Any link pointing to your site from another site is called a backlink.

Here is the first paragraph of a pinging service called pingates:
"Ping your blog or website to 40+ search engines and services that keep track of blogs/sites and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog or site has been updated and hence, they crawl your site to find the changes."

Search google for "blog ping" and read up on the subject.

~Olav