Backlinks act like a vote of confidence in your website from an external source. If someone is prepared to
quote you as a source of information or send their audience to your website, they’re essentially saying to
the search engines, “This is good stuff and we’re prepared to vouch for it”.
Backlinks are also important for telling the search engines how different websites and web pages are
connected, a bit like a street map from one web property to another. If, for example, a high authority online
marketing site backlinks to an SEO+ blog article, it’s a signal to Google that both websites share a similar
field and that the high authority site trusts SEO+’s content.
Trust and authority are two of the most important reasons that backlinks matter to search engines.
Generally speaking, trustworthy sites will link to other trustworthy sites and avoid spammy, untrustworthy
sites like the plague. This gives the search engines some valuable clues about how to prioritise a website
in search results because they would far rather give searchers links to genuinely helpful, relevant sites.
Backlinks are also important because they bring referral traffic into your website, which is traffic that might
not have found you in a search. If you can bring referral traffic in and keep people on your site with high
quality content, it lets the search engines know that your content is valuable to visitors.