Link building is time consuming or somewhat expensive. If you are at the point where you are using the ethics label to brand your services you are either:

1.) A new to SEO (that do not yet realize how important links are and how dirty a good SEO job can be).

In that case, you are more likely to undercharge the client and not have enough money for profit margin & to buy adequate links, let alone not knowing just how many you will need.


2.) You are so successful that's why you are not really willing to work as hard as you may need to work to do an excellent job.

Over time SEO (search engine optimization) can become somewhat boring as large portions of the job are repetitive in nature. Perhaps this is why they are more interested in reading books and chatting in forums than having lots of clients. The reason is to develop and gain more skills and knowledge.


Many of the best SEOs leave the SEO field and make their own ecommerce sites because they can of the reason that they can control everything from concept to marketing to fulfillment and make way more money or promote something way more interesting to them personally than the stuff they would being stuck promoting if they worked on other peoples businesses embedded with other peoples products and flaws.

Cheers...

Link Exchange is not working any more instead of it you should concentrate on one way link building.
That will work good and can give you a enough exposure in terms of search engine traffic

I think you need both links and quality content.  As each page of your site should be aimed at no more than 2-3 keywords, you need good content to generate more entry pages to your site and those entry pages also need to have links pointing to them, so you need both.