Have a good keyword in the "anchor text." This is the language of the actual link. It is used by search engines to decide which sites to display in the results pages. With article submissions, be sure to also have the full URL displayed as well, so those who use your article won't mess up the link. For example, you could have the keyword "strategic linking" used as your link, but then also show the full URL (starting with http://). Of course, if the keyword is in your URL, you are already one step ahead of the competition.

Have links from more important pages. If you don't have a Google Toolbar on your browser, you may want to get one and start checking out the "PageRank" (Google's trademarked proprietary system for ranking web sites) of the web sites you put links on. Submit articles to web sites with a PageRank of 4 or higher, and exchange links with higher-ranked sites as well.