Backlinks Or On-Page SEO – Which Team Wins?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 Comments (8)

If you read many SEO blogs, you’ll inevitably hear someone say that the most important aspect of a search engine optimization campaign is building backlinks. If that is true then why are people still chanting, “Content is king.” Can both be true?

It doesn’t seem possible, does it? If content is king then that implies that content is the most important aspect of SEO. On the other hand, you can’t discount the value of good, quality backlinks. In fact, in some industries, if you don’t have a good backlink portfolio then you simply don’t exist. That hardly sounds like content is king.

To be sure, backlinks mean nothing without quality on-page SEO. You can build a million high quality links to a blank page and all you’ll have is a million links pointing to a page that no one wants to visit. The search engines won’t honor that. On the other hand, one well-written highly optimized web page with no links still has the potential to rank well for the keywords that it targets. In fact, I’ve seen brand new web pages rank on page 1 of Google for competitive keywords with on-page content alone. Does it happen often? No. But it happens.

It’s important to put your SEO elements into perspective. The starting place for any optimization campaign is on page. Without quality content it doesn’t matter what kind of link building you are doing, have done, or are going to do. After you’ve improved your web page to a decent quality then it’s time to start building links. A good link building campaign can enhance your on-page SEO far beyond what the on-page content itself can do. So which is more important?

The answer is that both have their place. Like a husband and wife, they are a team. And your campaign will rise or fall based on how well the team plays together.

Comments (8) Category: SEO

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8 Comments

Comment by MikeY

Made Wednesday, 14 of October , 2009 at 8:23 pm

Nicely written, and I concur 100%. You cannot start building backlinks until your site is friendly to search engines.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 15 of October , 2009 at 11:39 am

Hi MikeY,

Thanks for the comment. You would be surprised how many businesses still don’t understand that simple point…

Comment by Daniel

Made Saturday, 17 of October , 2009 at 1:09 am

Spot on.

As an experiment with a client site earlier this year, we left the orginal unoptimized site in place on it’s original domain and created a new on page optimized site on a new domain.

We fed backlinks appropriately to both sites. While the older site had a pr5 and the new site had a pr1, we quickly discovered that the new domain with On Page SEO w/backlinks ranked higher consistantly than the old unoptimized site filled with backlinks.

The results never failed in favor of the dual optimized site. Thanks for this post, it reminds me to turn that experiment into a case study whitepaper.

–Daniel

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Saturday, 17 of October , 2009 at 5:16 am

Hi Daniel,

Excellent example and potential case study, when you have it written, please share it with me as I would like to hear more!

Comment by Lorraine Grula

Made Thursday, 5 of November , 2009 at 1:56 pm

Hi Nick
Daniel’s comment was interesting and I would like to share something similar.
I recently worked on a site for a local medical weight loss clinic. Their original site was embarrassingly BAD. We kept the old domain but build a new site that was chock full of great content. Before we got around to doing any back links, the site shot up to #1 for a wide variety of phrases. I was blown away. Granted most of the phrases were not terribly competitive due to the localized nature but even so, the bad site sat there for ten years without google ever noticing. One month after optimizing the site, there it was on top of the google!

Thanks
Lorraine

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 5 of November , 2009 at 4:23 pm

Hi Lorraine,
That is very interesting and I am not surprised…I too have encountered similar type of local SEO results for clients in the past. Perform onsite optimization re-write and improve the quality of the content and notice an improvement. I think in your scenario because the site was so old it already had a good trust factor. I would guess that if you were to do no link building the site would slowly slip down in the SERPs but with some good quality off site optimization this site should do very well long term.

Comment by Barry Lynn Miller -REMAX

Made Wednesday, 18 of November , 2009 at 6:15 pm

When you do pick up a link and say its a pr of 2-5 when will it actually help your SEO
1. Right away
2. At the next time Google crawls your site
3. or when the new pr comes out

Another question that I have and you might have a post about it but and I don’t want to seem like I am spamming (although I do like the Link)

Every agent around me as a pr of 1 they have not figured the SEO concept out or don’t care but anyway
If I build up to say a pr of 3 will and use proper keywords should that kick me to top of the list?

There is an agent locally that has a 10 year + domain
My content is better
My backlinks are better

But she is still in front so it has to be domain age
her pr is 1 and mine is 1 but if I get to 3 will I start coming before her

I mean her content is terrible and hasn’t changed in months if not years

Sorry this is off topic

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 19 of November , 2009 at 7:13 am

Hi Barry,
Thanks for the question, I actually addressed your question in a blog post that I just wrote:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/11/19/pagerank-affect-rankings/

I hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO efforts.