Backlinks belong on external sites with strong domain authority and topical relevance to your niche, plus strategic placement within your own site structure. The highest-value external placements include editorial links from industry publications, contextual links within guest posts on established blogs, curated resource or tools pages, and verified business directories like Google Business Profile or industry-specific listings. Avoid low-quality link farms, irrelevant blog networks, or site-wide footer links that Google flags as manipulative. For external backlinks, prioritize pages that already rank well and receive organic traffic—a link from a page ranking in positions 1-10 passes more authority than one buried on page five. The link should sit within the main content body, surrounded by relevant text, not in a sidebar widget or footer. Anchor text matters: use natural variations including branded terms, exact-match keywords, and descriptive phrases rather than repetitive exact-match anchors that trigger over-optimization penalties. Internal backlinks require a different strategy. Point them from supporting blog posts and category pages to your pillar content, service pages, and conversion-focused landing pages. Ottawa SEO structures this as topic clusters—10 to 15 related articles all linking back to a central pillar page with varied, contextually appropriate anchor text. This signals to Google which pages matter most and distributes authority throughout your domain. Avoid these mistakes: linking from or to thin content under 300 words, burying links at the bottom of 3,000-word posts where users never scroll, or creating reciprocal link schemes where two sites just swap links back and forth. Google's algorithms have detected these patterns since the 2012 Penguin update. In our portfolio management, we prioritize backlinks to pages with existing ranking momentum between positions 8-20, where a small authority boost often triggers a jump into the top five. We track placement using Ahrefs or Majestic, focusing on referring domains rather than total link count, since 10 links from 10 different domains outperform 100 links from one site.