I love backlinks, but face it. If you don't have decent content, you can build all the backlinks you want and your site is still going to lag in the SERPs. This is just my opinion, but my from my experience if you are spending most of your time trying to build backlinks and not spending more time on creating new content, then your backlink building effort is not going to get you very far. We have all seen the same posts, someone is wondering why all their efforts at building backlinks is not getting their weak content site a top position in google. The answer is simple, spend as much and preferably more time creating content that your users find useful than you spend trying build backlinks.
You actually need both. All the great content in the world won't get you anywhere if your site is never seen. However, when you DO get your site at the top of Search Engines, you want your content to be something that people will want to look at.
Angela makes a valid point. A site at the top usually does have content that people want to read And while content is important, I'll probably rate backlinks a tad higher on the importance scale. You could make an excellent site with information, but if nobody gets to see it, there is no way you will make money. To give it that initial boost, you need to build backlinks.
You are right, you do need both. However, if you have a lot of new and unique content your site will be seen. You could not build a single backlink after getting indexed and only ad unique content to your site everyday and you will get lots of traffic from google. On the other hand, you could make a one page site with no unique content, get indexed, build backlinks, and never get anything from Google.
In the first case, I'd be solely relying on my onpage factors and domain name to outrank my competitors. That might work with a low competition keyword, but certainly not with one having high competition. For instance you could write a post on mortagages/loans/credit cards/ SEO ( random examples), and not build a single link, and you won't get any traffic for it from Google.
Get it in your head - having the keywords on a page(title?!) - AND massive links will make your rank in google. Some examples: Search: CLick Here - Adobe #1 Search: Here - Adobe #1 Search: Failure - Was the whitehouse until google modded. Why do these sites that have nothing to do the searched terms show up? Because they have massive links pointing to them with that anchor text.
Well my problem is the other way around. I have lots of good content and not many links so my sites lag in the SERPs or some don't show up much at all. Links are the name of the game.
Agree.... Eventually creating fresh contents is the one that leads to link baiting. Nothing beats this one
i believe both aspects are equally needed, because without content there isn't anything left in the website, and without back links, how people gonna see your website? visitors needs some link to click and get on your site. so i think both needed equally.
fresh content = yes you need it but with no backlink you will be little bit hard to go to page one, without backlink how you will get PR?