i have done lot of backlinks in two months. around 5000 backlinks done in two months and got PR 3 from PR 0 this time. I think content + PR can help you more. More concentrate on content. I was on top for my content although my PR 0. So content is important
Yes... if you are building backlinks with your main anchor text, and other various anchor texts, you can do great in the search engine rankings.
That would be too low a goal, I believe. For example, if your content is good, you should be picking up way more than one link per month just from people voluntarily linking to pages on your site that they like.
Quality beats quantity every time. Fun that seems to hold up for both search engines & human beings ... Surprise! Surprise!
achieving backlinks is the hardest part in seo I could say (quality ones not spaming) that can be a reason why backlinks are still counting so much, for big efforts to be "awarded" cheers.