The original name for Google was "Backrub", because it ranked the web pages according to how many link there were to a page from other websites. If a website had a lot of inbound links, then backrub would list it higher in the results.

That strategy still holds true today. Your website can towards to top position on Google, if there are enough quality inbound links to your website. Even for a very competitive phrase like "the coolest guy on the planet", you could get to the top of Google using only backlinks - but they would need to be the right kind of backlinks.
Quality is more valuable than quantity. A link from certain websites are very valuable. Website that are recognised as "authoritative" carry more weight and ones that are universally recognised as authoritative are government websites, universities, interationally recognised institutes, with popular websites, such as NASA popular news sites such as BBC, CNN
Using the keyswords in the text of the link improve the value of that link. So a link text of click here is pretty useless. For this website, the best link anchor text would be something like "the coolest guy in the planet"
If Google detects too many examples of exactly the same link anchor text, especially if many backlinks appear in it may suspect that you are buy links, or using some technique that is not natural and organic. So try to get a variety of phrases as the link anchor text.
Copy-and-paste this text into the HTML of your page or blog.
Or if your are a more questioning type of person, copy this block of HTML into your webpage or blog.
if you want to make it more personal, and mention my name in the link, copy-and-paste this text below into your wbpage or blog.