Optimisation for the Bing search engine

Bing was not a significant market share outside the U.S., but tips that apply to this engine are valid for most others too.

Tips for getting inbound links

Bing provides a list of advices on the site, which mirror the basics of SEO already expressed in various articles on this site, as the SEO bible for example.

Relevance is essential. Relevance is important for links between pages: if links come from unrelated pages, their value is reduced or even they could be totally ignored.
The authority of a site brings much to the value of a link. A site is considered authoritative when he a lot of contents, a long history in his space, he has quantities of backlinks.
Quality is better than quantity. A small number of quality links is better than quantity of links from irrelevant pages that do not even appear in results.

We encourage you to create links with various methods ...

Contact the webmasters of sites whose theme is related to yours to let them know that you exist.
Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Add links to articles in directories.
Participate in forums. This is partly contradicted by the following section: too much links suddenly appear...

Prohibited links

And nearby links to get, there are those that must be avoided because they are more harmful than useful.

A large number of links that appears suddenly.
Quantity of links from comments on blogs or site unrelated to yours.
Hidden links in your pages.
Trade links.
Links on sites known as link farms (where anyone can add links, which fill the pages).
Links from your site to spam sites (which often happens with directories that require a backlink).

Other Tips

Avoid manipulations: once they are detected (and they are always) a spam rank factor is applied to the entire site.

There is an apparent contradiction in the advices from Microsoft. Directories of articles do not provide quality links, but you are encouraged to use them.
Similarly, they urge you to contact other webmasters but do not exchange links.
The contradiction is resolved probably by moderation: each link must be considered, mass links as those from blogrolls are abusive.