Links serve the same purpose for rating of your content as references do for your job hunt. The essential similarity between the two is that both make you more reliable in the eyes of the concerned. The concerned in the first case is an employer while in the second case it is the crawler of a search engine.

As it is valuable to give reference of some having a high profile and well known to the employer, so it is cool for the crawler to find links in the contents of some high-ranked site that lead to your site/blog. Even links in your site leading to well-known sites may also help here.

You should not go overboard while making links. Particularly you need to be careful not to build links of any one type very frequently. You should have backlinks, you should have forward links and you should at the same time have two-way links.

Making two-way links is like helping anyone mutually. Your site has links leading to another site while the links on that site lead to your site. No links can be made from the starting words of the blog: the title, subtitle and the first word of any section cannot be hyperlinked (to lead to somewhere else). The links should be placed on the keywords in a content-rich article by rule. So, such types of texts like ‘click here’, ‘go to’ etc. should not be used for link-building.

Many sorts of relevant links that are liked by your readers are crucial to taking your site to high ranking.