Which I like to call Web development and marketing. But that's just me. Anyway the reason why I say that back-links are not the end-all-be-all of SEO is because that top spot goes to the page content. If you don't have content that people want to link to then why bother chasing after those links in the first place?
It all boils down to basics: * Article writing and submission * Social bookmarking * Active participation in the social community known as "the internet" * Blogs * Make your content easily bookmarkable, provide buttons for the easy addition in sites like digg, technorati, redurl, google, yahoo etc... * Provide and make available RSS of your content and/or aggregate RSS feeds from other sites * Frequently updated and unique content p.s. taken from the same URL as above