Link building is an essential part of promoting your blog and driving traffic to your blog. I briefly touched on this in Blogging Basics Part 4 - Blog Promotion. Basically what you want is to get other websites to link to your blog. 

You can use your blog title, post title, or other keywords as the text. This will tell search engines what this blog is about and will help you rank for those specific words. The more sites that link to yours, the higher your rank will be in the search engines and the more exposure your blog will receive. Your Google Pagerank will also go up and more traffic will be sent to your blog.

It is recommended that you use a variety of keywords that are related to your niche as text for your links. This will help you rank higher for a larger pool of keywords ultimately resulting in more search engine traffic.

There are many ways to get links to your blog. The Link Building Cookbook by Collin Lahay is a great place to learn some great link building strategies. Another great resource is the SEO Book. This is a guide that will help you increase your blog’s presence on the web and will increase your blog’s traffic. Check them both out to help you with your new blog.