Today almost every business can be found online in one way or another. This is obviously highly beneficial if you are the customer; however, if you are a business it makes it incredibly difficult to stand out from the pack. This is where SEO comes in. Search Engine Optimisation can be quite a complex and multifaceted process but for the purpose of this blog, we are going to concentrate on high-quality backlinks. This is because high quality backlinks = great organic traffic.

Backlinks are incoming hyperlinks from one page to another. When webmasters and administrators first realised this, they rushed to shove backlinks in every nook and cranny in the web they could find. But it didn't take long for the folks at Google to realise this. Nowadays Google not only ranks a site based on its backlinks, but also how reliable these links are - aka, white hat backlinks.

Whilst appearing first in search results can be a very costly expense when relying on advertising such as Google Adwords, focusing on creating good high-quality backlinks can help achieve the same results for a fraction of the cost. Moreover, if a business follows good SEO practice for their website, they might be able to reach their target audience organically.

Here are a few easy to use strategies to get you started:

• Internal linking: linking back to content in your own site is a good way of creating backlinks with full control. It also makes it easier for Google to crawl through your site quickly (and increase your ranking).
• Ask a friend: as simple as it sounds, if you are not a large corporation with a big marketing budget, sometimes asking friends to link to your website in their blog/site, can be a good, affordable way to get backlinks for your site.
• Get the credit you deserve: Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, if you have clients that can provide a review for your business and link it back to your site, you need to take advantage of that opportunity! For B2B businesses this should be fairly easy to achieve as you can provide the same service in return.
• Online directories: a lot of directories offer standard business profiles that allow you to advertise your business and link back to your site in a very cost-effective way. Directories should be considered on a case-by-case basis as not all provide a good ROI, and not all have a good reputation online.
• Testimonials: sometimes you have to think outside the box. Using testimonials is a great way to get free publicity (and obviously, backlinks) for your business. From a B2B perspective, if you’ve purchased a product from someone and write a decent testimonial outlining how the product has helped your business, you can ask them to link to your business in your testimonial.

These are only a few commonly used tactics. There are many other ways of creating backlinks and some techniques that work great for one website might work horribly for another. It's important to understand that SEO is a complex process. Relying only on backlinks might get you on the right track, but ultimately it will not help you achieve your goal unless you follow other recommended SEO practices.