All On page And Off Page Techniques work. But have to use it carefully. Coming to On page, the site should be optimized properly in such a way that there should not be any duplicate content, without keyword stuffing etc. Meta tags and Header tags should be given properly. Coming on to Off page, can have all seo techniques used before such as Link Building, Blogs, social sites etc. Every thing should be done properly and wisely.
We all know that ranking a keyword in today's time is a quite difficult task, but if you stick to the content marketing strategy, your website never get penalized or even your ranking is also improved. In short, you can say that content marketing is evergreen strategy in search engine optimization.
STILL PBN works really well this year 2016 and yes it will really easily help you rank any website but of course link diversification is still needed for this =-) to avoid unnatural anchor text profile