Search Engine Optimization - Dead at age 7?

The question of the day causing all this ruckus, "Is SEO Dead"?
Well I'm here to dispel any misconceptions or confusion that currently exists surrounding this question. Have you ever heard the words, content is king, if you say enough times, then in your mind content will become your primary focus when you optimize your website and then ask yourself the question, "why don't I rank well on the search engines"?

Well the partial reality is web surfers use words to find related websites, but this in no way means content is king if you are trying to drive targeted visitors to your site. On the other side of the coin, you can't get quality links without quality content.

An SEO "blogger" has gone as far in saying "Organic SEO is dead", he's of the opinion that Content SEO is dead, and that anyone interested in raising their search engine rankings should focus only on link generation.

So which is it, what's happening off the page is more important than it's ever been. That's going to be an upward trend; this is common knowledge these days. No longer can an SEO pass themselves off as useful if they do not go after and get a respectable amount of links for their clients.

Here is a brief summary of key points to keep in mind when optimizing your website:

Carry on building links for ever.
Old links decay in value
Don't add them too fast, or risk the spam filter
Don't add them too slowly or you won't get enough
Get links from fresh pages
Ask linking site to move the link to a different page to make it "fresher"
Vary anchor text over time
Don't change the content of your key pages as not to reflect incoming anchor
Register your domain for several years
Use a solid hosting company with guaranteed uptime
Add new pages/content to your site all the time
Put Adsense on your site and make sure it gets good click through rate
Rank well in the past because Google counts your old rank in the current rank
Don't jump up and down in the serps too much. Google likes stable rankings
Make your site sticky. Sticky sites are favored
Aggressively pursuing a strong linking campaign gives you a fighting chance for competitive keywords. Google emphasizes links and sees them as indicative for the worthiness of your site to rank high as well as link text using it to determine what the linked to page is about.

Simply put, links imply that content is worth linking to and worth ranking high and more importantly your links should contain the keywords you are optimizing your website for and lastly links must be relevant to the nature of your online business.