1. Are Links More Important Than On-Site Optimization?<br />There are two main components of an SEO strategy. The first is on-site optimization, which involves making changes to your website to be found by the search engines so that they can deliver targeted visitors to the site. The second part of an SEO strategy is link building. Link building is the practice and ongoing campaign to increase a website and company brand visibility in the search engines and online in general. Often, people just getting into the SEO game wonder; is one part of SEO more important than the other? Different people have different answers to that question. Here is ours: No. <br />A website is the foundation to any online marketing campaign and it’s highly advisable to optimize it properly. There are two aspects of on-site optimization, technical and content. Technical components of on-site optimization include meta tags, code, internal navigation, URL structure, H1 and H2 tags, sitemaps, etc. Content is everything else on the page, including links. In order to properly optimize a website, all of its text components need to incorporate keywords that have been researched. <br />Link building is phase two of an SEO campaign and should be done once the on-site optimization has been completed. Links work to enhance the on-site factors. They drive additional traffic to an optimized website and increase the SEO benefits. Link building is important no matter what the website size is or what the industry is. However, it’s extremely important in a more competitive niche. Relevant inbound links build trust amongst the search engines and help to build a website as an “authority” website in its industry.<br />The goal of a link building campaign is to increase the number of inbound links pointing to a website over time. It’s a long term building strategy, since the search engines expect links to a legitimate website to grow naturally. It shouldn’t happen overnight. If it does, it looks suspect and could result in a penalty. There are numerous link building strategies to implement into an SEO campaign including article marketing and document sharing, directory submission, social networking, press release distribution, blogging and blog commenting, video marketing, and profile creation. The best link building approach is to build ten to twenty links per month from different sources. <br />On-site SEO and link building serve different purposes, but they are equally important pieces of the SEO puzzle. Sure, it’s possible for a mediocre site that isn’t well optimized to rank if it has good inbound anchor text links, but it’s not recommended. The search engines are always changing their algorithms and each search engine is different. Sure, Google may be “king”, but Bing is picking up speed. The best defense is a good offense, and the best offense is to properly utilize all of the SEO tools that are available to increase visibility. If you’re going to do SEO, you might as well do it correctly. <br />About the Author:<br />Brick Marketing is a Boston SEO company. For more information please call 877-295-0620 or visit http://www.brickmarketing.com. <br /> <br />