Why Backlinks are important?¶

Looking at the history of one of the Internet giants (Google), it is easy to see how the innovative concept of backlinks helped Google become what it is today. Back then, for Google and now for all major search engines, backlinks are the vote of confidence and trustworthiness.

Even today, and based on Google's own admission, backlinks are one of the three most important ranking factors ¹. The other 2 are website content and RankBrain.

Structure of a backlink¶

In simple terms, a backlink is an "A Href" HTML tag on another website (or same website) that points to the website.

Consider the following tag:

<a href="https://www.smartseohosting.com/seo-guides/">Seo Guides</a>

The backlink tag starts by opening <a`` and ends with. Thehref``` attribute defines the link to the website (In this case, https://www.smartseohosting.com/seo-guides/). The content of the link "SEO Guides" is the text displayed on the website for visitors to click on. For a search engine, though, 'SEO Guides' is the vote of confidence for that search term.

So a website that gets many similar links from authority websites is more likely to rank better for "SEO Guides" than a webpage that receives fewer backlinks.