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Two main components of Search Engine Optimization are Content and Links.

"Content is King" has been the mantra for years (many now claim "Content Curation is King" but I digress). The point is content is very important.

Considerable attention must be paid to link building as well. In fact, links are the "currency" of the World Wide Web; it's the road map for Google bots and Web crawlers. Unfortunately but never to our knowledge has the actual Relative Link Value of any given individual link been charted. With that said, there is a general consensus among SEO professionals as to link value.

The Link hierarchy chart below displays from high to low, the perceived value of any given inbound link. The value of a link pointing to your page content is important due to its ability to pass link "juice" (value or authority) to a given page. If you expect to achieve high page one rankings on major search engines for highly competitive keywords, then some serious link "juice" will be required to attain your goal - presumably the #1 spot on the SERPs for your targeted keywords.

Attempting to quantify this subject is an ongoing debate and will remain flexible and ever-changing. As Google makes changes to its algorithm - such as the now infamous Panda update - the value of links will subsequently change. In general, links from high authoritative sites will give you more link "juice" than those form low quality sites, which can easily be manipulated by spammers.

Link Hierarchy - (this is an approximation and should be used as a general guide)

High Value

Page which has a significant quantity of links pointing to it
Permanent Links: Press Releases, Published Articles
Highly Ranked Page for a particular head or long-tail keyword with like topic as target page
PR4+ content
High Alexa Traffic Rank
Major Worldwide Directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, with high Page Rank
Ranked Page with few outbound links pointing out to other sites
Any "naturally" acquired voluntary incoming hyperlinks from same industry
.Edu and.Gov Authorities

Medium Value

Blogs that are self hosted versus free blogs
Home Page Sources
Variable anchor text links from indexed sites
Links originating with page placement near the top or header section
RSS feeds and blog rolls
Links from root domains versus links from subdomains or subdirectories
Sites with High Domain Rank or established Domain Trust
Static URL, or any regularly crawled (ie. Spidered) content
links and from sites/web pages that have been published for several years (their is authority given to aged domains)
High PR pages that don't use the No-Follow tag (although no-follow is diminishing)
Directory listing as long as the page has minimum outgoings links (may be moving down the list in terms of value)
Contextual links originating from within same site's page content (the actual post or article)
Links with surrounding contextual content matching the anchor text
Rich keyword anchor text links
Pages with complementary and related topics
Social Media site links - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter - (may be moving up the list in terms of value)
Author Bio Resource Areas (common in article directories such as EzineArticles)

Lowest Value

Low value directories attained from directory submissions
Free Blogs and Forums
Dynamically generated pages
Unrelated topic sites
Resource Pages with fewer than 15 outgoing links
Footer and Sidebar Links
Inbound Bookmarks where other users Bookmark your pages (Quality bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon still have value)
Reciprocal links

I love everything SEO and Internet Marketing. As a full time Internet Marketer who works with small business clients, being able to make a nice living and share my knowledge has made me a very happy family man. If you are interested in learning more about SEO and link building I highly recommend this free Link Building Tutorial.