Link popularity/ Generating backlinks is a critical part of Search Engine Optimization. You can’t make sales if the customers don’t find your website, be it in search engines or other popular pages. Search engines like Google and other’s give higher ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related quality sites. This does not mean that you get your site listed in one of the many link farms ( pages containing line after line of links) and get done with it. In fact, it may have quite an opposite effect and search engines will consider this practice as Spam/Black hat marketing. Always bear in mind that the quality of the site you are linking to is important.

Get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo. It will take time and follow-up to get listed in these top directories. DMOZ is free whereas Yahoo is paid only for Commercial Listings and free for the non commercial ones. Always browse to the deepest category of a directory and submit your listing.

Some of the best ways to get back links are;

1. You can get quality backlinks through directory submission. It may take a long time as it may have to be approved based on the quality of the site and its relevance.
2. If you want the fastest way to build backlinks, you can use forums for posting. But spamming in forums can result in Permanent BAN. Find a relevant discussion forum and post messages on it. Forums signatures is one good way of obtaining quick back links.
3. Social bookmarking sites have high PR and can generate high quality backlinks to your site.
4. Link Exchanges/trading is also a good option.
5. Best of All: You need quality content, then you need to share it with people who take an interest in your niche and link you. Just make sure that your content isn’t duplicate and you will be offering both your visitors and the search engines something new and something unique.
6. Write an article about your site’s topic and submit it to article sites like EzineArticles.
7. Answer related questions on Yahoo Answers, and provide your link along with it.
8. Create a blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com (or both!) about your site’s topic and link to appropriate pages in your site. Find relevant blogs that’s about your topic and post comments to the blog or send a mail to the blog owner asking him to review your site.
9. Getting high PR backlinks can be a quick way to boost your own PR and bring in targeted visitors, especially if the site you’re buying the link from is relevant to your niche.
10. Purchase advertising in appropriate forums. This can be a much more advantageous way to advertise your site, as opposed to the cost and complexity of Google Adwords.
11. If you know what the main competitors are in the niche you’re targeting, you can attempt to contact the webmasters. You can set up mutually beneficial advertising (reciprocal linking) schemes.
12. Some other techniques which you can about for link building are;
1. Classified ad posting
2. RSS submission
3. Article submission
4. Press release submission
5. e book submission
6. Pad file submission
7. Video upload
6. Create backlinks from Yahoo Answers