Organic. Organic. Organic!
That's the battle cry of the search engines. Everything should be organically driven on the internet. Of course, us saying "organic" today contradicts what we said on Friday. For the reason behind that you need to keep reading.
If the internet was not filled with businesses trying to make money, what would it be filled with? Take out all businesses from the internet and all you're left with are bloggers, news, government and social networks.
Without businesses driving the internet there wouldn't be a need for search engine optimization. There wouldn't be a need for all this online marketing education. Instead, the internet would just be driven by interesting tidbits of the lives we lead.
Maybe that would be boring? Maybe not?
The point is that if businesses were not the driving force behind the internet we would all simply share links with our friends when we found an interesting blog post, or online video, or news article, or photos. We would have our close friends, and perhaps a social clan of additional friends, and everything we shared with them would be honest, and without any reason for financial gain.
What we've described above would be a purely organic internet world, and that's the world Google wishes we actually lived in. Google wants us to link to other websites simply because we find the website interesting and not specifically for organic optimization purposes. Google certainly does not want you to pay someone else to build links to your website, and they absolutely do not want you to pay someone else for link placement on a specific website.
You should treat your links like friends. Don't buy friends; don't trade friends. If you are looking for new ways to find links, you simply need to ask yourself how you would go about finding quality friends. Do you become a better person? Do you participate more in the community?
Becoming a better person actually means to become a better website.
Participating in the community is just like participating in online social networks that can gain you interest.
These two approaches will eventually build those organic links, and if you are worried about our report from Friday that organic results will no longer show on page 1 of the SERP, don't be. You'd be an April Fool if you believed us.