After the recent updates Panda & Penguin – the web world is shaken. Now most of the old SEO techniques are not working and people are trying to get habituated with the ethical SEO practices more and more.
Personally, I think it was a needed step from Google. Just for these updates- now I can say there will be more useful results in searches than the previous years.
Here is an infograph from IDF Marketing – describing how things should go for off page and on-page SEO.