When you are tracking your link building strategies and their results, it is important to remember the age old recommendation that quality is better than quantity.  You definitely want to get lots of incoming links to your site.  But if they are from pointless directories that have no page rank to share, then they aren’t really doing much for you.

Your best bet is to focus on getting important links from a quality “seed set”, including Yahoo and DMOZ, before setting out to get more incoming links from other sources.

Your next best bet is to find the partners in your industry with which you can share links.  These would include vendors that you purchase from or retailers that you sell to, or even strategic partners that you work with.  But don’t spend too much time making direct calls to get these types of links, especially if you extend this task to cold calling strangers who you think might want to swap links.  Once you get to that point in this process, it is time to invest your time and money in a good web marketing campaign that will yield hundreds if not thousands of links from all across the internet.

Remember that a good marketing campaign would probably include a smart press release, which can yield you hundreds of links over night – a far “return on investment” than trying to get those links with cold calls.