Back links have been recognized as important components of SEO strategies because search engines regard them as votes for your site.  This is understandable because other webmasters may not want to have links guiding their visitors to your website if they do not consider the information on your site to be helpful.  Therefore, in general, if there are more back links leading to your site, the higher will be the rank of your site in the results pages provided by the search engines.

Back links have come to be considered as essential components of the SEO process because with their presence, your site has a higher chance of being indexed much faster by the spiders of search engines.  In the long run, back links are also useful in raising the number of site visitors who are likely to make a purchase in your website.  

However, it should be realized it is the quality back links that are taken into account by the search engines and not just any link that leads to your site.  Search engines have already developed algorithms that can counteract the effects of black hat SEO methods used in the past, such as link farms in which no content is available on a web page except for the links.  Thus, a search engine like Google, may only consider a particular back link as a vote for your site if it comes from another site that has the same topic as your website.  Thus, a back link that comes from a website that focuses on a theme that is not relevant to your topic will not be counted when the search engine computes your site’s rank in the results pages.

Another factor to remember is that the number of quality back links should grow slowly over time.  If the quantity of back links grows too rapidly, the search engine may find this to be suspicious and penalize your site instead.  More and more search engines are considering back links to be important because it would be more difficult for site owners to manipulate them than links that already exist on their sites.  Meanwhile, search engines have developed more stringent rules in assessing the quality of back links because of the unethical strategies that have been resorted to by some site owners in the past.

A strategy that is usually utilized for building back links is to contact other webmasters and offer to provide them with a back link if they also create a back link for you as well as utilizing article submission services.  However, it is important to make sure that you are dealing only with those websites that have similar content as yours or they would have little effect on your SEO efforts.  A better tactic, although more time would be needed, is to submit your articles to the different directories with tools such as Article Submit Auto and to post quality articles on your site.