A few years ago, all you heard most SEOs talking about was link building. You were supposed to go out, buy links, pay for link strategies, and get your link house in order. Many SEO’s treated links like they were the most important thing about online marketing. Some of them still do.
When Google came out with the Penguin update, suddenly, all the link builders decided to focus on content marketing. But they didn’t really change their strategy.
In fact, content marketing just became another word for link building scheme. Which makes you wonder.
Are links really that important?
Links have always been important for good SEO, but they’ve never been the most important thing for SEO. Content is still king. On-page content is far more important than links and always has been.
The reason many online marketers started seeing their hard fought for links being dismissed by Google is because they put their emphasis on links instead of on content. Now they want to pretend to be putting their emphasis on content when they’re still following the same strategies. And all they’re doing is guest posting on other people’s blogs.
If you really want to take your business up a notch, then I highly recommend focusing on producing quality content. Not links. Not guest blog posts. Not some crazy content marketing strategy that you hope will fool the search engines into believing you’re not building low quality links. I mean, focus on high quality content. If you do that, you’ll get the rankings you deserve.