what are backlinks? and how important are they in seo?

Backlinks, often called inbound links or external links, are references from other websites that point to your content. These digital citations have been a cornerstone of search engine optimization since Google’s inception, acting as “votes of confidence” that signal your content’s value and authority to search engines. While their role has evolved significantly over the past two decades, backlinks remain a crucial element in how search engines evaluate website credibility and determine rankings.

In the early days of SEO, the approach to backlinks was primarily quantitative – the more links pointing to your website, the better its chances of ranking highly in search results. This led to the proliferation of link farms, automated link building tools, and various black-hat techniques designed to manipulate search rankings. Many businesses invested heavily in acquiring as many backlinks as possible, regardless of their quality or relevance, often through paid arrangements or artificial networks.

Today’s search engines, powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence and natural language processing, evaluate backlinks through a much more nuanced lens. Quality now decisively trumps quantity. A single backlink from a highly authoritative, relevant website can provide more SEO value than hundreds of links from low-quality or unrelated sources. Modern search algorithms analyze not just the number of backlinks, but their context, relevance, and the authority of the linking domains.

The shift toward a more holistic approach to SEO means that backlink building must be integrated into a broader digital marketing strategy focused on creating genuine value. Rather than pursuing backlinks directly, successful websites focus on developing exceptional content that naturally attracts citations from other reputable sources. This approach aligns perfectly with Google’s E-E-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), where backlinks serve as organic validation of your content’s quality and your domain’s authority in your field.

We do include link building but done in a very careful way.  We aim to develop natural organic links from reputable sources that are not “spammy” or “bulk” but highly relevant to the website, the topic and the client that we are working with.

Our strategy uses reliable and white-hat methods to concentrate on a “quality over quantity” approach an building then naturally over time.  This may include news articles that feature our client, guest blogging and other genuine ways that real people will find the content that we are “promoting” to be useful.  The whole approach to SEO in an integral modern way is that if backlinks are built over time from reputable trustworthy sites that are adding value to their user experience by linking to our clients´ website then google and other search engines (including AI and chat/voice search engines) will see this as genuine endorsements rather than trying to trick search engines into thinking that the page is more important than it really is.

Build trust with expertise, authority, and transparency in every aspect of your website.