This does not mean that you should give up on SEO, but it simply emphasises the fact that clean/ethical/white hat SEO is now even more important than ever. Do not over optimise, do not buy links, think quality more than quantity.
With this in mind, now is the perfect time to get your onsite optimisation right (or review it)
The onsite/offsite optimisation debate
In the past 5 years, link building has taken more importance in the search algorithms, so much so that some figures suggest that it now accounts for 60 to 70% of a website's rankings. The incorporation of social signals and development of new social networks has accelerated this trend further in the past 2-3 years.
While no one can argue with these numbers, I have observed a worrying trend with a lot of my clients recently: they seem to completely neglect onsite optimisation at the benefit of link building.
Ideally for a natural organic growth, both activities need to be undertaken at the same time, and without good onsite SEO, it is very likely that your website will not rank well in search engines, especially if you're a new/growing business without a lot of brand recognition/awareness.
So my advice has always been the following: get your onsite SEO right or it will cost you. And from a resource standpoint, it is much easier and often quicker to get your site optimised than it is to acquire good quality backlinks.