Happy Monday!

I was digging through the messenger bag I use for work this weekend and found a blog post I printed out back in October but forgot to read. The post, vaguely titled Ross Dunn Answers SEO Question #4, got me thinking - are inbound links as important as I make them out to be?

The thing is, I have been doing SEO for about three years now and I InsureMe’s site has seen some decent results. One thing that I really started to notice about a year ago, at least in the insurance vertical, was that your inbound links seem to matter a heck of a lot more than your content. This was perplexing, since at every SEO conference someone is always preaching about how “content is king” – but to me it seems like content is, at best, the court jester.

In answering Question #4, Ross Dunn really helped me understand why perceive links to be the real King in SEO, and others still feel content and on-page optimization are King. I highly recommend reading the entire blog post, but to give you a taste, here are some of Ross’ main points:

• Links are extremely important, but your content and on-page optimizations have to be good to harness the full power of your inbound links
• Some sites might rank very well with little or no content and a ton of good links, on the other had, some sites will rank well with great content and only a few good links.
• Every site ranks based on links and on-page factors…the importance of those two factors can and will vary from site to site.

Interesting stuff, huh?

Many thank yous to Ross for writing such a clear and informative post. It really helped me get some more perspective on link building versus on-page optimization. :)