Most of the SEO consultants are selling nicely packaged snake oil. Many get links by blog comments, forum and directory spamming. But, there are few good consu

Most of the SEO consultants are selling nicely packaged snake oil. Many get links by blog comments, forum and directory spamming. But, there are few good consultants as well and they use several creative and hard ways to build links. Following are some of the effective white hat link building practices: 1) Competition research: Find out your competitors backlinks using a tool like http://www.ranksignals.com http://www.ranksignals.com, and try to get backlinks from their sources. This is easy and highly effective. (Disclosure: http://www.ranksignals.com http://www.ranksignals.com is my product) 2) Content Marketing / Guest Posting: Ask relevant bloggers in your niche if you could write a blog post on their website. They usually credit you with a link. 3) Infographics: Create an awesome infographics and spread it around the web. Don't forgot to provide an embed code with a backlink on your website. If you get enough bloggers sharing it on their blog, you will have lots of relevant links. 4) Sponsor contests and giveaway: Reach out to high quality blogs and offer them to sponsor contest with a giveaway of your product. This is almost free to you if you have a digital product / service. 5) Create an awesome design and submit it to all the design showcase websites like Dribble, Behance, Deviantart and hundreds of other web design galleries. These are hundreds of easy links right of the bat. Moreover, popular web design blogs (like SmashingMagazine) may pick your website and link to you; these blogs usually have very high PR.