The only SEO that Google staff actually recommends is content-based marketing. You have to add content as rapidly as possible to get more text crawled. And I mean rapidly - like 10 - 15 articles daily for at least 6 months.
After that it's always going to be about the backlinks. Basically, google updates mainly effect the way your content is crawled and its "importance factor." There are about 25 or so on-page SEO elements to be concerned with.
So basically, add good content (good, meaning easy for computers to understand and then engaging enough to keep the users on it longer than 5 seconds and give them a way to share it somehow, easily) and then get high PR backlinks. It's kind of "black hat" to say this buy you can usually buy some good ones. Contact the owners of those sites by doing some who-is searches and get their names and numbers and harass them until they give you a deal (lol).
Alternatively, the market place here usually sells some good do-follow links in the form of guest posting. These things will probably never change in Google.