1) Great/Amazing content combined with intelligent outreach
2) Guest posting on relevant sites
3) Social media (also powerful for brand awareness)
4) High % of branded anchor text + low % of exact match + lots of noise

- Reciprocal links - Not a good use of time unless very relevant.
- Blog Rolls - More likely to do damage than good nowadays.
- Blog comments - Only manual comments that add value - no spam.
- Wide range of keywords - Always a good idea to target as many relevant keywords with decent search volume as possible.
- Only high quality one way links - Yes of course, but not 'Only'.
- No purchased links - Its more complicated - Some paid links such as sponsorship can and do work.
- Forget About lots of external linking - Just Build Strong Content - The former follows the latter.

Building strong, quality backlinks is not really that hard. It simply requires more time and most importantly... something worth linking to. And these (time and effort) are things that the greedy webmaster looking for a quick return are simply not willing give up in return for great rankings. They want it now... and cheap... and easy.

Get out of the mode of thinking, "Where can I 'plant' an unnatural link to my mediocre content?". Instead spend some time thinking and planning your link building strategy BEFORE you even create your content. Before building a new site, resource, tool, or piece of content, think about things like:

Where can my targeted audience be found online?
Where online can I find visitors who will find my site useful and convert?
Which of those sites are complementary to my site and not competitors of my site?
Which of the sites that my targeted audience visits would be great sources of links for my site?
What content/resource/tool can I create that would be valuable to visitors of those sites where I want to get a link.

Then it's just a matter of building the site/resource/tool/content and making those sites where you'd like a placement aware that it exists. If it IS really great then the chances that they will link to it are good. If it is low quality or mediocre content then the chances that they will link to it are slim to none (closer to none).

So now days, finding great sources of links really comes down to building something great that cannot be easily found on thousands of other sites on the web. If you start with great content, the link building becomes much easier.

I disagree about forgetting external linking. I think its really important who you link out to; it says a lot about your site, your theme, neighbourhood, trust/credibility.

Blog comments are good? They could be consider as natural links?

1. Reciprocal Link is not a natural link campaigning
2. Blogroll link give multiple linking from same domain & using same key word.
3. Blog comments can be done but you need to be extra cautious
4. Guest post is the only valid way to build links, but don't overstress on using particular keyword, i would recommend to use your domain name as keyword
5. Social media can also be used.

They could be consider as natural links?

I would not consider that natural. A natural link is generally consider as a link given freely by one site to another. A blog comment link is a link given by the beneficiary to themselves from someone else's site. Not natural.

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:57 pm (utc) on Sep 29, 2012]

Social bookmarking and creating web 2.0 backlinks, e.g. wordpress.org, blog.com are good for a 2 month old site?

1. Reciprocal Link is not a natural link campaigning

Reciprocal linking as the sole-component of a link building effort has been out for many years now. However it's not a good idea to dismiss reciprocal linking completely.

There is an editorial decision to grant a link. That editorial decision, the conscious decision to create a link is a feature of a natural link. Done in low levels there is nothing wrong with reciprocal linking. That's been the case for many years.

Update on my linking building efforts on a 4 year old domain since my post. Thank you all for your valuable guidance which I did follow and did pay off.

Site went from a pr3 - pr5.

- Guest posting on relevant sites was one of my main tactics.
- Reciprocal links - found it to be to much work.
- Blog Rolls - Didn't take a chance and found prices way to high. But I may consider this in the future.
- Blog comments - small focus and all done manually
- Wide range of keywords - Covered 20 keyword phrases and attached lots of noise around them.
- No bulk purchased links - Only purchased a few high quality and highly targeted links. Receiving steady traffic from those links. They were costly but delivering.
- Another huge focus was on high quality content. All unique content of value to prospective clients, along with photo galleries and text.

I guess I will keep going with the above.

Sorry, think it was a pr4 to pr5. Don't really watch pr anymore.
northweb

Congrats, glad it worked out for you.

Reciprocal links - found it to be to much work.

Usually I only do recips when during the course of a link-beg campaign someone with quality content and backlinks (regardless of PR) requests a link back. I don't do recip campaigns, I stopped in 2003.

Blog Rolls - Didn't take a chance and found prices way to high. But I may consider this in the future.

In light of recent developments, something to consider is that your linking patterns may be lumped together with the others who are on the same pages with your link. If they receive an unnatural links warning and do a reconsideration request naming names of where they paid for links, then the page you're on might get burned, along with your link.

So then are all paid links a gamble including blog rolls, sponsored links and guest posts? Plus, change your link patterns as much as possible.

The information you all provide is so valuable, saves a huge amount of time and helps to eliminate the guess work.

Many Thanks Everyone.

If you think about it, the only links that are natural are those not asked for and anything else is not natural because you are doing it to rank higher. Think of your link building plan as marketing rather than building links to rank higher. For example, if you post articles in niche article directories, do so to get people hooked to your site and not for the purpose of a cheap link back to your site that invariably people do (in the resource box). This way you will eliminate lot of the bad practices in linkbuidling campaigns. Most importantly, though, write content that you yourself wouldn't mind linking to if it appeared on someone else's site. In other words, top notch content.

zakamichi (4455584) you nailed it on the head here.