Search Engine Friendly Places to Get a Backlink From

In today's world of 9,000,000,000 or so web sites, having people finding you without spending a fortune can be a pain in the royal buttocks. There's a list of things you can do to help get your site search engine optimised, but with the internet being a "web of sites" linking sites together helps people find things too. Links that point to your site from somebody else's, otherwise known as Backlinks, are a good way to help get your site noticed. The problem is they aren't always that easy to get sorted. Below is an ever changing (or every time I find a good new place) list of SEO friendly ways to get backlinks sorted to your site. They won't all be useful to everyone, but they are all useful.

• Net-Guide. Only accept accessible sites which conform to current standards. Sites are all tested & double checked before being added to the directory. There is a small charge to be included in the directory, but it's a one-off fee.
• businessblogwire.com. I believe this site invented blogtipping, so is well known and well ranked. I don't have a link on here, but I wish I did.
• Some Social Bookmarking sites such as the ones on this list are search engine friendly and do not use "nofollow" to prevent links in your profile being visited.
• phillyfirstonthefourth.com - Human edited search engine friendly directory.
• If you design or build sites yourself, get a backlink from the site's homepage. Most web designers will do this anyway.
• w3csites.com - make yourself a profile, and add each site you build. Make sure it's accessible and validated though. That's the whole point of the site.
• Test your site using webagogo.be's online seo, accessibility and markup validator tool. Once your results are in, you'll get a backlink to your site appear on Yahoo not too long afterwards. Bonus.
• Tags page. Probably too many links on one page, but a nice idea anyway.
• Forums. Seek out forums about things you are interested in. Once signed up, edit your profile to include your website URL. These are usually shown everytime you post. Not all forums are indexed by search engines, indeed some I post on do not. For the ones that do, every proper post you add that doesn't get removed can provide you an extra backlink. It's an obvious way to get links, but useful when you consider lots of people do post on forums and search through them for lots of things. So post, post and post. Just don't spam.
• On the back of the forums idea, posting comments on blogs and articles is another way to get a backlink, or at least get more search engine spiders to crawl your site. Again, this isn't bulletproof as many people post cmoments purely to get links to their site. Many webmasters have wised up to this and use "nofollow" on links posted in comments. Cheeky. Posting on comments can actually get your site noticed by people who want to link to you naturally. This happened to me with a comment left on a Smashing Magazine post about excellent free fonts for designers. I ended up with a link from an article on the same site about footers in modern web design. Spot on. Nice to know my work doesn't go entirely unnoticed :-)