are relevant backlinks enough to get your site ranked, without all of the article writing/submission and the social book marks etc etc??
Aren't all of those things simply places where you get links, though? Links are the most important part of ranking. IMO, even more important than title tag, content and everything else.
Relevant backlinks should help get you ranked, but ultimately your rank will depend on the websites you are competing against. To get ranked highly, you will need more backlinks, content, and better on page SEO than your competitors...
Short answer is yes. Non relevant links from social bookmarks helps to get indexed faster but barely helps to succeed in strong competition.
Also you need links from High page rank sites. The more authority the site has, the better the linkjuice
I had a page rank of 3 in about three months of work with submissions to google and several guest posts on major blogs in the niche I was working in at the time. Once you do get ranked though you'll notice that google finds you much easier. I wouldn't worry about competition either, your competition in terms of google searches can be your greatest allies if you do link exhanges together or write content good enough for them to want to write about it.
They need to be not only relevant, but from sites that are high quality, authoritative, and/or well recognized. They should have a decent number of quality backlinks as well.
If you are serious about getting the links I would suggest to do a mix of different ways. Articles also bring natural traffic.
Yea, link which are relevant will make your site rank higher. It will also help you on getting traffic.
Hm, what is the difference between "relevant" links and links from article directories (which are relevant to you article subject which is again relevant to your website, I suppose)? You are talking about the same things... social bookmarking will get you more links, which also means better SERPs and more traffic... everything of that is important in its own way...