If you are looking for ways to increase your website’s ranking on a search engine, you’re probably also looking into link building. And if you didn’t know already, there are many ways to get that done.
Some get you great results and increase your ranking. Others get you in trouble and undo all the hard work you put into it. So, when you’re asking yourself, “How many types of link building exist in SEO?” here is the answer.
White Hat Practices
The practices that align with the requirements of major search engines and increase your ranking are referred to as white hat SEO practices. This is a way for you to increase the visibility of your website on a search engine.
Guest Posts: Buying guest posts is a fantastic strategy. Apart from the above-mentioned ways, you can reach out to influencers in your industry for guest-posting slots. This is basically a practice where you create content to be published on other websites and get a link back to your landing page. This way, you get to reach a wider audience that is relevant to your content.
Citations: As it happens in academia, you can get citations from other businesses relevant to your website’s content. This includes details like the name and address and maybe a phone number or social media handles of your website on other webpages.
Grey Hat Practices
This is a set of practices that are classified as murky when a search engine crawls that web to rank your website. It’s called grey hat because these techniques aren’t necessarily bad but also don’t fall in the category of best practices. While some interpret them to be reasonable others might disagree.
Link Placements: A lot of services recommend buying old domains that have been abandoned by their original creators. This is often used by other websites to create backlinks and raise their own profile. The links are supposed to be of good quality when they are authoritative domains. But some disagree and hence the classification into the grey hat practices column.
Black Hat Practices
These are practices that are not acceptable and land you in trouble with search engines. Not only are they frowned upon but will also lead to penalties by search engines like Google that will take your brand and website a long time to recover.
PBN Links: These are links from private blog networks that do not have any content but are created purely for the purpose of backlinking. Now, you can add them to your website to raise your backlink profile. They may even create some passive referral traffic but Google considers this cheating (which it is) and penalizes websites that deal with PBNs.
And Finally…
The best way for you to raise your profile with a search engine is to keep it simple and straightforward. Keep the quality of services and content valuable to your customers.
Use rich keywords and meta tags and be descriptive. Make your user experience such that anyone can easily navigate your website. Keep your website mobile friendly and make sure your website loads quickly.
That ought to do it.