I’d thought I’d close mentioning you really should have a specific goal every time you start linkbuilding.

What do you want to rank no1 in Google for anyways?

• your company name or brand? Not only do you want to rank for it, you want to control every mention of your company name in Google, easily done by social media participation and using the authority of other sites to rank for your brand. Very easy to achieve with just on page optimisation and a few incoming low-quality links (sometimes, not even).
• Your service, in your area? – again, fairly easy. Done with on-page optimisation (geographic mentions in the title and in the text for instance), and generally speaking some low-quality links
• Your service in your country? - slightly more difficult than above, but can be handled with plenty of low quality links from even low quality, unrelated sites in some cases
• Your service? – difficult depending on the niche – you’re going to need some decent links or at least the same amount of crap links your competitors have. Crap anchor text links outweigh unfocused poor anchor text links from even relatively authority sites.
• Your products? – generally speaking, very difficult, especially if your products can be bought in a 1000 other places. You’re going to need links that pass pagerank, anchor text and trust ie ranking ability. You’re going to need a few trusted sites to link to you to rank all those products. The more pages on your site, the more pagerank you will need. To get pr, you need incoming links.

A weight of crap links built over time can beat even a relatively trusted site in Google in 2009 – still. However, it’s these links Google have a lot of brainy people working on attempting to nullify, so why swim against the tide?

ESPECIALLY considering just a few links from one site can transfer instant ranking ability and trust to a new site, or one link from one PR5 page can transfer enough pagerank to heat up an entire 200 page website with no other links. Finding those sites can be a full time occupation though.

Deciding what you want to rank for and how you want to do it are at the core of link building strategy.