The best way to get links (including text links) is by natural reciprocating. Simply put a link on your page to some site that would be interesting to your users and ask the webmaster of that site to link back to you. Don't speak at any moment about cross-promotion, link-exchange, nor anything of those: simply try to make some resources more reachable to your users, and those who manage those resources migth feel that your site is as interesting for their visitors as their site for yours.
And, the most important, do not try to get a fixed keyphrase as tittle or description for all the links:
it wouldn't be natural. Let the other webmaster decide wich text use to put the link.
Also, some sites have link-exchanges managed through databases and forms: this is 100% artificiall. A link is only natural if it is put to help users, and search engines work
always in separating natural and artificial links.
In some posts, people say that G checks if incomming links are all (or a great part) identicall for a site to infer if the links are natural or not. If you have natural links, they will have diferent texts, but with some repeated keywords in them. This is what G considers that makes a page relevant for those keywords (apart of many other factors, of course).
As a summary:
A reciprocal links pair is a link from site A to site B and another one from B to A.
A link exchange is an artificiall reciprocal links pair.
Reciprocating is the fastest way to get links.
Artificial linking is bad-viewed by most of search engines.
So, reciprocate but don't exchange
Or, as GGuy uses to say: think in users, not in SERPs ;)
Greetings,
Herenvardö
