Content vs Link-building

Which is truly king?

[mwack]

Just wanting to know everyone's opinions/experiences on what the SE's like more, content or inbound links. Also wondering this because I'm unsure which to devote the majority of my time on. The way I'm guessing is that content is the overall king in the long-term, as having lots of quality content promotes other people wanting to link to you, but that seems like a plan to have a well-ranked site in 2+ years as opposed to sooner.

Let me know your feelings on this subject.

[lufc1955]

Build for the long term. In other words fill your web site with quality unique content that others will want to link to. That way your links will increase naturally. Also start looking to add links from good quality sites, preferably in your niche. I think you already knew the answer! Don't expect any decent rankings for at least 12 months for competitive keywords.

[Lorel]

Unless you're willing to wait for the world to come to your door, without advertising, I would add content and at the same time gather links. Unless you have lots of links the search engines will ignore your site and google especially.

[Trungvan]

I think content is very important , visitors can come back your site and big search engine will crawl yours a lot

[Eltiti]

I'd focus on high-quality content --lots of it. The "good" links (ODP, authority sites) may well come automatically.

I have an online course about widget programming, and the other day I accidentally discovered (never bothered to look at it before) how many sites are linking to me. These are all sites that volunteered to link; I never asked them (except for the ODP, where I submitted, once).

[Illah]

I use Movable Type as a CMS on one of my sites and try and add content at least 5 times a week, if not more. And despite the 'blog' backend I'm adding real content, not just talking about breakfast. Yahoo loves it and I'm very well ranked, but Google hardly cares (and actually indexes many more pages due to the Sitemaps feature). Apparently links are all that matter there :) MSN is really random. I was doing well for a while, then disappeared, then I was back, then gone again...crazy.

So which is king? I think a better analogy would be King & Queen - they rule together.

--Illah

[sarika mosaic]

Hi mwack

Link building is very important but dont go for reciprocal links.
Search engines consider sites with more incoming links as more relevant, since it indicates that more people are interested in linking to your website. Thus, search engines give sites with more quality links a higher ranking.
search engines also scan the site linking to your webpage for its content and relevance to your category.

Content is also of same importance. Your site should be content rich. The content should be relevant. Your site should have some great content or some good tool or something which creates unique value(UV) for visitors. Good content will automatically help in building links with other websites.

sarika_mosaic