First, I make a good looking website with quality timeless content (50-100 pages) and choose good keywords (in title and h1-text). I don't care too much about competition. After that, I publish this website and obtain a few links (not DMOZ or Yahoo dir etc) and forget the site.

After 1-2 years the site is getting quite lot of traffic and pages have high positions in google. And there are usually couple of hundreds natural inbound links. The site's PR is often 3-5.

What is your strategy? I don't know what to think about link directories or link exchange...

Cheers, I live in Tristan da Cunha