One of the fundamental driving forces behind a website's or blog ranking is the number of incoming links it has. Backlinks sometimes they call it, the number of links pointing to your site from other sites. Many of the blog owners are busy making exchange links to other sites. But careful guys make sure to link out to other related websites or blogs within your content. It can only help with your search engine rankings. By linking out, those sites might link back or include your blog in their blogroll. The more related incoming links you have, the higher you should rank on the search engines. Another example is article submissions to different social bookmarkings sites; social bookmarking sites have a million readers everyday. Or another way to generating inbound links is to submit your blog to different Free Directories, and etc. These three examples that I have given can generate some backlinks to your site. The quality of the backlinks, meaning, how important the site linking to your site is. The more backlinks you have, the more you can stay on the top of Search Engines.
