For the most part, link-building has been understood as a black hat SEO strategy that most popular search engines like Google and Yahoo frown upon.
There are several ways how black hat link building strategies can work – the most popular being using irrelevant keywords to link to websites that are taken as competition, reducing the site’s credibility.
There are however ways to go about doing link-building in a white hat way that can be ethically accepted worldwide.
Although the most effective way is authoritative, relevant link-building, there can be varying degrees of success in that strategy.
The Effective Way
The most effective way practised worldwide by SEO people is emailing webmasters of popular sites and requesting them to link to your site. This might require a fair bit of flattery and ‘begging’ but can sometimes achieve success.
You search for the popular sites in your nice by searching for your most important SEO keywords in a search engine and then carry on with the process.
The White Hat Way
If your success using the actual link-building strategy is low, you might resort to black hat strategies and be the target for the ethic police to bombard every now and then. However, effective-link building can be somewhat white hat if you go about it the right way.
First, install the Link Checker addon for firefox. When you have selected a popular site you want to build links with, go to the site’s page, click on Tools in firefox and click Check Page Links. This can take a few minutes if there are a lot of links on the site.
When you have the list of links, you will notice there are some links highlighted in red and yellow. These are broken links identified by firefox now and highlighted as such.
Sometimes, working links can be mistaken as broken links by this plugin to so click on every potential broken link and check if it works. If it doesn’t, save it in a notepad file.
When you have a list of broken links on the popular site ready, email the list to the site’s Webmaster and inform him that search engines usually dislike sites with a lot of broken links and this can affect their SEO badly.
In return for your suggestion and ‘favor’, request the Webmaster to link to your site.
How This Method Can Turn Black Hat
Okay, we’ve spoken enough on a white hat technique for link-building but seriously, this technique can be made black hat too if you’re desperate for SEO money and tired of your competitors.
If your chosen popular site is linking to a direct competitor, you can have them remove the link to the competitor site. The trick is to send that broken-links’ list to the Webmaster and randomly include the working link of the competitor site.
You can hope that after clicking on the first few broken links, the Webmaster will assume the list is credible and all links in the list are broken, subsequently removing them from the site.
Mission accomplished!