Welcome to the board bearpaws
First of all, you will need to trade hardlinks with sites that are like yours. Meaning if your site is about Latin, the hardlinks you trade for should also have something to do with Latin. Otherwise your google will devalue your backlinks. Furthermore, stay away from link farms, they tend to get ban by google and if there is a link to your site from theirs, you might get penalized for it.
Lastly, pick good trading partners when you trade links. If you trade with higher ranked sites who does not have many outgoing links from their sites, the links will be worth more in terms of SEO for your site