Content... You'll hear content is king and you can get traffic and page one rankings with that alone. You can't get traffic without content. You wont get high listing on Google with a pitch or squeeze page (sales page or list building page). Google likes LOTS of content. You usually wont see someone's home page on Google. What you will usually see is secondary pages. There are exceptions. If you search for "Living In Cebu" for example. The first non-paid site you'll see listed has what is called Sitelinks. That is a highly rated site and it means it will be VERY hard for you to move into that niche and get the number one listing. Back links Some will say this is the most important part of SEO. In a way that's true but if you don't have content it wont do you any good. As for optimization though, it is the most important thing you can do. Each time another site links to your site, Google see's that as a VOTE. You need lots of votes! The links need to have your keywords in them too. This is called Anchor Text. So if your keywords include Living in Cebu then you want to have the clickable text show those words. It is also good to vary them a bit. Cebu Living would be a variation. About 60 percent with your main keywords and then 30% your secondary keywords then spread it around with the rest of your links. If you do it too fast or if google catches you buying backlinks your done. Also there is something called the Google Sandbox. So your site might not rank well at all for 3 to 6 months. Or it may rank well at first and then fall far in the listings. When that happens, keep building your back links. Posting your links to Wordpress blogs is generally NOT useful. They are almost always NofOllow links which means Google wont count them as votes. That's very frustrating but blogs were forced to do that because of back link spam. Many forums are do follow but going around posting one liners tends to hack off the moderators. You need to offer the forum something. They need you to provide content to them, like I am doing here. Some forums wont let you post a link in your signature at all. I see that as someone asking for me to give them content without them giving anything back. Move on when you find that. Treat your forums well and they will treat you well too. So its content and backlinks to start with. Then learn about social marketing and if you can make video, then you really have something that can do well. Me, I have a made for radio face. haha. But those topics are for another post. Actually, made for radio face is okay.... People seem to like what is real.
Thanks a lot... The conclusion of the above write up is "One should concentrate equally on Content and Backlinks".
Zopat, good point and thanks! I think backlinks might be more important but if you don't have content it wont do any good for SEO purposes to have backlinks. Backlinks are more important than keywords or even title, though that title is VERY important too. There are other reasons to have backlinks