The backlinks thing can still be made to work if you do it right - but you need high quality backlinks that are relevant to your site. Links from other windy's sites will be relevant, but their sites prob get so little trafic that Google will class them as low quality & because of this it could adversely affect your own rankings.
Links from local business directories are usually the easiest & safest options, and links from human verified search engines are worth looking into as well.