Obsidian backlinks work by typing double brackets around any term or note title — [[example note]] — which creates an instant bidirectional link. When you click it, Obsidian either opens the existing note or creates a new one with that name. The backlink panel in each note shows every other note that links to it, making it easy to see connections across your vault. For SEO work, this becomes powerful when mapping content clusters. Create a pillar note called [[Link Building]], then reference it from child notes like [[Guest Posting Strategy]] or [[Broken Link Building]]. Each child note automatically shows up in the pillar's backlink panel, giving you a visual content hierarchy without manual tracking. You can also use aliases with [[Link Building|backlinks]] syntax to control anchor text while maintaining the same target. The graph view visualizes these connections as nodes and edges, which mirrors how Google sees topical authority across a site. At Ottawa SEO, we use Obsidian vaults to plan internal linking structures before building pages — it catches orphan content early and reveals natural cluster gaps. You can tag notes with #priority or #published to filter the graph by production status. Practical tips: Use consistent naming conventions because [[link building]] and [[Link Building]] are different notes. Enable the core "Backlinks" plugin if it's not already on. For larger vaults (500+ notes), the local graph view outperforms the full graph for daily navigation. You can embed backlink mentions directly into notes with query blocks if you want a self-updating index. Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown files in a local folder, so your vault syncs with Git, Dropbox, or iCloud without vendor lock-in. This makes it reliable for long-term documentation that outlives any SaaS tool. The learning curve is about two hours to feel productive, then it becomes faster than spreadsheets for non-linear planning work.