Incoming links are a measure of a sites authority. They are an important factor in your overall rankings, but there are dozens of other factors to consider along with that. I automate my link building with simplifiedses.com Link Exchange.
Backlinks can provide two sources of traffic - direct and indirect. Direct = directly from the actual website you've got your site link on. Indirect = through increased search rankings on google and other search engines.
i think it depends where you post them, if you post them on dormant webpages they will never bring traffic
The perfect number of quality backlinks is equal to the number it requires to take over the position you desire on Google. Which is usually a number slightly higher than what your competitor has. Not all links are weighted equal, the better matched the source, your anchor text being equal to your keywords, and the ranking of the other sites, all play role in how much weight each link will pass to you.
Backlinks dont really help your site much anymore, a little more traffic will be gained, but until your PR 5 its pointless!
That is an interesting theory, except for the fact you can prove backlinks make the difference in almost every case, by doing research with Market Samurai, and other tools.
nowadays google and other search engines give preference only to relevent link and relevent link pages strictly as per theme.Updates have become more acurate and regular.
Backlinks are the key to get your site higher up in the google rankings. The goal is to get somewhere on the front page of Google. Before backlinks though you need to see if you can compete, so there's plenty of work that needs to be done before you start worrying about backlinks.
There are 2 article distribution site I submitted a lot of articles a few years ago and my page rank went up a lot.
Here is a link to an article I wrote on link building that might help Inbound Links And How They Build Link Popularity
Miguel82's summary is perfect. Plus you get the added benefit of any real people who might just follow those links to your site, amazingly not only googlebots follow links.