What exactly are backlinks? Backlinks are one way that your website can get the exposure it needs in order to gain a high search engine ranking and attract more traffic to its site. In layman’s terms, a backlink is an incoming link that points to a specific web page or a particular web site. A backlink is very important to search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies, as well as, to your actual ranking in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs).