Our interactive agency just release an ebook by our president, The Honey Pot - the goal is 2 fold. 1) Dan wanted to help small to mid-sized businesses that may be a little lost in the online marketing world, 2) hopeful people will read and link to it So to answer your question, content comes first and links should follow. The premise of The Honey Pot is to create value across your digital touch points and people will want to engage with your brand - the same holds true here.
Content and Link Building are the two most important. The most important between the two will depend how many pages you have in html. The more pages you have will make it better for content. The way the keywords are arranged is also important. I only have two pages in html, www.detroitmichiganmagician . The rest are in flash. Search engines can not pick up my content on the flash pages. It makes SEO weak for me compared against my competitors. So back links are more important for my site dealing with SEO.
Both matter equally the same. No quality content, lots of backlinks = high bounce rate! Quality content, no backlinks = Anyone out there?
Just backlinks, you don't even need a site to send them to lol. You need both BUT you can't have backlinks WITHOUT content BUT you can have content without backlinks and still get traffic. You need both and they both need to be in your arsenal. Don Luttrull
I believe it depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to get traffic or search ranking, prioritize on content. Check this out for example (not my site, a friend of mine was competing with this website and was trailing on it every day): www(.)the-mafia-wars-guide(.)com It has only 5 backlinks, PR 0 awesome updated content and it ranks second for search ranking in google for the keyword "Mafiawars guide". If you're aiming for Page Rank (PR), then work on getting quality backlinks. All the best
Both are very vitals when it comes to SERP; but baed on my observation in Google Caffeine, Google SERP will be more on fresh new contents.
That's it! You can't make differences, good content means quality backlinks, and quality backlinks means better ranking.
Content always WIN with non relate backlinks, but content - means - time consuming process, it needs to much work , better is finding relative websites and put there your links. Or forums, ven they are not related to your keywords they are much stronger than social sites like digg etc. because you have millions of forums around the world you can use, and Google likes links from that sites, especialy GOV and EDU
I go for content too, Its the king of the site! but I also agree that your content is nothing if nobody likes it...
Unfortunately back links are generally more effective than content at getting higher SERPs. If you have bad content though anyone actually visiting your site wont be there long, or return.
I think you actually need both. You need to have multiple backlinks coming in to your site and you also need to update your content in order to increase Search Engine Rankings and get your site more traffic.