Getting found in the wilderness that is the Internet has changed a whole lot. The days of over-optimizing pages and keyword stuffing in order to rank high in the search engine results, are long gone. Also gone are the days of building tons of dodgy links with only one anchor text to get a page to rank for that keyword. Sadly, many SEO providers still advocate link building as the best form of getting quick rankings. Quick, maybe? Sustainable? NO! see full post at http://www.gomungoseo.co.uk/Writing...nt-To-Any-Company-Providing-SEO-Services.html
If you go to the fist age of google for any competitive keywords you will find the sites have very powerful backlinks. You can write the prettiest article you want but unless it is in a well linked site it will never be found. and if content is so powerful why do you need to drop a backlink here ?
In my article I have actually written that "Creating content is something that should be taken more seriously than just building links." I agree that building powerful backlinks is crucial, however to get powerful backlinks that in Google's eyes "appear natural" building them into the "prettiest article" or writing great engaging content can atract those powerful, influential sites that may just be interested in posting your article for free and/or even pay you to post your article. The backlink is to where the article is, if you or anyone elses cares to read more on the subject, thus avoiding duplicate content (i've already been slapped for that by Digital Point ).