If you visit any website which discusses SEO and how to improve rankings on Google there will undoubtedly be some discussion, articles or information relating to backlinks. To prove the point, you are reading one of them right now, so it is fair to say professional SEO and backlinks are very much related.

Where the confusion, and sometimes reticence to use backlinks arise is not knowing which backlinks have a positive impact, and which backlinks are more likely to see you plunging down the rankings, or worse, wiped off them altogether, which has happened to countless websites.

Part of the problem is that there are so many ways in which you can create a backlink to your website, and just as many places online where you can link from. Add to this Google’s determination to clamp down on spam links, link farms and links which appear to be high quality but aren’t, it has become a cat and mouse game between the search engines, and those who use those blackhat tactics.

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.