Quality backlinks from relevant sources are the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. Once you’ve established solid technical foundations and have invested in producing quality content then what else can you do other than promote your content organically via PR, social and ads, and/or if you want to risk it then via paid link campaigns.
It’s worth noting at this juncture, in Google’s Search Quality guidelines the reputation of the website itself has a bearing on the PQ rating;
“You must also look for reputation information about the website. We need to find out what outside, independent sources say about the website. When there is disagreement between what the website says about itself and what reputable independent sources say about the website, we’ll trust the independent sources.”
So tackle link building in a couple of stages: