SEO Blog

3 Year-End Search Engine Statistics That Will Amaze You


With a New Year right around the corner it’s good to look back this year and see a “snapshot” of the state of search engines in 2019 and where search engine optimization is headed in 2020 and beyond.

Here are 3 very interesting facts about the power that search engines have when it comes to business growth based on 2019 data:

75% of users don’t even scroll past the first page of the SERPs. (source)

First page presence is vital when it comes to search engines. When attracting new business you need every positive signal you can muster and a first page presence in a major search engine like Google speaks volumes to visitors.

93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. (source)

Whether looking to make a purchase or just looking to learn, people utilize major search engines like Google regularly.

Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (ex. cold-calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate. (source)

It’s clear that SEO will continue to play a vital role in connecting visitors to product and services and continue to fuel business growth moving into 2020.


Happy New Year!

Local SEO for Google In 2019

To many, local SEO (Google Maps, GMB, etc) is a whole other animal that seems even more complex than Google Search (organic results) but, on the contrary, it’s actually simpler…


December of 2004 was a milestone for Google. This is when they filed their Patent for Authoritative Document Identification. The idea behind Authoritative Document Identification was to provide local searches with quality local content.


Authoritative Document Identification as explained directly from the horse’s mouth:


“A system determines documents that are associated with a location, identifies a group of signals associated with each of the documents, and determines authoritativeness of the documents for the location based on the signals.”


Put into context, Google uses four main signals that determine a location for a business. The signals are as follows:


⦁ H1 tag matches the business name.


⦁ The page has many links pointing to it from a number of other pages and/or websites that mention the location and/or the business name.


⦁ The page contains a physical address with a legitimate phone number.


⦁ Business name contained in the URL.

Virtual office vs Physical office for local SEO purposes

The first two bullet points are standard SEO stuff: Keywords in the appropriate header tags (primarily H1) and backlinks (links from other pages and/or websites). However, It’s the last two that put the “local” in local SEO. Does the page contain a physical address? (no, virtual offices don’t count since they don’t have a dedicated physical address) Does the page contain a dedicated phone number specific to that business?


Simply put, a business needs physical representation of it’s existence, even if it’s a residential location, in order to even have a chance at ranking for local SEO terms (ie. {keyword, city/town, state}) in Google. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to go rent a dedicated office space since people work out of their home all the time and these same people use their home as their business address. However, there can be a problem with using your residence as as your business address if you are looking to target a specific geographical location…

When it comes to local SEO location is everything


Are you trying to rank for valuable keywords in your little suburban town that has a few 10s of thousands of people in it…or that big city you’re near that has a million? Your dedicated physical address that you use for your GMB page will highly influence this. It’s not to say that it’s impossible to rank for keywords inside a major city if your business is physically located outside of said city, it’s just that it will be much harder to do so compared to actually having the business be physically located inside said city limits.


“So, after I do all of the above I shoot to the top of Google Maps, right?“


Not so fast, partner. You still have to worry about the 3 main factors that Google uses to determine local ranking:


⦁ Relevance


⦁ Distance


⦁ Prominence


Luckily for you, Google has created a special local SEO help page that covers these 3 factors as well as some tips on how to optimize your GMB page (Adding photos, managing reviews, etc). I highly recommend checking out that page and following those instructions to a T. Don’t worry. It’s a short read.


Something that is still overlooked even in 2019: Mobile SEO. I know what you’re thinking. Why am I talking about Mobile SEO in this post. Shouldn’t that be another topic for another day?

Local SEO Jon Snow


“Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites.” (source)


In other words, you need to make sure your website peforms well (loads fast, has visible content, uses responsive design, etc.) on mobile devices as well otherwise your local SEO efforts will be for naught.


Furthermore, “Google uses business information to help surface relevant local search results across Google, such as in Google Maps and Search.”(source) so things like integrating driving directions into your mobile site can actually improve your GMB listing rank and organic search rank.

Mobile SEO is a greater influencer on Google Maps and Search than ever before.


Let’s Get Started (If You Haven’t Done So Already)

Starting local SEO


Getting started with local SEO is not hard at all. The very first step is to create and authorize your Google My Business (GMB) page. Authorization can be done via postcard or phone call.


Then, you need to properly fill out your newly created GMB page by entering complete data about your business while keeping in mind the following (as mentioned previously in this post):


⦁ H1 tag matches the business name.


⦁ The page contains a physical address with a legitimate phone number.


⦁ Business name contained in the URL.


