13 Proven Link Building Strategies: Complete Guide to White-Hat Tactics in 2025

Getting backlinks is undoubtedly one of the most essential parts of any SEO strategy. Although it requires a thorough analysis, improvement of your content, and significant outreach efforts, the results you’ll get are undoubtedly worth it. On the other hand, you should opt only for white-hat link building methods if you don’t want to get penalties from Google and ruin your online authority.

What is Link Building Strategy?

A link building strategy is a plan that involves improving your backlink profile with one-way hyperlinks from reputable and relevant sites. This off-page SEO technique can improve your online visibility, eventually increasing your website’s popularity and revenue.

The development of an efficient strategy requires not only relevant experience but also powerful tools and thorough analysis. You need to review the methods used by your competitors and define new opportunities to strengthen your backlink profile.

Of course, it may be difficult to complete all the mentioned tasks on your own! Fortunately, you can rely on SeoProfy link building services and let our experts take care of your backlink profile so you can focus on more important business tasks.

The Role of Links for a Website

Google clearly states that its algorithms consider backlinks as an indicator of unique, reliable, and expert content. Thus, the more links from other sites your pages have, the higher their search engine rankings are.

According to our SEO stats, only 9% of users scroll to the bottom of the first page of Google and other major search engines. It means that if you want your website to attract more organic traffic that may be converted into clients, you need your pages to conquer the top of search results. Link building can be a valuable strategy in this regard.

While developing SEO strategy for your website, it’s essential to focus on your backlink profile if you want to boost your website authority. Moreover, off-page optimization is necessary for a successful recovery of your site after Google updates. We have numerous SEO case studies proving that proper link building combined with other methods for search engine optimization can help a website thrive again.

Nonetheless, everything is not as easy as it looks because Google constantly improves its algorithms. After the release of Google Penguin, it’s not enough just to collect the links from any website. Now, it’s more important to focus on quality than quantity. Also, there are other link building strategies to stick to if you want to ensure stable growth of your site, making it reliable in the “eyes” of search engines and prospective clients.

13 Proven Link Building Strategies

Regardless of your industry and business goals, you should always try to use only white-hat SEO techniques. Implementing effective link building strategies from our list is a great way to ensure that Google won’t lower your rankings or even remove your pages from the search results.

1. Make Link Bait Content

If you wonder how to build backlinks that will take your website to the top rankings, you should undoubtedly start generating content that will make others refer to your pages. In SEO, such articles are called “linkable assets” or simply “link baits.” They’re crafted specifically to attract backlinks from other websites. There are many types of content you can use to catch the attention of other webmasters and inspire them to link to your pages, including:

• Niche-related surveys and studies;
• Useful tutorials and how-to guides;
• Listicles with tips;
• Infographics.

The more unique and valuable content your website offers, the stronger its chance of getting backlinks. For example, look at the annual “The State of Link Building Report” survey led by Aira. This content provided the digital marketing agency with over 1,500 backlinks from over 600 sites.

However, what can you do if your business operates in a relatively boring niche? It may be a good idea to opt for tangential content. As a rule, it’s not directly related to the products or services your business offers. The fascinating fact is that, according to Fractl, 6 out of 10 brands that have blogs feature tangential content. It’s even more exciting that you can use this technique for literally any niche:

So, whether you want to start link building for ecommerce or a law firm, tangential content will surely stand you in good stead if you skillfully implement it in your blog. Also, you can focus on the creation of interactive elements, such as calculators, minigames, online generators, and quizzes.

Top-Quality Links for Your Success

Boost your backlink profile to reach your business goals:

• Increase traffic, eventually leading to higher revenue
• Enhance your online presence and rankings
• Cooperate only with reputable and relevant websites

Start Your Link Building Journey

2. Use the Skyscraper Technique

First of all, this link building technique doesn’t involve the building of a real skyscraper, so you can exhale with relief. Nonetheless, this is still one of the most challenging yet rewarding link building techniques in SEO.

