As others have said, you seem to be confusing two different things.
At its simplest, SEO is a matter of providing a coherent structure to the pages on your site. This is no different to having a good structure for a paper document. So typically you'd have:
Title
Heading
Sub Heading
Title would be a "h1" tag in HTML terms and you are only going to have one of these per page/document. Headings are for the major sections (h2 tags) and subheadings are for more minor points of interest (h3 tags). As an example let's say you are making the site for Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory then the main page might look something like:
Code:
<h1>Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory</h1>
some introductory content here
<h2>Our Chocolates</h2>
More content
<h3>Dark Chocolates</h3>
...
<h3White Chocolates</h3>
...
<h2Confectionary</h2>
etc
The page has a structure and each heading mentions the word "chocolate" or something to do with sweets/candies and is relevant. Incoming links take time to obtain as they are outside your control (if done "legitimately") but you can start the process by linking to other relevant sites yourself, say a Wikipedia article about cocoa, if the webmasters of those sites notice a lot of traffic from WWCF then they will often put in a return link.
Unless your site is about a very specialist subject then it may take a while to appear on the search rankings. If it appears on the first page of a search engine's results then you probably don't need to do much more than keep checking it periodically.
My own site appears fourth in one of the search terms that I've targeted. The top two hits are to the associated club website that I also manage and the third hit is the Wikipedia article on the subject - that article does link to my site but someone else added the link
. Just tried two other searches on different subjects and both the associated pages appear on the first results page from Google. I've done nothing more than what I've indicated above, no link farms or dubious tactics.
HTH