What are inbound links? And why do I need them??

Without other sites linking to your website, it’s highly unlikely you’ll rank as high as you otherwise could, on Google & the other search engines. Links are Lovely (with a capital ‘L’) in SEO terms, and so I recommend you cultivate them in addition to the work you do with your carefully crafted copy!
Social media is one of the easiest ways to rack up some links – you can link from blog posts, within blog comments, and so on.
Have a look at the number of links to your website and to your blog, and examine the source of new links. How many links do you have, in comparison to your competitors? What sites are linking to them, that perhaps you could get to link to you as well?
There are several inbound link tracking services online. One you can look at is  Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. The free version allows you to track and report on up to 1,000 links.
If you’re looking for a magic number that automatically determines your social media prowess, you’re not going to find it. Instead, the secret to tracking social media is tying together disparate data sources, and selecting the metrics that make the most sense for your company. And those are never the obvious ones like Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Tracking social media may not always be easy and fast, but it’s absolutely, 100% do-able and you should be able to find a social media manager that can help you do that in a way that is relevant to your business.
You can see the full article from which this excerpt was taken here
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