I won't lie, I'm clueless

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Last month I started a website for graphic supplies, it gets pretty good traffic from deviantart, however I want to be found in search engines as well. The question is how? I know that SEO is very important when it comes to sites, but I just can't really understand it sadly. I've done research on it, I hear that backlinks are very important so I've been trying to build those up but I don't know if its doing me any good. I hear of the site ranker Alexa but its not counting half my links it seems, at first it only counted one and now I'm up to four. I don't know if I'm doing anything wrong..or where to look for help far as tutorials or anything. I'm tired of searching on google, I have other things I need to do besides staring at sites that don't help me any. How does anyone learn this stuff? It seems that a lot of the sites contradict each other.