Backlinks are incredibly important for your positioning within the search engines. The more quality backlinks you have the better. But what is a backlink and how do you get one?
A backlink is nothing less than another website pointing to your website. The value and impact of a backlink is great. You should think of this as most votes count. If there are several websites with high authority pointing to your website, then your website must be good. So this is how the search engine looks at your website.
So if you are actively gathering links to your website, you will ensure that your website will rank higher in the search results. However, make sure you do this in a smart way. The search engines want you to acquire links in a natural way. So it is not really 'natural' if you suddenly get 100 links in one day. Spread out linking over a longer period of time and reap the benefits over time!
Backlinks are a part of link building. With link building, you also take into account internal links and the like.
Buying links
When buying links, you will have to make sure that they are good quality links. Sometimes people buy links from a PBN (private blog network). This is possible, but these websites are often on the same IP address so the search engine can see that something is wrong. You can get a panalty for this and you really don't want that.