If your links aren't relevant then you will lose search engine ranking. The key to effective link building is to make it look as natural as possible. The search engines are really good at recognizing un-natural patterns, because their ranking system wasn't created to be manipulated for your own gains. Building natural and relevant links will result in higher rankings that actually lasts. That's why when you try to do the whole process manually; it can get quite tricky as you try to get the right links. Most people go out and find any and every site that they can post their website's url to. Basically, this is a sure way to lose.

The rest of this article will make you aware of some tactics that will hurt your site.

One of the mistakes most people make is only linking to their home page and none of the others. If your goal is to have all of your pages rank high then you need to concentrate on linking to each page that you want to increase rankings for. To get optimal results, you want each page to focus on its own set of keywords. In this business you will want to be able to be found with different keyword searches and the only way to do that is to backlink to different pages. It might even be a better idea for someone to find your site through a page on your site that contains the keyword they were looking for because it is more targeted to their search. Creating backlinks for your homepage can be a headache, whereas, it can be easy for topical pages. For example, you can write an informative article on an individual page and then email other webmasters/bloggers for a backlink to it. Doing this for your main page is almost unheard of.

Don't make the most common backlink building mistake of all: simply getting as many links as you can without being concerned with their quality. It may seem logical to assume that three links are more valuable than one. The way it works, however, is that the search engines place a higher value on certain kinds of links than others. It's better to have high quality links than simply a large number of them. For instance, having a backlink coming from an authority site is way better than getting 10 links from low-quality sites that are spammy. You may be tempted to get lots of low quality links because they are cheap, but a few links from well ranked sites in your niche will help you far more. If you have too many low quality links, in fact, your website can be downgraded by the search engines, who will see you as an unethical link builder. The apparent shortcuts when it comes to link building won't help you in the long run. If you want long term success, build it gradually by creating a high quality site and exchanging links with other good sites.

Remember to take your time when building links so you won't forget important steps, such as, using your main keywords as anchor text.

Also, image links work but they are not as powerful as text links with anchor text.