It's getting harder to "game" the search engines, especially with updates like Google's Penguin. So a lot of the old methods that might have been effective a few years back (article marketing, reciprocal linking) won't work, or will event be detrimental moving forward.

A colleague of mine said it best a few days ago: "You can't fake it anymore when it comes to SEO. If you want to rank well, you're going to have to put out / do awesome stuff." I totally agree.