You hear the phrase all over the net, content is king. I have to disagree. When it comes to generating organic traffic, getting links is key. Your ability to get links will directly impact your site's authority and search engine rankings. The key to success in SEO is getting quality anchored links, not content.

The idea that content is king comes from the fact that Google loves content and, in theory, you can rank for more keywords by using more words in your content. The basics of that belief is true, but Google does not rank content alone. The number one factor in ranking well in Google is quality back-links.

Generating content is an important part of your SEO, but many bloggers spend hours generating high quality content. There are incredible writers on the internet that go nowhere, while blackhat spammers and thin affiliate sites dominate them in SERPS. So why is low quality content generating more traffic? It is due to the quality and quantity of links pointing to that page.

Content plays three important roles in SEO. First, it provides Google with content to crawl. You provide Google with keywords, both short tail and long tail that can be used to rank your site. In addition, quality content makes your site sticky. Although quality content won't bring traffic, it will keep traffic. Your feed count will go up and your bounce rate will go down. People will stick around to consume your content. These followers can turn into potential links sources down the road. Lastly, content provides a form of link bait. Quality content can motivate people to link to your site. The content alone does not bring organic traffic, but can help produce links, which will bring organic traffic.

When I launce a site, I spend 20% of my time researching keywords to target. I then spend 10% of my time crafting content for those keywords. And I spending the other 70% of my time getting links or promoting my content via social media, in hope of getting more links. In modern SEO, getting links is one of the hardest and most time consuming task you'll do. This might be why Google ranks links so highly, because they're not always easy to get.

If you've been generating content for your blog for months, and see no growth, you should consider building links. For the next month, spend 80% of all your blogging time working on getting links and promoting your site. Slow down your posting, your blog will not die over night. Instead of crafting a post a day, post two or three times a day. Spend the other four or five days getting links to your site. You should see start seeing a drastic increase in the rankings to your site.