For reciprocal links.. Do it yourself and BY HAND. Don’t use one of those 1000+ link directory sites. Keep your links relevant to the PAGES you want to link to. Don’t always use your homepage as the page that the incoming reciprocal link is coming to, and try and mix up your anchor text so it’s not the same damn thing over and over. If you add more keywords and turn your anchor text into more of a one liner description with your primary and secondary keywords inside, you’ll see better results on a broader scale, rather than just hitting one keyword at a time.
For direct links.. outsource it. I always do. Don’t buy those pay per month links either, because those aren’t permanent if you decide you don’t want to shell out $50 a month anymore. Get someone from elance or RAC or somewhere like that and make them understand that you want RELEVANT and TOPIC RELATED direct links. They’ll probably charge you a one time fee of $10-$20 per link, but it’s a premanent link so it’s probably worth it. Don’t worry about pagerank either, because it’s fairly useless. Make sure the pages that are linking to you are ones that are visited often by the engines and are RELEVANT to your PAGES. Follow the same anchor text rules as above..
Be patient and once the link has been established LEAVE IT ALONE. Don’t play around with it. Let the engines take it’s course and keep updating your links every month. Don’t get greedy either. A maximum of 30 links per month is just fine.
This should give you substantial rankings over the next 3-6 months. Follow this method and I can almost assure you it will beat out whatever current method you’re using. If you’re worried about using this on a primary site of yours, then you should have test/dummy sites where you use them for testing out new seo methods without risking your primary sites.
Best Regards,
Shuvayu
MarketRaise Corp.