I would start with the things that you should Not Do:
1. Stay away of pattern links where you can control signature, widgets, Bios. That's where Google is massively working and penalizing. Using them in the wrong direction pushes SEO strategy to manipulative way. Many SEO and marketers are using though.
2. Guest posting it's tricky, that's why don't use it against your business. And it's logic why exact match keywords can harm you very bad. Creating negative foorprints to your business will always be negative. Doing all without a backlink offers much more benefit and natural effect. The result is when you get linked back by someone as a reference and that can be done in any manner and that's a quality and natural link, despite the forms it comes.
3. Footers will be always a bad place for external links. Also the side-wide links.
What you should Do:
1. Be active on search engine. That's vital and keeps up everybody up. The gold word will always be important no matter what and that will be the foundation of a solid natural optimization merged with social signals and distribution. 2. Natural links, niche links are also a second important thing that you should do. This way you win credibility, traffic and lose any chances of controlling the anchors. Natural links..
3. Try and use nofollow.
Hope it helps.