Getting backlinks to your site is vital to your success on the search engines. Naturally you need to have your research done, keywords selected, on-page correct so you rank for the right terms; But without backlinks you might be lucky and rank for a handful of keywords that generate a few visitors.

You also need to ensure your off-page work (obtaining backlinks) matches your on page work as I mentioned in my article about On Page SEO. You need to use a variation of your keywords in your backlinks. That's not all though, you need as many links as you can from relevant web sites or web pages.

You main objective when trying to obtain links actually comes from your on-page, creating quality content that people will link to. Other than that, you can also do the following to increase your backlinks.

If you have a web site about flowers, then ideally you want links from other sites about flowers. You could then get links from florists and other sites about flowers such as forums, blogs and other online communities.

There are many sources of getting links out there but you need to be cautious in your efforts. Don't just take a link for the sake of a link, you want links from quality sites, larger sites with more authority are also better.

Below I will go through the different resources I have found very beneficial when building links for a site. Just remember though, when using forums, blogs and similar, participate and contribute rather than just chase links. Chances are it will get deleted as spam anyway, if it doesn't, it isn't the way to go about building brand awareness.

WEB DIRECTORIES & CLASSIFIEDS:
Directories & Classifieds can be very useful, especially those dedicated to a specific topic (vertical directories). Having said that they aren't considered a top grade link by Google, you want to use all the good ones then move on. When building links you need to mix up the resources your links come from.

BLOGS & FORUMS:
Blogs & Forums are a great way to get links. By participating you gain links back to your site while building good personal relations and brand awareness. You can also control the text in your backlinks via your signature.

NEWS SITES:
News Sites are another great resource for links while building personal relations and brand awareness. You won't always get a high PR link but you will build some brand awareness as these sites can get a lot of traffic.

SOCIAL MEDIA:
Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites are another great way to build some backlinks along with personal relations and brand awareness. Each of these sites can vary in their nature, again though, you need to make a genuine contribution to reap the rewards.

RSS FEEDS:
If your site is RSS enabled then submitting your feeds to submission services and RSS Sites is an excellent way to get your content out there and generate some links and brand awareness.

LINK MINING:
This is by far the best way to get valuable links. It's tedious but you pick up relevant links of high quality. You can mine links a few ways;

Software
This is a nice fast way to build a list based on keywords or your competitors.

Manually
Using Google you can type search queries like the following to source out great links, for example the following returns pages that have the word domain in the page title and guestbook in the url.

intitle:domains inurl:guestbook

You can also use search engines themselves to see how many links a site has and work off those lists.

You can try the following at Google to find competitors backlinks or your own;
link:http://www.yourdomain.com/

You can try the following at Yahoo to find competitors backlinks or your own;
linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

Another great way to build helpful links is to simply type your keywords in to Google and find any top ranking sites you can get links from. These links will help your rankings as they come from established sites on your keywords. When building links to your site be sure to build them to other pages in your site, not just the home page.

We all know the story about the tortoise and the hare right? Be the tortoise with your link building. Doing too much at once will cause more harm than good, build them up gradually and regularly. And again, create good content!