• Use Open Site Explorer and research the sites linking to your competitors. Type your keyword that you are trying to get the page on your site to rank for in to Google. See who ranks #1 currently. Cut their URL and paste it into the mentioned site, Open Site Explorer and discover their top inbound one way links.

• Link baiting

This is probably your most effective way of building powerful one-way links, and this is exactly what Google, Yahoo!, and Bing want you to do. Link baiting is a fancy term for writing content that is so great that it gets links from other websites. You want them from news sites, bloggers, social media sharing, etc. Consider your unique skills, ideas, and expert area and position them on the web. Do you want to get a one of your new pages ranking high? Consider placing a really helpful “How To” or “what Does” that will attract links. The main concept is that you won’t have to request links. You will get them naturally, and your web page will rise up the search engine ranks.

• Requesting links from high page rank websites

This is the hardest and will require the most work. A main Strategy and absolutely essential strategy in link-building. Find sites, blogs and pages you like and contact them and ask for a link.

• Request links from vendors and business partners

Since you already have a business relationships with your target list. These vendors will have links to other partner websites,. You might just require you sending a quick email requesting a link. Try submitting a testimonial for displaying on the vendor website, and request a link back to your website in exchange. If they request a link back, it’s best give it to them, but know that reciprocal links are not nearly as valuable as one-way links.

• Develop relationships with schools and government organizations

Try to obtain one way links from .edu and .gov websites. Websites with these domain extensions are very highly trusted by Bing, Yahoo and Google!

These types of websites are given much more credibility than a random blog. These can be difficult to acquire, so think of ways that you can provide value to these organizations in order to obtain such links.

• Publish guest blogs and articles on other websites,

Write a guest blog and incorporate a contextually relevant link to a deep page on your site if the publisher will allow. Ensure that you include contextually relevant links to other quality websites as well. Caution with this tactic, however as Google is scraping and searching for it because this was abused and not as valuable today.

• Submit press releases to industry-related news websites

Write news worthy articles and watch links come in by the boatload. If your news is newsworthy within your industry. You will see it get re-published on related news sites with links pointing to the page that you specify.

• Directories 

Yes, they are another way to build one way links. Don’t focus too much on these, however, as you want to diversify your link building profile. Here’s a few directories to consider:

• Yahoo! Directory – Approx $300. annually, near instant listing
• Niche Directories related to the topic of your website. Do a search on Google with queries like  + “submit URL” or  + “add URL”
• DMOZ – Free but difficult to get listed in

• Keep the anchor text of your incoming links natural

You must avoid a penalty from Google’s Penguin algorithm. Don’t get majority of links to a page on your site have the same anchor text. This is spam in the eyes of all search engines. Sometimes keyword-rich links do happen naturally, so you don’t want to completely stop using them. Keep them to a reasonable number, typically no more than 14% of the total links pointing to the page on your site should have keywords in your anchor text.

• Avoid “run of site” links

These links that appear in the sidebar others will place them in the footer of every page on another website. These links are not ranks or scored high as “deep links”. Links from a high ranking, single site page on another website are best. Since the others look a little spammy to again all search engines. They still have a little value, but not as valuable as a deep links from well scored Page Rank webpages.

• Obtain links from webpages that are topically related to yours

Request your link also be placed in close proximity to other related keywords within the content of the page.This takes a lot of salesmanship.

• Avoid requesting links from low Page Rank webpages, unless they are topically relevant. Have you heard bad news is good news? While it’s true that most any link is a good link. This is true as long as it’s not from a banned or flagged website by Google. Completely off topic and from a questionable industry would not be desirable. Your website or blog will get more value from one link from a high well ranked page.  Many links from poor page rank site pages is harmfull to a web site. Do your best to only link to high Page Rank sites and blogs. You have to let Google understand that you are a website they can trust, and your own site Ranking will benefit as a result.

• Avoid links with the “nofollow” code

 They will not give your web site or blog any link juice from Google and others. The “nofollow” attribute tells the search engines not to follow the link. So your website and blog will get no credit. Also avoid redirect and javascript  links, as search engines cannot easily read them. Google today has gotten better at reading javascript links, but not recommended.

• Obtain links from webpages that have few links already on them. The more links on an external webpage, the less valuable a link to your website will be. They have to all share the value of the page rank.

• Never buy links from link brokers.

Links should be acquired naturally. Developed naturally without request by having great content on your website.

• Ontolo – A very cool link building tool  that allows you to find link building prospects by type/footprint using keyword phrases related to your niche, and save them in lists. The tool also finds contact information, identifies competitors’ links. Clueing you that the prospect would probably link to you as well. Also prioritizes the opportunities for you.

• Buzzstream – Project link building outreach to scale while keeping a personable approach. You are able to discover links and prospects by type and other factors. This tool can bookmark link building prospects and save key metrics like pagerank, domain authority.. Also automatically finds things like contact forms, social media profiles. The final kickers are that it acts almost like a CRM. Allowing you to keep all your link prospect contacts organized. It also allows you to customize templated emails to your prospects. Then showing you conversion rates of different types of e-mails.