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Links accomplish two things. The first is authority, and the second is relevance. The authority comes from the trust & authority of the linking site, and the relevance comes from the anchor text and the co-citation (co-citations means the content/links around that specific link you're getting).

So, anchor text influences relevance. If you're both trying to rank for the term Glass, and one has no links with the word "Glass" in any of them, while the author has a few links with the anchor text of "Glass", then the second will be deemed more relevant to the search, therefore ranking above the other. At the same time, if you abuse the anchor text property, by for example having every single one of your links having the exact phrase of "Glass", then Google will find it manipulative and lessen the authority of these links.

So, in conclusion, anchor text plays the role of relevancy.

+1 for Chris!

Sorry I just got to this question, but Nick, as Chris said, there's much more value than the initial link you get. Granted that some opportunities are really only worthwhile for that specific link, most opportunities for broken links should be turned into something far greater - a relationship.

Also, when you find URLs of broken resources, go to Open Site Explorer and plug those URLs in. Find other people linking to that same broken resource, and reach out to them as well. Ideally you should start an excel spreadsheet of different pages linking to broken resources, so as you come across more broken links, you can add even more prospects. In the end, you should never run out of sites to do some BLB on.

Hope this helps Nick!

That's a pretty broad question, but two tactics that would work best, although by no means unknown, are internal linking and guest posting.

Internal linking is basic, yet so freakin effective. Everyone says you should, but few actually do it correctly. Hopefully you have a blog. When posting about anything, and I mean anything, tie in those pages to your conversation. Don't just randomly link to them, but make sure you steer the convo towards the topic of those pages so you can link naturally to them. (And yes, internal links work. One of my client's competitors is ranking #1 for a money term that ranks solely on internal links. Frustrating, yes, but more importantly, learn from it.)

Guest blogging is great in this instance because you're going for 30 different pages, which means you need multiple links from a single opportunity. In most guest posts you usually get at least two links in the bio, which you can use for any of those 30 pages, but like when doing internal linking on your blog, make sure you tie some of those pages into what you're writing about in the bulk of your post. For example, if one of your pages has some great information on biking helmet X, and in your post you're talking about biking, make sure you start talking about the different options you have for helmets, and say that one of these options is helmet X (which you link to). The blogger won't have a problem with this because it's on topic & relevant.

Hope this helps! By no means is this comprehensive. You can go a number of directions, but since you're building links to a bulk number of pages, these two tactics would be the most efficient.

There's usually more to it. Links are just one part of the algorithm; although probably the biggest piece of the pie, there are so many contributing factors that it would be difficult to pin point which metric is the reason that specific site is winning (and in most cases, if not all, it's more than just one metric).

Sorry I can't answer it, but that's the question so many website owners & SEOs have: "Why is that site ranking above mine?". It's never an easy question to answer :).