The fourth bullet point (also mentioned previously in this post) would be ensuring that the page has many links pointing to it from a number of other pages and/or websites (backlinks) that mention the location and/or the business name. This, however, is a whole other journey so I won’t go into depth here. I will be dedicating another post to it in the near future though.


Beyond this it’s a matter of making sure your mobile SEO is in tip-top shape and you should be good to go.


Remember, creating a GMB page is free just like getting an organic listing in Google Search (regardless of rank) is also free. With this in mind, any serious business owner should absolutely incorporate local SEO into their digital marketing strategy.

Strange Rumblings in SERP Land

To borrow Hunter S. Thompson’s signature style for a moment, morning comes hard to SEO professionals everywhere these days it seems. There has definitely been a shake-up in the search engine results page (SERP) for Google.


Even Barry Schwartz, a leading SEO industry blogger, and webmaster of seroundtable.com, admits the news on the subject is alive and he acknowledges the repeated coverage but the reason is evident…


All major 3rd party SERP volatility tracking tools have been firing off and showing signs of strong activity within the last couple of weeks. Mozcast, Accuranker, RankRanger, SEMRush, Advanced Web Rankings, SERP Metrics, and Algoroo have all been showing signs of trememdous SERP volatility and, from my own experience with my site and clients’ sites, the volatility is real. But what can be done about it?


Truthfully speaking, not much.


Content & Links: The Original Recipe Still Works


I still add content and build links (when possible). They are 2 age-old practices that Google officially confirmed as leading search signals back in March of 2016

I don’t see why this would change any time soon or what could possibly replace this system. Content is the whole point of the search query whether it be something as simple as directions or something more complex like how a diesel engine works.

Links that DON’T contain the nofollow html tag (rel=”nofollow”) still serve as a “vote of confidence” and pass authority to the site that the link directs to.


Reach Over Rank


I have wrote on this in the past: Don’t obsess over rank. Of course, 1st position should be a secondary goal but increasing your first page listings should be priority 1. SERPs are not stable and Google completely admits to multiple updates daily with the occasional huge update that sends the SEO industry into panic/mania mode. Avoid these up and down waves by increasing reach through additional first page search listings.

SEO vs UX

SEO best practices and UX best practices don’t always mesh well. In some cases, simplicity is key with UX but for technical SEO matters this simply will not work. Lot’s of onsite detailed content *cough* keywords *cough* are required if seeking a first page rank for relative site keywords.

Many Times, Waiting Is The Best Option

If a reason is not known for a major shift in SERPs then sometimes waiting it out is the best option. I have seen sites drop off the first page only to return their a week or two later. The key is not to panic and just assess the situation. Making changes to a site simply as a defensive strategy to a rank shift is not only pointless since it’s essentially just guessing but it is also runs the risk of being counter productive. A major on-site SEO change could end up doing more damage in the long run.

If you need an expert to help with SEO and get your businesses presence on Google’s first page then call today: 585-622-1126

The Darkside Of SEO: From Blackhat Tactics To Extortion


The SEO community is a positive space, generally speaking, but there are a few cases where SEO practioners have, to reference Star Wars, “joined the dark side” and have completely disregarded Google’s guidelines, deliberately exploiting loopholes from flaws in Google’s search engine algorithm to a very large scale for profit. Worse yet, there is even a case of one man receiving a jail sentence for extorting money from his clients through threats of negative SEO, a practice that can actually lower a website’s rankings rather than raise them.


The first real mainstream story of shady, TOS breaking practices involves the famous American department store chain, J.C. Penney hiring the SEO company SearchDEX to help them during the 2010 holiday season, the most lucrative time of year for their ecommerce website: JCPenney.com.


SearchDEX proceeded to buy and trade links to JCPenney.com on other separate websites, not related to the J.C. Penny brand to trick Google into thinking that JCPenney.com was receiving organic links from various webmasters naturally. Doing this made JCPenney.com go up in search results in Google during the holiday season. Not just on Google either. Microsoft’s Bing is affected too since they use the same methods to promote sites (and they copy Google!). Soon, and , JCPenney was on top of a lot of searches where it naturally didn’t belong.


Eventually, Google, and reportedly its algorithms, detected the strange activity (an unaturally large spike in backlinks) and immediately cut them down to unnaturally low status in the Google search results. Over the years dozens of large scale paid link networks would get shut down by Google one by one all over the world such as places like Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia, France & Germany with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s US webspam team at the time, even tweeting about one of the events involving the take down of 7 link networks in Japan.


Out of all the stories involving the SEO underworld the one that, without question, ultimately takes the cake is the case of William Stanley, a little known SEO consultant of of Dallas, TX at the time.


