I've always had this question in the back of my mind as well. I'm still new to SEO but here's what I do.
For link building, I usually start with business listings and directories (about 5-10 month), after a few months of those being indexed in Google and Bing. I start with low tier backlinks from WordPress blogs that I created and link to those business links (about x1 500 word article a week). You can try to reach out to people's blogs to post on, but I've never been successful with that.
This may not be the best method, but is this what I do to see keywords more up a few ranks or even pages (depending on how difficult the keyword is).
Hope this helps.