Why backlinks are important in SEO?
Answers
When Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created the platform they recognized a weakness in the search engines of the time, they were not using links as a valued metric to rank results. This meant it was difficult to not only find matching content, search engines were not returning results based on human valuation.
So, the two founders decided a good way to 'rank' results should lean on the votes being cast around the web by external pages. These votes are backlinks.
When a page links to another page it is saying the target is a qualified, authoritative reference.
Links are not only a signal Google uses to rank web pages, they are a source of traffic. Face it, links on popular pages get clicked. Because they have lots of traffic some of it will pass on to your page as well.
You can consider these links as votes for your page that signal authority and drive traffic.