Everyone says that linking is important, it is but so is the linking strategy. Links must seem natural, serach engines prefer these types of links and if too many links appear too soon the site can be penalised and sand boxed. Some links will be ignored for quite a while by the engines but can still bring traffic to your site. It is also true that on topic links will carry more weight when your site is indexed by the search engines. So when linking remember that it is not only the links but the type that count.
Sniff sniff. I smell a bot. http://www.google.com/search?q="while+by+the+engines+but+can+still+bring+traffic"&hl=en&filter=0
More links, and more links. Is that what a business owner has to waste time doing. It would be best to focus on content, customer service, and the product.
I hear you Stuart.. Did you know that exchanging links can be done with one click of your mouse! That might sound kind of strange but checkout my site, and you'll find that you can save hours of time getting link partners. Well, you won't get thousands yet, but in time there will be lots of websites from which you can pick for link partners. It's free right now too. When you say "on topic links", diglet, I assume you mean that your anchor text is on topic with your keywords? If this is what you mean, I agree for the most part. I don't make them all the same though, but the bulk of my anchor text links jive with my keyword phrases in my page which are bolded, italicized and in my meta and alt tags.
link building strategy by: link exchange to related sites and submit to directories and put on the right category..... make use of the blog and forum sigs for faster indexing... 'coz forum sigs are being crawled by SE almost regularly...