Search engine optimization is made up of relevant content, fresh content, and link population. I say this many times every day. However, an argument still exist out in the Internet Nation of whether you should spend more time on your content and on getting links to your web site.

“Content is King” saith the link opposition. It is true…content is important. If you are not providing new content to the internet that is useful, enlightening, and down right interesting, you have a problem. Search engines download your entire web site (textually speaking) to determine what your web site is relevant to. The process is far more complicated but you get the general idea.

If a web site pertaining to cars has an encyclopedia of one million pages of car repair, car classifieds, car information, car related products, and car articles, it is very easy to see that this site is highly relevant to the term “cars”.

But what if our million page mammoth doesn't have any web sites linking to it? Realistically, that is not going to happen…but lets pretend.

Links to a web site are a symbol of good quality. After all, would a thousand people relate their web site to a web site that was not relevant nor useful? No usually. This is why Google particularly puts so much emphasis on link population. Your local car shop may have five hundred relevant links to it and only ten pages within the web site.

However, it is likely that your local car shop will rank higher than the car web site with over one million pages of content. Why? Because content is like weight. Ten pounds of gold may weigh the same as ten pounds of cotton but the value is still greater.

So one million pages of relevant useless content can be lost in the search engines because nobody is linking to it. Of course, with that much content, someone in a blog, web site, or forum is bound to make reference and link to the site…but not if the content is useless.

What to do. Content comes first. Create a lot of good content. You are in business because you have something that others don't. Be it a product, ability to make a product, ability to perform a service, or a license to do a service, you have something that others do not. With that, you naturally have knowledge that others do not. Share that knowledge. Knowledge is equal to the aforementioned ten pounds of gold.

Once you have your knowledge on your web site, you can begin doing link exchanges and also receiving unrequested links to your web site…all because you now have useful, relevant, and interesting content.

In the case of Content vs. Links, the verdict is simple. Both are important but content needs to come first and be useful. Links come after useful content and they need to be from relevant web sites.