Quality is better than quantity. As everyone knows by now links that grow to quickly do not look natural to search engines, so when search engines see this they become suspicious. Getting quality links are more important than getting quantity of links. One link from a page rank 8 can push you to the top of the search engines rankings compared to getting 100 page rank 0.
Getting links from web pages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook. Your link title should be brief and free of long sentences.
When optimizing your site you should optimize around the researched keywords that you chose. Remember content is king. Search engines love links and if these links are natural within the content search engines see the benefit and use them. Plus the rapidly changing content is another reason the search robots love the new content. Having good quality content is what brings reader to your site. Since the internet is about information content improve the quality of your website and by improving the quality this will bring people to your site. The site should be optimized for your chosen keyword or keywords. The first recommended way to get links is to develop useful, unique and original content. The way to get links to your site is to create well thought out meaningful content, when webmasters visit your website will read this information become interested and link to it from their website.
Manual link exchange is slow. However, link exchange done manually can be very, very time consuming. When placing the link in text body of the content, you are basically letting the visitor know that you are recommending the other website, the visitor might not be conscious of this, but this is basically what you are doing. Many people believe that Google and Yahoo have already started penalizing web sites that does link exchange in a large scale but we do not know the extend of it.
Reciprocal link exchange is not dead, if you provide links for the benefit of your visitors. Linking for the sake of visitors is a win-win scenario. Every link on your site is an official business contact exposure. So when opting to exchange links make sure the partner you are exchanging with is motivated to put the link on his site and you will need to do the same. One of the best ways to get links is using directories, blogs and articles. Yes link exchange is still worthwhile to do but your directive should be to get one way links, since these will really boost your search engine results. When acquiring one way links make sure you are using keywords in your anchor text, this will help with the one way link. Many web directories require you to pay for a one way link or exchange links with the directory.