To implement this strategy, you have to find an outdated page with a significant number of backlinks. Once you do it, use it as a basis to craft more interesting and valuable content on your website. Then, reach out to the websites linking to the original content and present your updated version. As you can see, this strategy truly resembles the Great Skyscraper Race of 1931, but now it takes place in the digital world:

Considering that over a decade has passed since the introduction of the Skyscraper technique in 2015, many experts believe that it can no longer help you reach your SEO goals. Nonetheless, the survey conducted by Ahrefs in X based on 479 votes still proves that more than 57% of the respondents still efficiently use this strategy:

Although the implementation of this technique looks pretty simple, there are several mistakes to avoid if you truly want to get the desired outcomes. Here, we’ve prepared a list of the most common pitfalls:

• The usage of the templated emails: Although the creator of the Skyscraper technique also introduced the template to reach other webmasters, it doesn’t mean you should use it word for word. Personalize your emails to increase your chances of getting answers and valuable backlinks.
• The absence of value: Some people believe that if there is an article containing the list of 10 useful tools, upping it up to 20 in your content is enough to skyscraper your page. However, instead of simply adding the tools, it may be a better idea to focus on the improvement of the existing list and visuals, making it more attractive for visitors.
• Lower reputation: Finally, if you’ve just launched your brand, it may be difficult for you to immediately compete against titans like Forbes or Investopedia, as many people link to these websites due to their time-tested reputation. In this case, there is no reason to skyscraper their pages. It’ll be better to focus on the improvement of your own online authority by crafting unique and valuable content.

3. Follow Competitors’ Best Link Building Practices

One of the best practices for discovering authoritative websites to generate links involves the analysis of your competitors’ backlink profiles. If a webmaster refers to the sites from your niche, there is a strong chance that they may also provide you with some valuable backlinks. Such an approach is called “resource page link building.”

The good news is that the analysis won’t take a lot of time if you follow our instructions and use the best SEO tools like Ahrefs. To implement this strategy, you need to make a list of your biggest competitors’ homepage links. The best way to do this in seconds is to opt for the Batch Analysis tool, which allows you to analyze up to 200 links. Once you copy-paste the URLs you’re interested in, the platform will generate a report highlighting the most important metrics, including backlinks.

Also, Ahrefs can provide you with a competitive map of the organic competitors. This visual report shows how your opponent’s websites stack up against your site in terms of organic traffic (including its value) and the number of organic pages. The bigger the competitor’s circle, the more pages they have.

Select the competitors with the biggest numbers of the obtained backlinks. Your next task is to discover the pages on their websites that attract the most references using the “Best by links” tool, which you can discover in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

This useful report allows you to identify what types of content helped your competitors attract other webmasters’ attention. Use this information to create something similar or even better.

You can also use this link building tool to set up a backlink alert. Due to this, the platform will notify you every time your competitor gets a new link. Thus, you’ll be able to analyze the new tactics used by your opponents and implement them on your pages ASAP.

4. Determine Your Selection Criteria for Link Building

Even the most efficient techniques won’t help you reach the desired results if you can’t distinguish high-quality backlinks from the ones that can affect your search rankings. The table below includes the most important criteria to consider while estimating the authority and relevance of the online resource that provides you with a link.

It doesn’t matter whether you need link building for law firms or dental clinics. You need to consider these criteria every time you obtain a link from a new website. Moreover, it’s also important to analyze your competitor’s backlinks to find out the average value of these parameters in your specific niche.

5. Write Quality Guest Posts/Outreach

Guest posting is one of the most efficient link building practices often used during the SEO campaign setup, as it allows you to obtain backlinks by posting content on other websites. Nonetheless, this process is way more difficult than it might seem at first glance.

First of all, you need to discover the top blogs in your industry that are eager to accept your contribution and allow you to add the link to your site in the provided content. That’s where SEO outreach comes into play! By analyzing your competitors and niche, you may define the best websites and bloggers for your guest posting campaign. After this, you need to come up with an attractive email and a compelling article idea.

It may be a good idea to find the main competitors of the blog you want to write for. Analyze their content to discover which topics bring these sites lots of traffic. Using Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool, find the articles that haven’t been covered on the targeted blog yet.

