While you can now get away with poor SEO you can’t do without links. Link text and linking strategy are now more important than on page factors for some reason. You still need to SEO your page a bit but that’s no longer rocket science like it used to be. IOW things have gone to links.
Keep in mind that there are two things you want to do with links. One is build some reputaion for your page by using the link text. Fairly simple to do and almost any text link from anywhere will do that.
However, it ain’t quite that simple. 
When I make a new site or even just a page to add to a site I go to nichebot and do some keyword research. I want one keyword phrase I know I can get a number 1 on but it also has to have some traffic for the phrase. If that phrase gets searched 200 times per day that’s good. Then I look for a couple of more that get lesser traffic and have far fewer sites optimized for that phrase.
Anything from 3 hits per day to as high as I can go but I want it to be a very low competition phrase. I’ll pick three of them. Then I’ll go make the page and incorporate all the phrases somewhere on the page. Generally I get the two highest in the title and description and I might use a lowerone in an h3 heading.
Now I have the 4 phrases I want to use as link text. All should have some part of my main keyord phrase in them too. When I do the lonks to that page I’ll make 40% of the links be to the main keyord, 30% to the second best keyword, 15% to the next and 10% to the last. The other 5 percetnt may be “click here for whatever” or something similar.
All 4 of your text links will help your page and also help your main phrase.
The other thing you want in links is some from pages with higher PR. Better 8-10 pr4 links coming in than 1 pr7 but pr2 and pr3 links are good too. Don’t make the mistake of thining that just because a sites homepage has a PR of 7 that’s what gets passed to you. It’s not site rank that counts when you get the link but what the PR is on the page you are being linked from. A pr7 site giving you a link from a pr2 page means you are getting whatever little share of the pr2 page you get.
However it helps to have a site with a PR of 7 linking to you because it means google likes and trusts that site. That’s all it means. How does that help you. Well, if google trusts the site then they are more than likely to trust the sites that site links to. That’s the benefit to you. More trust from google.
That trust can’t be built overnight nor can it be built to last with short term thinking. Short term thinking will kill your site. Lol, been there, done that.Stop thinking about you, your money and how much you can make.
Other than doing the keyword reserach and getting the text links to your pages and some on page optimization stop thinking about SE totally. Think about what’s best for the surfer. What’s going to make their visit to your site more enjoyable. How can you make their life easier? Go out of your way to do it and you’ll do much better, both in sales and in the SE.
Don’t just slap up links to anyone or anything on your resources page. Make sure the resources you add are going to give the surfer what they want, not what you want or what the other site wants. MOF, even if it’s a PR7 site and they treat their surfers like crap don’t bother to link to them.
Update your resources page slowly with high quality things your surfers are looking for. Ask them to bookmark the page and come back and check it often as you will be setadily adding high quality resources for them. Seems like a no brainer to me but hey, what do I know.
If you add high quality things surfers want they are going to come back to your resources page when they want something and you might just make an extra sale or 5 because you took the time to do it right. Lol, I hate it when other sites want me to do things I don’t want to do but I understand the reasoning behind it. I hate the rules I’ll have on my resources page but it ain’t about me or other sites, it’s about keeping surfers happy and making them want to come back.
In case you haven’t noticed I don’t view links as traffic sources but as a way to build link reputation and get higher search engine listings for multiple keywords. That by itself leads to more traffic and higly targeted traffic. I’d rather have people searching for 3-5 word phrases because they are a lot closer to spending their money than someone doing a search on a generic word or two. In other words the people I’m targeting have already weeded out the junk and are now seriously considering spending some cash.
BTW, if you make a reply to a blog post and the owner replies to you put in a different link in the second comment. If you don’t it still only counts as one link to that page. Always use different links in each comment. When a new page is posted then you can use a same url and hopefully with a bit different text.