My 2 cents - in my experience, good links seem to have the most impact on SEO rankings (more than even lots of great content does). People are always looking for quick, cheap options to magically get lots of traffic, but that doesn’t happen. Write interesting stuff, and make other people on the internet aware of it (via social news sites, press releases, etc.)

Now, the tricky part in all of this is when you have to relay these “truisms” to your clients who are looking to your comany for SEO help. Getting that client a website up and running is relatively easy, but expecting the rest to take care of itself obviously doesn’t do anything positive for the client’s bottom line. It’ll sit there unnoticed and silently age. Then it’ll get written off as a waste of time. Not good.

Valitic’s value to your clients (from the outside looking in) is educating your clients on what tactics will likely be most fruitful initially and then supplying them with a scorecard (and recommendations) every month letting them know how the tactics they’ve implimented are performing on a month to month basis. For companies that earnestly invest in their web presence, that should all they (and you) need to be wildly successful.