Yea the white hat way is to basically write something completely unique and new that the world has never seen before(obviously hard to do today with so much similar content) and wait... People will link to it and as you gain links Google takes notice and then gradually bumps up your site. Then you get more traffic. This is really what Google wants us to do which I find a bit controlling. Who says people will link to us? Not of all us can rely on that so we then do link building ourselves which can be risky I suppose if not done right.