Learning to link based on competition 101

Help a newbie

[mkfoto]

Ay there... thanks for looking.

I am completely new to all of this and SEO in general.
I want better search engine placement. I am a photographer other than building a links page on my site and slowly manually asking for links from others and doing it all the old fashioned way...
I have heard others in threads talking about crawling competitions links pages or .php, and easy ways to help automate part of the task of linking how in detail to I do this?
Or how to look back at yahoo history how do I do that?
As much description as you can give me would be helpful
Or if you can point me toward a site with a step by step how to that'd be cool.
Thanks in advance

[Lorel]

If you do a search for any keyword and then check PR and backlinks on those who are ranking on first page, having the most links doesn't always mean first place. Sometimes a lower PR site will out rank a higher PR site for that keyword. There are a myriad of factors affecting keyword rank such as good SEO and this includes watching keyword density.

Submitting to automated link exchange programs often results in bad links that pass no pr. Therefore, I would say the only way to gather links is one by one. Submit to sites that pass PR and this means making sure the link page is passing PR and not just the home page. Make sure it's not in a frame or has a meta refresh or no follow tag or code in .htacess preventing SE's from following the link, not too many links on the page, etc.. Also if the site is categorizing their links and doesn't allow more than 50 links on a page that's good, but not if it's alphebetical as your link will move from page to page and the PR may change also. Remember you have to count their menu and footer links also.