I talk every day with clients and write often in this blog about the importance of links in any SEO strategy. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes reading about SEO knows that back links are critical ingredient for organic search engine rankings.

One point I make often is that a good link strategy will yield limited results or no material results without a strong foundation of content. In fact, we say that (in round numbers) 30% of a website’s SEO success is based on “on page” factors. On-page factors refer to well-optimized content with good use of keywords, meta tags, header tags, search engine friendly URLs and optimized source code.

The math is obvious. We like to say that about 70% of a website’s SEO is based on off-page factors. Primarily, this refers to the extent to which others think your content is good. At first, this sounds very strange. How can others determine how good my content is? And, how can Google (and other engines) determine what others think?

Consider a comment made by a Google engineer at the Online Marketing Summit conference I attended last October. He said this: “Google doesn’t care about your content. Google cares about who cares about your content.” What he means, is when other content (on other websites) link to your content, they are “casting a vote.” for your content.

The Google technology explanation describes how this works.  Essentially, other web pages link to your content and Google considers that a “vote” for your content.

To accentuate this point consider how Google’s origin as Backrub, is based on this concept of keeping score of the popularity of your content.

So, if creating links to content is so critical to SEO success then why don’t we just go out and buy a g-zillion links to our content?  Well, some do.  First, consider that if you pay a site to link to you, that is frowned upon by Google and the other major engines.  We don’t condone it.

Let’s go back to the comment by the Google engineer.  In fact, Google does care about your content.  He went on to say that the more relevant, keyword-rich content you have (along with a search engine friendly architecture), the more links your content will naturally attract.

Then, if you pay someone to build legitimate links to your website (not pay the website to link to you), those links will be well supported by your content and provide good SEO value.

Now, let’s go back to the 30/70 ratio although, this is admittedly hearsay, not a statistic backed up by Google.  The point to this ratio is this.  If you build a strong foundation in your SEO plan with great, relevant content, then the links you get will carry weight in SEO value. 

Of course, the Google PR value of the source of the links counts as well.  The point here is that links without content are not effective.

So, it comes back to this – content is king!