Consider that it’s essential to write top-quality articles for guest blogging. Thus, you’ll not only ensure your potential partner accepts your content but also that its page is indexed and receives organic traffic. Thus, you can get a high-quality backlink and inspire people to visit your site through the links skillfully woven into the guest post.

6. Build Tier-2 Links

Here, we come to one of the link building tactics that doesn’t require a lot of effort and time. Nevertheless, the benefits you’ll get can surely overcome your expectations. Tier 2 link building involves providing references to other websites that contain the links to your pages. SEO experts do it to improve the authority of these online resources, making their backlinks more valuable for your site. Eventually, it strengthens your backlink profile.

Unlike Tier-1 backlinks, Tier-2 links don’t need to be placed on high-authority websites or popular blogs. You can build them from social media platforms, directories, and forums related to your niche.

For example, if you want to implement an efficient ecommerce link building strategy, it’s surely a good idea to opt for this cost-effective tactic. Create a list of pages linking to your website and select a couple of them to improve. Then, you’ll need to provide the backlinks to them from third-party platforms, following several simple rules:

• Avoid generating many Tier-2 links in a short period: It’s essential to keep a steady and slow pace to prevent search engine penalties.
• Build relevant Tier-2 backlinks: Considering that these links still have to drive relevant traffic to boost your Tier-1 backlinks, it’s important to make them fit the content on the promoted page.
• Never overuse the exact-match keywords in anchors: Google can consider this activity as an attempt to manipulate its algorithms. It’ll have a bad impact on the SEO performance of the page containing the links to your site.

7. Find Unlinked Mentions

A popular website may refer to your brand or product without providing a link to your website. Luckily, there is a strong chance that they’ll add a backlink to this content if asked to do it. However, how can you discover these unlinked brand mentions?

You may opt for the Brand Monitoring app developed by Semrush. This amazing tool for the implementation of efficient link building tactics allows you to search for all your brand’s mentions, including possible misspellings.

Enter the “Mention Details” tab to see the mentions of “Without Backlinks” in the “Backlink” section. Furthermore, you may opt for a Positive Sentiment filter. Thus, you’ll see the websites that are more likely to fulfill your request to provide the backlink.

When you prepare a list of online resources mentioning your brand without references, it’s time to write emails asking their owners to add the links to your pages. Here are some tips that will help you persuade them:

• Always thank the publisher for the positive mention of your brand.
• Politely ask whether they can include a link to your website by way of attribution.
• If a publisher is willing, you can suggest where to link and which pages to refer to.

8. Broken Links

There is no reason to immediately opt for quality link building techniques if you haven’t analyzed your backlink profile first. When you have a close look at it, you probably will discover a couple of broken links leading to your website.

Different reasons may lead to such a situation. For example, you might remove the page with content other sites were referring to. Also, the owner of another website might just misspell the URL while adding a backlink to your page.

Anyway, these broken links don’t provide you with any value, and sometimes, they may even harm your site’s performance. That’s why fixing them is often a part of our Google penalty recovery services.

First, it’s necessary to find the broken link building issues. The positive news is you can do it in minutes using Ahref’s “Broken backlinks”:

Once you find that any website refers to a page that doesn’t exist, get in touch with its owner, offering them to provide a link to the new content that includes relevant information.

Finally, we have a useful pro tip that will help you build links more efficiently. Using Semrush’s Backlink Analytics, you can check your competitors’ broken backlinks. After that, you can reach the sites containing them, suggesting your content as a replacement.

9. Reclaim Lost Links

Looking for smart link building tactics, you definitely shouldn’t ignore a link reclamation. It involves returning backlinks removed from third-party websites. First of all, this is an excellent strategy because you don’t need to spend a lot of time looking for new link building opportunities. Further, if a site has linked to your pages once, there is a strong chance it’ll do it again.

