When it comes to getting your site to rank better in the search engines, the most important thing you can do is get more quality links to your site. The major search engines like Google will tell you to do this by providing quality content on your pages and people will naturally link to you over time.
The only problem with this is that if your site is new and you have no links, it doesnt matter how much great content you have if you dont have any links nobodys going to see it.
Which brings me to the paradox. If you have a site that ranks well in the search engines, other people are naturally going to link to you if your site has good content to offer. By having a high ranking website, its easy to get more links to your website. Conversely, if you have a site that doesnt have any links, your ranking in the search engines is going to be quite low, if not non existent. Nobody is going to link to your site naturally over time if they dont even know it exists, hence the link building paradox.
This is why I dont like such conservative views on how to build links to a website. This view simply makes things easier for the search engines. However, this...