Links are the most important thing when trying to rank for competitive terms nowadays, and common ways of getting links are already known by everyone; that's the main reason why we need to focus on different, more advanced link building techniques. 

In this article I am not going to talk about common ways of link building such as exchanging links (cross linking way), submitting our site to top directories, link baiting (not really basic, but known), etc. I am going to focus on other less known techniques that can be used:

Using 301 redirects:

301 redirects aren't used much nowadays, and we should get the advantage by using them! A good simple (but expensive) way of using them is buying a site that belongs to your "rivals" (maybe ranking lower than you) and 301 redirecting that website to your domain. This should boost your rankings, as you would be earning all the link juice your competitor has. Another way of using 301 redirects for your advantage is for ranking inner pages: what we should do is register a new domain for each inner page we want to rank, then create a website with each domain, SEOing it for the keyword we want to rank on each inner page. After getting good positions with the new domains, we can 301 redirect each domain to each inner page, passing all the link juice to all inner pages. Why? Because it tends to be easier to get links to a domain than to an inner page.

Niche-Related Themes

We all know that creating new themes for CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, etc. is a great way of getting links, but it would be much better to create niche-related themes. For example, if we have an SEO company, the best thing we could do is create a theme that looks for people into the SEO market. If they like and use our theme, we would be getting quality, highly related backlinks for our SEO company from SEO people.

Creating Automatic Backlink Generators

What I call an automatic backlink generator is not what you think (hehe). What I mean is something that other people add on their site, and that something would include a link to your site. A great example for this would be a hit counter--they might not be the latest fashion, but lots of people still use them. What we would have to do is create a hit counter service where people would have to add a code to their site and by adding the code, a counter would be displayed along with a small text link to your site. Another example of this would be a tool that other people can add on their site or a link exchange directory, where they would have to link another site (not reciprocal) for getting listed.