Is it all about back links

Just as everyone else is I am attempting to get my site at the top of google, the good news from my point of view is I get a fair amount of hits from other places, but my thinking is if I can get SE traffic I would be laughing.

When I look at my competitors I cant see what they are doing right and me wrong..

They are a factor, but not the only factor. What you have on the site is the largest factor. If what you have provides a significant value, then you get added to the master list: word of mouth. That's what will make a site grow. By bringing in people from related sites, some organic search results, and providing quality content, you'll begin to grow.

That's for white hat. Black hat could bring you in hits faster, but in the long run you may risk getting de-indexed and if your content isn't great, then the site isn't likely to grow for a sustained duration.

When in comes to se traffic - purely search engine traffic- it is all about backlinks...
Google crawler can not differentiate between shit rewritten content on a website or super quality original content, so this is not a factor.
Plenty of content is not a solution for ranking anymore, cause there are a lot of content generation nowadays, and billions of pages indexed - there s already to much content on the web.
Your only chance for kick ass ranking is links, and of course basic on page seo.

Thanks for the advice...

Google uses over 40 factors when ranking a site. This was in an interview from one of the inner google engineers. But blacklinks play a major role so yes it is very important.

sorry to burst the bubble of most opinions

the MOST important factor to rank high is NOT content, NOT meta tags and NOT even site optimization. It is the BACKLINKS - preferably with anchor text that contains your keyword

George Bush's site is rank no.1 for the term "miserable failure" yet this phase has never been mentioned in any page of the whole site.

CNN is rank no.1 for the word "news" yet it is only written not more than twice

Link popularity is the key!

Have you even encounter a website that is poorly done and not even optimized and has crap content yet ranks high? Have seen this a thousand times!

Now you know!

snowwhite said:

sorry to burst the bubble of most opinions

the MOST important factor to rank high is NOT content, NOT meta tags and NOT even site optimization. It is the BACKLINKS - preferably with anchor text that contains your keyword

George Bush's site is rank no.1 for the term "miserable failure" yet this phase has never been mentioned in any page of the whole site.

CNN is rank no.1 for the word "news" yet it is only written not more than twice

Link popularity is the key!

Have you even encounter a website that is poorly done and not even optimized and has crap content yet ranks high? Have seen this a thousand times!

Now you know!

Click to expand...

I beg to differ! Yes backlink is important but content is equally important. Without content, you got no ranking...without links, you got no ranking. The instances you're describing is what you would call Google Bomb. Google has to give in when there is hundred of thousands of links pointing to a site with the anchor text. Plus both of those two sites already had hight authority so they would rank for pretty much anything with certain number of links.

Sorry but 100% definitely NO! They are not equal in importance. I know this for a fact because I have tested the method myself.

To the OP, you mention what your competitors are doing write and what you are doing wrong. Look up the backlinks for your competitor's site. Try to get those backlinks as well, and then get more backlinks than them, and better backlinks.

Yes, it IS all about the backlinks. Many sites are now ranking #1 purely on backlinks because the keywords they rank for don't even appear in the site's content.

I've had high quality content pages lose out ranking wise to completely crappy content pages that had better quality backlinks. On the other hand, my high quality content + backlinks from sites that get major Google love have given some of my competitors fits. So as far as I'm concerned, it's all about the baclinks.

I was crazy after SEO untill people started saying that content is the king/queen/bishop whatever....I started developing good content on my blogs ...so it was 80% weight on content and 20% on backlinks. Trust me this is 100% original content. Till date there has been no success. Yes backlins are very important. I should say concentrate MORE on backlinks than content for sure.

Thanks again for the great feedback..

The big question is now how do I get quaility links, had this problem a few years ago.

Are we talking social networking sites..

Nick Flame said:

When in comes to se traffic - purely search engine traffic- it is all about backlinks...
Google crawler can not differentiate between shit rewritten content on a website or super quality original content, so this is not a factor.
Plenty of content is not a solution for ranking anymore, cause there are a lot of content generation nowadays, and billions of pages indexed - there s already to much content on the web.
Your only chance for kick ass ranking is links, and of course basic on page seo.

Click to expand...

They can differ, i know of 3 ways of how they do it ... right away:

1.) google Bots knows basic english grammar, so they can detect scraped content or computer written content in this way. -> also the main factor that is not thought of when creating Pages for SEO cloaking (I may release a SEO cloaking guide soon though that shows how to cloak in the right way)

2.) many pages have adsense or google analytics on them ... guess what this gives google the power to measure of how long somebody stays on that page. It is obvious the longer someone stays the better the quality of the content and the page ;-)

3.) google can also check if someone enters a search phrase in their searchengine then clicks on the result ... and although the page looked optimized to google the people that entered the search phrase come right back to google and search again or click another link ... well guess what ... let this happen a couple times and google knows that this one page is obviously not so good. ;-)

Quality content matters! By the way the better your content the higher the chance of being successful in the long run anyway .. because then people automatically start linking to you (of course links are very important too). ;-)

Hope that helped.
catman