A publisher might have removed a link accidentally. Furthermore, they might have slightly adjusted their content, so now they’d like to refer to another page on your website. You can discover lost links using powerful platforms like Ahrefs.  Simply opt for its Calendar tool and open the “Lost” tab:

10. Internal Linking

As a rule, your website includes three major types of pages:

• Homepage: This is the heart of your site, where your visitors can discover your services, products, etc.
• Linkable assets: These are the pages with the content that easily gain backlinks. For example, it may be a blog post, an online tool, a study, etc.
• “Money” pages: These pages generate your income as they sell your products or services.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to inspire the owners of other websites to refer to the commercial pages. As a rule, webmasters opt for content that provides their audience with useful information for free.

Luckily, you can still boost your “money” pages with the help of internal links. Analyze your website to discover the content that gets the most backlinks. Thereafter, skillfully weave the links to your products or services into your linkable asset. Thus, even the most boring pages on your site will get more traffic and significantly increase your revenue.

11. Use Digital PR

Although digital PR is not among the latest link building techniques, it still works perfectly for all types of websites. The technique is a great way to promote your online business by getting references from popular online media related to your niche. Its implementation requires taking the following steps:

1. You research your industry’s trending topics and create a story related to one of them.
2. You share your content with relevant journalists via a press release.
3. Once an online magazine decides to cover your story, it credits your site with a link.

The chance of getting high volumes of backlinks and mentions makes digital PR one of the best practices for link building. Nonetheless, you probably wonder which platform you should choose to build your prospect list. Here are several options that you can start with:

• Featured
• Connectively (HARO)
• SourceBottle

12. Use Roundup Posts

Roundup posts, also known as “expert posts,” provide readers with useful tips and a great flash of inspiration. Moreover, they are also shareable, which means adding this type of content to your blog may provide you with a significant number of external links.

When you create a roundup post, you provide the backlinks not only to your own articles but also to the experts from other trustworthy and relevant websites. Thus, if you manage to create truly brilliant content, there is a chance that the sites you linked to will share your roundup post with their audience.

If you don’t know which topic to choose, you can simply use Google Search to get a flash of inspiration. Simply enter the following search modifiers to find out the trends in your industry:

• “Your keyword”:roundup
• “Your keyword”:best
• “Your keyword”:top

13. Avoid Black-Hat Link Building

No doubt, the implementation of all the mentioned link building tips requires time and effort, so it may be tempting to opt for slightly easier ways of boosting your website. That’s the main reason why many people decide to pay for performance SEO, which guarantees jaw-dropping results in an astronomical time.

The truth is that these experts often focus on low-value keywords. Their implementation may indeed increase your rankings, but they actually won’t provide you with real business value. Furthermore, when they guarantee you many quality backlinks and a significant increase in natural traffic in a couple of weeks, they’ll likely involve black-hat tactics. In this case, you may indeed notice improvements at the beginning of the SEO campaign.

Nonetheless, spammy backlinks will only ruin all your previous SEO and link building efforts. Moreover, you may even get Google penalties, leading to the removal of your pages from the search results. Of course, it’s possible to recover from this damage by disavowing toxic backlinks. However, it may be much more expensive and time-consuming than investing in professional link building services from the beginning. Thus, we strongly recommend cooperating with agencies that use only transparent and time-tested SEO strategies.

Reach the Top with Time-Tested Link Building Methods

If you want your SEO campaign to succeed, you definitely need to create a strong backlink profile. Furthermore, it’s crucial to monitor it closely to guarantee steady growth and prompt elimination of harmful backlinks.

Also, from time to time, new link building techniques appear, and if you want to stay on top, you should be the first to implement them. Of course, it may be challenging even if you run a website together with an entire team. In this case, you can opt for SeoProfy and lay all your link building tasks on our shoulders so you can focus on completing more critical business tasks.

Author

Andrew Shum

Andrew is the Head of SEO at SeoProfy, leading a team of more than 20 experienced SEO specialists. He has been involved in search engine optimization and digital marketing since 2016, gaining hands-on experience across various niches and regions. Andrew possesses strong analytical and strategic skills, particularly in planning SEO strategies for highly competitive projects.