One of the ongoing questions of SEO is that of content vs. links, or as can be seen another way, it is a question of organic links (which you will get when you have quality content and people will want to link to you) versus non organic links (which you can get by asking people to trade links with you). This is not a question that I will attempt to answer here (feel free to leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this issue) but I will tell you that it is the position of Google that quality content always trumps links (I agree with this position but have to add that there are many circumstances when link exchanging is both necessary and beneficial to all parties involved, and I recommend that you never dismiss this strategy as part of your SEO campaign).
This video talks about some merits of the links versus content question. This video features Matt Cutts, who is one of the senior developers at Google.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXgni6U6qk8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
