If you are set on marketing your products and services through the internet, then you should always bear in mind that you have to seriously spend some time and effort to improve your search engine page ranking which can be effectively done through SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
If you have been wondering what backlinks are, they are simply the links on other websites which when clicked will go back to your website.  Your website’s significance will be judged by the number of websites which are linked to your website.  Relevant backlinks means more votes from the search engines.
Being the leading search engine with the biggest volume of search engine traffic, Google dictates the norms for page ranking.  Nevertheless, Google does not only look at the number of your backlinks but also on its “quality” which means that these backlinks should be  coming from sites which are akin to your website’s content.
Having a lot of quality backlink will play a major role in your website’s popularity as well as to your marketing undertaking.
Search engines compute the relevance of the site’s keyword versus the proportion of pertinent contents in the site which is linked.  For instance, your article is about website development and the backlinks are coming from sites of a different niche, then that will not be taken as an appropriate link and therefore will not be counted by the search engine robots and you will lose page rank.
Following are some of the ways to get higher page ranks through backlinks:

1.    Do not even think about using the link farms which are interlinked pages which were developed to purposely mislead search engines into thinking that the pages are relevant.  If you have linked your site to one of these sites, your page rank will be lost and you will not be searched by the search engine spiders. These sites generally use the black-hat method to improve traffic and have a kit of pages which contain outbound links but they have not created any content on their pages.

2.    Indicate HTML code for your links so they can readily be duplicated and inserted to their link page.

3.    Concentrate o catering to your targeted market and link only to sites that have similar content as yours.

4.    Verify your links and see which sites have linked back to you.  If all the links are coming from your site and they have not made any backlinks to your site, then the other site is on the receiving end of all the benefits – increased traffic and page ranking.  If this is the general rule rather than the exception, then your site will be unsuccessful.

5.    Avoid linking with sites that have no page rank.

6.    See the high ranking websites in your niche and connect with their owners.  Webmasters will be more open to linking to your site if he/she knows that you were a visitor of his/her site and let him determine the benefits that he and his users will get if he links to you.

7.    Do not bother with sites which have not linked their home page to their other pages because search engines take no notice of link pages in general.

These are just some of the techniques but more than enough to set  you off to a good start in developing your website and your reputation, which hopefully will also drive a good volume of traffic to your site without spending a single cent.