Share your ideas about link building methods. To start with I list few here. 1. Directories Submission 2. Forum Postings 3. Article Submission 4. Link exchange 5. Link Purchasing Lets introduce new ways for link building..
What a lot of people are doing is contact webmasters that have good PR sites by email to ask for links exchange. Other than that you basically covered them all "except spam obviously".
giving away select bits of content but requiring that sites that use it link back is probably one of my favorite ways, and definitely one that involves very little effort.
There are a lot more. For example giving people insentives to link to you eg giving away various tools and buttons that contain a backlink Then there are various templates. For example you need to promote a forum. You can make a free forum theme for others to use with a "designed by wwwdotyoururldotcom" in the footer. Then there is social engineering and good old lying. Eg you run a SEO website for beginners. You simply say something along the lines of: In order to get good PR you need to be associated with a quality website. You can do this by linking to us from your main page.
if you have some programming knowledge. YOu can actively develop web applications and give them away free for webmasters to use and have a backlink coded into the scripts. Or if your a good designer develop kick ass templates and give them away free with obviously a backlink coded into the footer
"Ecomatrix" thats a good idea, but create only good scripts. "Zokiii" thanks for that link, its very usefull. jalika
I started a site that allows users to add badges to support the cause/site. It has created a ton of links with virtually no cost.
Webrings? I think they help... Reciprocal links are a way of brining traffic, but the problem is that you dont see big sites like youtube or myspace with shared links.... It just doesnt look professional having all types of links on your site with different colors and all... It's best to have them in 'sponsors' or 'brought to you by' and stuff like that.
I only include text links in my directory so the page is the same color and very uniform. I know what you are saying, though. I don't particularly care for links pages with text links and all kinds of different color banners mixed in. It just looks very messy. If you choose to do banner links then you should use a table and neatly organize them. I have seen that done and I think it looks nice like on this site. http ://www.smiledogproductions.com/photo_related_2.htm (I added a space)
A way to get around that is to use only XHTML and CSS. You keep all of the formatting info out of the link text. Crawlers will see only the XHTML and browsers will see all links with a consistent style.