Being active in social media I receive different e-mails from people who just started online. This is the reason for considering necessary to publish some articles about basic terms. This one is about backlinks:

Backlinks are links that normally have an anchor text and they point towards your site giving you authority and popularity in the eyes of all the Major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and MSN.

Backlinks originally came about as a means of website navigation. Once the Search Engines picked up backlinking, backlinks turned into a staple for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get a website ranked higher.

No one knows to much about the Google Algorithm, but what we do know is that backlinks definitely help your website rank much higher in the major search engines. Getting a vast amount of backlinks over time is an indication of website popularity or the popularity of a page within your website. Also the pagerank of your backlinks is a factor in determining how important your site is.

Other than for SEO purposes, backlinks are good for traffic generation. If you manage to get your links onto a site with a lot of traffic, your site will get a steady stream of targeted traffic from your links on each site. Basic terms, a backlink is any type of link placed on a web node (website, web directory, web page, profile page, blog, wiki page, guestbook, or top level domain) from a different web node.

Backlinks can also be called inward links, incoming links, links, inlinks, and inbound links.
(source: monsterbacklinks.com)