Newbie to SEO

Hey all as the title says I'm a newbie to SEO.
Soon I hope to get a site up and running which will be for sport streams etc, I was wondering how I'd go about ranking this site?
I don't have a very big budget so 'scrapebox/senuke' etc is out the question.
Could I get on the first page by just manually doing backlinks? Or should I go about buying some .edu links from fiverr?
Thanks all, appreciate the advice.

Have a look in the Services Offered forums on here, experiement with what you can afford and see what has the best results for you.

Also there are plenty of threads on here answering your question...spend a few hours reading and you'll soon get ideas.

Yes manual blog commenting on Good blogs will be good for you to start with.

and they do provide increase in search engine rankings.

web directories are free, sign up to social bookmarking sites, Digg, Stumble upon, delicious etc, start a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.