As soon as you improve on your site content, optimize the onpage factor (keywords, meta, etc) before building your links. This will help you rank faster. Start building quality and targeted backlinks for rankings and for targeted traffic as well. Posted this in another thread about link building - hope it helps
Link building is the key for an effective SEO campaign. This works best for PR and SERP. Always provide useful and relevant content in your websites niche as this will help in quality organic linking - sites will naturally link to your site once they see unique and helpful information in your site. Keep in mind that the more targeted backlinks you build for your site, the more likely it will bring in the right visitors that could make the conversions for better revenue. You do targeted link buidling for fast and long term traffic to your sites.
There are several ways to build links. Here are just some of the following:
Directory Submissions - targeted links at high PR directories
Blog and Forum Postings - to high PR and frequently crawled sites
Social Bookmarking
Classified Ads
Article Marketing - submit to high PR directories, could also serve as link baits
Link Exchange - with relevant and authority sites
Link Baits - for organic linking
Etc. etc.