words. Here give different title to your content and publish on linkedin pulse.

Take the expert interview. This step is little bit time consuming but it's worth. If done well, it help you rank for your keyword. Take the interview of an expert about the same topic that you wrote a post on your blog. Conduct proper interview and don't ask more than 10 questions.Then publish on your blog and optimize it for main keyword.

By repurposing the existing content, it increases your post reach to maximum number of audience, increases traffic and most importantly gets ranked  in Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

#5. Broken link building

You will often hear about the term "broken link building" in SEO world. It is nothing but identifying external broken links on websites and that broken link points to a content similar to your blog post article.

So, you need to find out such broken links and replace them with your article link. It not only helps you to get backlinks but also the site owner to get their page fixed.  It is time consuming but it's really worth to spend.

Here are the tips to find out broken links.

Find relevant sites that you like to get 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 find relevant sites, copy all those page specific URLs and paste them on spreadsheet.

Now, you have list of all URLs and it's time to find out whether they have any broken links. You can use Domain hunter plus which is a chrome extension that analyzes all links of a page, shows you broken links.

Here are the other tools that you can use to find out broken links. Ahrefs site explorer, check my links, screaming frog, xenu link sleuth.

Yet another way to find out broken links is to check for quality pages in your niche. This process is time consuming but sure it helps. Check top 30 sites related to your niche and analyze based on these factors. If the page has too many outbound links, spammy backlinks, low word count and content that's not helpful, content that is not at all related to your niche topic then don't target those pages.

Once you have list of all relevant pages with broken links then use Email hunter.co to get the contact info of the site owner.

Now, compose a mail. You can use below template.

Try different variations of this template or you can Google for templates. Start outreach campaign.

#6. Build links from link roundups

You need to spend 20% of time on creating content but 80% on promoting. Yes, the real challenge lies in promoting content.

Getting links from link roundups is beneficial for two reasons.

It brings new visitors to your site.

You will gain backlinks for your site.

How to get featured in link roundups and get backlinks?

#1. Write really awesome content. If you don't have awesome content to share then don't write it at all. The more effort you keep on article writing, more other bloggers feature it on their blogs.

#2. Let the bloggers know. Reach out to the bloggers of your niche. Here is how you can do that.

Mention other bloggers in your content by giving link to their articles.

When you write an exceptional and useful content, it goes viral and will be noticed by top bloggers.

Tweet other blogger articles

Send a personal email to bloggers of your niche. However, the response from top bloggers is very slow.

Now, find out bloggers who will publish link roundups.

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

Sort all the blog by the amount of traffic they receive. This you can find out by using Alexa ranking.

#7. Steal your competitor's backlinks legally!

Well, who doesn't want to grow their search traffic. Then you should build backlinks. Firstly, analyze who are your top 5 competitors.  Add their website links onto a spreadsheet. You can use SEMrush to find your competitors who ranks well for your keyword. Here's an excellent article on how to steal your competitor backlinks as one of the white hat SEO techniques.

Now, you have the list. Let's see how to steal your competitor's backlinks.

#1. Collect all information about your competitor. You can do this by setting up backlink alerts. Go to Ahrefs, click on "alerts' tab. You can create backlink alert for each of your competitor. You get notification whenever they are mentioned anywhere online. This is to track your competitors link building and online marketing.

#2. Find sites that links to more than one competitor. Go to Ahrefs, click on "tools " tab then click on "link intersect". Enter top 5 domains and click on "show link opportunities". It will return a report of sites that link to all the domains you entered. Check individual links where it shows to what site they have links. If it displays forum beside your competitor link then go to that forum and promote your stuff.

#3. Check your competitor's guest posts. Guest blogging helps in building links to your site. How to check?

Use Google search. Try search "author name" + "guest post" – site:competitordomain.com -site:https://domain.com or else you can try searching, "author name" + inurl:author.

Use ahrefs. To find the content written by a particular author, use ahrefs content explorer. Just enter, author:"author name"

#4. Find your competitor's most popular content. Find their popular content and create even better and then promote. It is one of the great ways to build backlinks. Head over to ahrefs, click on "site explorer" tab and enter your competitor link. Under "pages" tab, click on "best by links" and also "best by shares" to know your competitor's most shared content.

When you are ready to promote your content, just enter your competitor URL under "site explorer". To find their backlinks, click on "referring domains".

#5. Fix your competitor's broken backlinks. You can check broken links information of your competitors by going to ahrefs > site explorer > enter domain . Under the "backlink profile" tb, you will find "broken". Just export all these results. Now take each result and plugin to check my links chrome plugin. It confirms the multiple broken links on that page.

Now, reach out to that site, tell them about their site broken links and offer your site as an alternative provided you have similar content on your site.

Don't over depend on your competitors for backlinks. By doing these, you will not only have backlinks but also gets some topic ideas which helps in creating unique campaigns. This helps in increasing your blog search traffic.

Final thoughts about white hat SEO techniques in 2017

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

Just don't focus on improving your SEO (getting links, increasing rankings etc) really quickly. SEO is a big ocean. Trying to do too many things at once can burn you out. So start small, apply one technique at a time and that's how you boost your search rankings.

Do you have any more white hat SEO techniques to share? If you like this white hat SEO guide, please share it with others and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Source: Top 7 White Hat SEO Techniques to Boost Website's Google Rankings