I am a bad one to ask – I am swimming against the stream with this and everyone and his brother will tell you I am nuts.
I only exchange links with a handful of very carefully picked sites I actually consider valuable for my visitors. I have relied on my content getting linked from the web naturally, and for me it has worked.
I have been around for a very long time though and have had years of generating content others will link to…
Also, the trend is to get one way links pointing to your own site. I actually prefer one way links linking out to authority sites. Call me a fool, but I like to decide who is in my neighborhood.
So while I am likely not one to give advice in this, I am an example of the fact that rules in this game are not carved in stone.
I have never looked at what seems to be working to manipulate google at the time. This changes all the time, and sometimes google turns around and dislikes tomorrow what it liked yesterday. So if you play the google game, google will become god and dictate what you do with much of your time.
I look at what will get me traffic – and sometimes you can think outside the box and have success.
I think if I were just starting out I would concentrate on one of the smaller search engines first, just to get on the map. I would manually submit to as many good, small engines as I could, internationally. I would keep trying to get into the authority directories on the merit of having better content than others do. If you can become prominent anyplace, other engines, including google, will soon follow.
Clearly, what SEO experts suggest you do at the time does work. That doesn’t mean there is no other way to generate traffic.
It is of course true that google will ultimately generate the most traffic for you if you can get on page one or two. That doesn’t mean that you can’t generate good traffic numbers combining other sources.
Google is fickle, but your traffic shouldn’t be.