Direct linking shows the most immediate returns to be sure. As for creating tier's, think of it like this....home page links were incredibly successful and still can be, simply because the links you were getting had a lot of links of their own already. Tiers allow you to create that same affect, although it definitely takes much, much longer.

The main thing to focus on as an Internet marketer building back links to your site for off-site purposes is solely quality content and distribution landmarks that possess high traffic volumes.

Our main strategy is building authority accounts and document sharing sites by providing high-quality material that our customers are seeking as we refer them back to our site with the link containing are keywords in the document for more information about that hinted upon solutions described in the content.

So essentially rewrite high-quality articles convert them to PDF after we had embedded are link at the bottom of the document. From there we upload them to document sharing sites such as stoc stoc and scribd.

We has several different split testing campaign set up testing different back linking strategy and so far to the strongest methods are creating links and document sharing sites with PDF files and drastically increasing the value of the PDF links with image sharing site links pointing back to the document.

So should be obvious that we would recommend document sharing sites for your on-site Seo strategies utilizing image sharing and PDF sharing resources.

so make a pdf with your site in it? And put it in a file sharing website? What are these backlinks called?

How about socialadr.com (social bookmarks) which is $40 a month I believe, and also forum posting, blog commenting. All are free and drive relevant traffic to your website who want to read / see your content. MAKE SURE you're posting the most RELEVANT forums and blogs that you can.