An essential part of any effective SEO strategy should be the building of backlinks to your website. Google sees backlinks as a measure of the importance and relevance of a site, and therefore if backlinking is done correctly it can produce significant improvements in the ranking of your website in Google’s search results.

There are multiple ways to build backlinks, although not all of them are recommended. Many so-called blackhat techniques may work in the short term, but they risk having your site delisted from search results if you get caught. For this reason, you should only ever consider using methods that are perfectly legitimate.

The first method is to use the SEO tool ‘AHREFS’ or a Google Chrome extension called ‘Check My Links’ to discover broken links on other websites. You should try those within your specific niche and more generic websites that have at least some relevance to your business. Ideally, you want sites that have resource pages or links pages, but this is not essential.

When you find a broken link, contact the website owner, and advise them that they have a broken link. Explain that broken links can have a huge negative impact on their website rankings and offer them a quick and easy way to fix it.

They might expect that you are going to ask for a fee, but instead you ask if they would mind changing the broken link to a link to your website. The worst that can happen is that they say no, but for everyone that says yes, you have added another backlink to your website.

All the websites that you can get links from will pass on a lot of authority to your website, and if you continue this process, the authority and the ranking of your website, can only improve.

A second way to gain backlinks to your website is the use of guest articles and blog posts. This tried and tested method involves writing a very high-quality article relating to your industry and then offering it to other websites in return for a link back to your website.

Websites owners know they need good content to keep their visitors and readers happy, so there will always be a demand for it. What better way to take advantage of that fact than to offer content to those who need and want it.

When you have a post or article which is published on another site, you gain link juice and authority in the eyes of Google, which adds to your ranking score. If the website owner who has taken your content is proactive they may link to your article from their social media accounts which adds further fuel to the SEO fire as you gain some authority from those links too.

Imagine the uplift in your rankings by getting just one article or blog post per week published on another high authority blog or website within your industry. Also, do not overlook the benefit of increasing your own personal credibility when articles and blog posts attributed to you are shared within your niche.

The third way to gain backlinks is a variation of the previous method, where instead of using a written article as the content to link from, you offer a more visual piece of content in the form of infographics. Infographics are extremely popular in these days of multimedia and allow site owners to convey facts, figures, processes, and many other pieces of information in an easy to follow format.

If you are not graphically skilled but have the info in text form, there are many places you can get infographics created for very little cost. Sites like Fiverr and Upwork have lots of freelancers skilled in graphics who could produce high quality infographics for you in a very short space of time.