Backlink Help

I don't really understand backlinking. I will first say that I am a real estate agent. I have checked my competitors links and they have a ton of local business website backlinks and real estate sites in general.

How are they doing this? How does backlinking work? Can someone quickly explain. What is the process? Do you need to ask a site to link with you? If so then what do you do?

Need help wrapping my mind around this as I understand the importance.

Thanks in advance for educating a newbie.

Backlink is like popularity, more you have links more populair you are. When you are popular when people writing your keyword for a search you will be on the first place, if you're not popular you're will be on page 10+.... So post the link of your site on blog, submit to directory, submit to forum,.... On a forum you always have a place to post a site so there you get a backlink.

Have a bit of a look at where your competitors have dropped their link, you may (or may not) find they have dropped a comment on that site using anchor text for the keyword they are trying to rate for.

Now you can go ahead and drop a comment using your anchor text on the same pages.

To put it really simplistically (not taking into account other variables like the linking sites PR, your sites content and age of domain) once you have more links pointing to your site than your competitors Google "could" rank you higher than your competitor.

If you create enough links that say, Denver Real Estate Agent - and those words all link to your site as a link... You will eventually rank for that search term, even if you don't have those words anywhere on your site. Good luck... Real Estate is very competitive, and a very hard market right now as you know.

Every links refers to votes. So have many quality links to beat the competitor.

Also the more relevent the website is to your buisness/sector/theme that you get a link on the the better.

100 links from relevent websites will beat 1000 crappy unrelated forums any day.