The main motive behind the creation of any sort of website is to have visits of visitors on it, which could be only possible when the website is popular at wide level for the purpose of making a website popular among the visitors there are several sorts of methods are in existence through which a website can gain too much popularity among all of the ways through which a website can be popular the link building is the easiest and as well as the best way for this purpose too. Basically there are two ways through which the link building is conducted, these are inbound linking and outbound linking and along with these there are three other things as well the quantity, quality and relevance of the links which had an important value in increasing the websites popularity.
Yes it is important to have good relevant links, rather than thousands of spam links. Just like in life its more important for a person to have 1-2 good references, rather then 10 bad ones. The keys i use when looking for links are -Relevance -Quality Of The Site -Avoiding Google Penalties If you can do these 3 things then you should find yourself at the top of any keyword.
I agree. It is not the quantity anymore that counts, but the quality of the links pointing back to your site that matter.
Yes quality links are more important from niche categories which adds more advantages to your website , you can get such quality back links to your website by submitting your website to best web directories like directoryready which has top list of high ranking websites in different categories.
Of course, you should aim to build natural links for better result, I would say, it would help of course, there is no doubt to it really... believe me..