subject: What's More Important - Link Building Or Meta Data [print this page] Search engine optimisation is made up of two main constituents, link building and onsite optimisation. For years the debate has raged at which of these two sides is the most important. A link from another site pointing to yours is a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google. So the more inbound links you have other websites the more popular and trust worthy you'll appear to the search engines, especially if the linking sites are well established with original content and have a high page rank.
Some search marketers herald onsite optimisation as the key element of any successful SEO campaign. This is primarily concerned with aspects such as page titles, meta descriptions and keywords elsewhere in the coding of a landing page. Having well targeted relevant keywords disseminated across a specific page makes that page and its content more visible to the search engine's spiders and therefore perform well in the search engine results pages when related key terms and searched. Onsite copy also plays a big part in this area. You want the copy on your specific landing pages to be keyword rich, meaning that between one to three particular keywords feature regularly in the content of that page, but so much as it impedes on the readability of the copy.
So which of these two sides of the search optimising process holds more clout? Well at the risk of copping out of the argument too easily it really is both. Perhaps its not a completely even 50/50 divide between the two but they are both integral to any search marketing campaign because they compliment each other. The link building is the external part of optimising for the web. Not only acting as votes of confidence from other sites but also providing web users with other ways of finding your site.
And there's massive crossover as well. For example internal linking, which is an important feature of improving the conversion rate of your website, is basically onsite optimisation via link building. It gives you the chance to highlight more keywords in your copy, these terms as anchor text also work to make that particular page more search engine friendly.
So, in my opinion at least, a successful search engine optimisation campaign is going to be made up of both an external link building strategy as well as implementing highly targeted meta data with relevant keywords. Developing particular landing pages for these practices is also vital, but that's a whole other topic.
