What’s More Important, Links Or On-Page Factors?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

It’s the same old debate experts, business owners and marketers have always had. Are links more important than on-page search engine optimization? Or is on-page SEO King Supreme? Talk to two SEOs and you’ll get two different answers. Talk to ten and you’re just as likely to get ten different answers as dividing them down the middle. We’ll tell you what we think.

Links are important, of course. And you can’t do without on-page optimization. Both are important. But that doesn’t really help us, does it?

Let’s break it down.

Before you can even think about links, you need to get your on-page optimization completed properly. Otherwise, links are irrelevant. Yes, you can rank your website with good inbound anchor text even if your on-page is mediocre, but I wouldn’t advise it. The first step to website optimization always has been and always will be your on-page factors.

But that doesn’t mean links aren’t important. Links are enhancement tools. First, make your on-page optimization pristine. Then, build links to drive traffic and increase the SEO benefits. The more competitive your niche is, the more important those inbound links will become. The more global your business, the more important your inbound links are. But make no mistake, links and on-page SEO are equally important. But on-page must come first.

March 2, 2009
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2 Comments
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SEO

2 Responses to “What’s More Important, Links Or On-Page Factors?”

Malcolm Evans says:

April 2, 2009 at 9:03 am

Yes, I would genuinely agree that it’s about both but with on-page coming first. We have managed to leap up our rankings from nowhere to emerging quickly on search engine front pages simply by getting on-page right. We have carefully made sure that our text, titles and tags reflect what we do: this is corporate culture research and human resources development. Without looking at all spammy we are concentrating on “owning” corporate culture as a credible and passionate specialist service provider. Now we are moving on to blogging, quality article writing and selective linking possibilites, such as this opportunity, which is a chance to share useful information and not just a meaningless tick in a box. We increasingly think seo is a quality driven activity and that decent operators have nothing to fear from search threholds and that there is no need to panic into “black hat” practices. Good article, cutting through some of the B/S.
Nick Stamoulis says:

April 3, 2009 at 6:12 am

Thanks Malcolm for reading!

Since you would within the corporate culture area, here is an article that I recently wrote for Marketing Pilgrim that is about the communication gaps within social networking:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/03/social-networking-generations.html