To rank well in Search Engines, nothing is more important than high quality links that point to pages on your website. What makes a link a high
quality link? Ideally you want a link that utilizes keywords you want to rank well for from a related website that itself ranks well and has few outbound links.
Links from low ranking unrelated sites with tons of outbound links won't hurt you (in most cases) but are not worth pursuing unless a possible customer may
find their way to your website and convert to a sale from the link. It is much more worthwhile to pursue the high quality links. One high quality link can
be worth 100 or even 1000's of low quality inbound links.
In the past reciprocal linking was
an effective way to build the quantity of incoming links but the search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated and the benefit will be canceled
out by your link back to link partner (search engines algorithms can now also detect 'triangular' linking schemes).
Inbound Links To Do
Be sure to use a variety of your best keywords in the anchor text (when you have the option)
Achor text pointing back to your site pages should vary and look natural
Request links from product suppliers to see if they will create a link. Often you can find these in a suppliers “dealer locater” page
Request links from business associates like accountants, attorneys, chamber of commerec, any profesional associations related to your industry
Request links from friend and family, college friends (.edu and .gov domains are especially valuable),
Use yahoo ‘site explorer’ to find competitor’s back links. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
Reciprocal linking is not worth the effort in most cases
AVOID ‘run of the site’ links
AVOID purchasing links except in cases where you can dictate the details like anchor text and where the link is placed etc
Author onsite ‘link bait’ content. Sources of content could include, how to's, descriptions of proccesses responses to common question via email, in house notes, memos procedures etc
Deep link the incoming links
AVOID outbound links to ‘bad neighborhoods’
Submit to all the directories that Search Engine News book recommends (more directory listings beyond that would have a limited effect).
Get creative! :)