This is the age-old debate (since the relatively recent birth of search engines):
Should you work on creating a great quality site that’s so good that people will want to link to or should you focus your energies on a linking campaign?
In some SEO circles, this debate can get pretty heated.
My take on this debate is you should do BOTH. While it’s great to expend all your energy on creating a great looking site for your visitors, it’s equally important to promote it.
Just focusing on developing content alone isn’t going to get you anywhere because it’s just like a business owner who says they rely solely on “referrals” for business where in effect they expect their clients to say good things about them without any incentive whatsoever. This is a very passive approach and won’t get you noticed by the search engines for a long time if at all. There are exceptions to everything of course, but do you really want to leave your business to chance or blind luck?
Consider also that if there are no links to your site to start with, how in the world is anyone going to know you exist? You have to promote it somehow… Links are a great way to do just that!
If you enter a very competitive marketplace like mortgages, travel, or web hosting, chances are very slim to none that you’ll ever get your website ranked and noticed.
Good, optimized content is still advisable to have if you wish other webmasters to link to you. After all, a webmaster linking to you is like an endorsement of your site. The better your content is, the more likely people will want to link to you. The poorer the quality of the site, the fewer links people will give you.
It’s a balance you should aim for. Just like healthy eating, you want to balance your diet with fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, and grains. The same with search engine optimization. Balance your on-site optimization (on-page factors existing on your web pages) with off-site optimization (inbound links from various sites).
In case after case, link builders win in search engine rankings compared to well-designed sites alone.
So, don’t spend all your time on content building alone. You should apportion about 65-85% (more if possible) of your time/resources on link building. If you don’t have the time to do so but have the financial resources, you can always outsource linking campaigns to a reputable link building company.