Google is eliminating "artificial links" and taking action against reciprocal link pages, link farms, cloaking and guestbooks. Then, what would be the next steps for website promotion? Offcource Quality one way links(Natural links) and lots of traffics to your site.
As we all know it very well that fresh and interesting content is liked by all search engines and it will earn lots of natural links for you. So, it is necessary for you to put some good contents on your site. While articles/press releases submissions and forum/blog posting will generate lots of traffics for your site. You may try social bookmarking/networking sites for extra efforts. Only one way quality links are the best solution for your SERPs.