It is a well known fact in the world of webmasters that you need lots of links in order to rank well in the search engine results pages. But no all links are worth the same, you can have 3000 links and rank higher than someone with 20,000 if your links are from sites of a better quality.
In the past, all you needed to rank highly in the search engines was reciprocal links, which made seo quite easy because the links were easy to get. You’d find a site that was promoting itself by exchanging links, add their link on your site, email them asking for a link back, and wait. You then have a link, they have a link, everyone’s happy.