In early January of 2016 Stanley, a search engine optimizer, was sentenced to over three years in Federal prison for extortion. What Stanley specifically did was a mix of negative SEO and negative reputation management. This included posting fraudulent comments, creating links on “bad neighborhood” sites (pornography, gambling), and creating negative reviews if the victim didn’t pay him a certain amount of money. (click here for the full story)

Although the SEO industry is relatively new since major search engines like Google have only been around for about 20 years and are constantly developing and changing, there has been no shortage of illicit SEO practices that have made headlines time and time again.

Perhaps a whole “SEO Mafia” is hiding somewhere in the shadows 😲

Looking for professional SEO service that follows Google’s guidelines and gets results?

5 Important Facts About Google & Backlinks In 2019

1.) Bad Links Are Devalued, Not Penalized

Since Google’s Penguin 4.0 update bad quality links are now devalued, rather than penalized, by simply not being acknowledged anymore. Prior to this, Google would lower the search rank of pages that bad quality links pointed to as a form of penalty.

2.) Total Number Of Links Is NOT A Ranking Factor

The total number of backlinks a website had used to be a ranking factor. As Google’s algorithm became better at understanding content on webpages this changed. Now, backlink numbers alone don’t mean anything. Moving into 2019, only the authority and relevance of the page that the link is on matters.

3.) Nofollow Links Don’t Pass Authority

Nofollow links aren’t beneficial for ranking purposes, only traffic. As stated by Google verbatim: “In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links” (source). This is important if you buy links for ranking purposes (which is against Google’s TOS) because you are getting ripped off if they are all nofollow links.

4.) Negative SEO Is Not A Problem Anymore

Thanks to backlink fact #1 negative SEO isn’t a problem anymore. In the past, negative SEO was a vicious ranking strategy that played to Google’s harsh treatment of websites with bad quality backlinks. By creating a bunch of backlinks from web pages and domains that are blacklisted and/or completely irrelevant with spam and pointing them to competitor websites in an effort to lower their search position rather than raise it (thus the name “negative SEO”) for a greater chance of taking their place, a period of rank tanking commenced before Google finally addressed the problem with an update.

5.) Content Should Always Come First

Before you go chasing backlinks (since they are an official ranking factor) content should still always be priority one. Remember: Backlinks are powerful but, without pointing to a page with content that is high qualty, useful, and relevant to the visitor’s search query, they are useless.

Do You Have A Search Engine Marketing Plan For 2019?

With a new year right around the corner many businesses are getting ready to start the next calendar year off strong with plans in place for their business to continue to run smoothly and grow. Do You Have A Search Engine Marketing Plan For 2019 However, many businesses tend to neglect the finer aspects of their marketing efforts and end up not giving much focus (if any) to search engine marketing. This is a mistake as businesses end up leaving a lot of revenue on the table from not capturing their share of valuable, converting search engine traffic.

Reasons Why Businesses Don’t Invest In Search Engine Marketing

The reasons tend to be the same with a few variations. For example, many business owners “just don’t understand how Google works” making them afraid to deviate from more tradiational understood marketing mediums such as radio ads and newspaper ads. These same owners may also think “Google controls all the results” (so there is no work to be done that can improve outcome).

Other common objections to search engine marketing is that SEO’ing a website and ranking it high for it’s relative keywords “won’t do much for business revenue” or that Google Ads are “too expensive.”

All of these thoughts and objections are entirely false. Breaking them down one by one with proof is easy:

Objection 1: “I Don’t Understand How Google Works.” (SEO)

Resolution: Google is simple. Content and links is what affects your rank in Google’s search engine. Google has publicly stated this multiple times.

Objection 2: “Google Controls All The Results.” (SEO)

Resolution: Not really. RankBrain does. RankBrain is Google’s A.I. used for search. It can read content at a more sophisticated level than Google’s spider bots making it better at understanding and categorizing content. However, it still responds to certain signals that affects Google’s algorithm as a whole. SEO specialists can generate these signals leading to high rankings.

Objection 3: “It Won’t Do Much For Business Revenue” (SEO/PPC)

In the short term, on average, this is true but in the long run this is completlety false. An increase in business revenue 2, 3X over time is common. In some cases, number one organic rank is achieved and business revenue can increase rapidly as a result. Take a look at some search engine usage statistics that will prove how much business revenue potetial is online daily.

Objection 4: “Google Ads Are Too Expensive.” (PPC)

This statement usually implies that the speaker had a prior experience with Google Ads that ended up costing more money than it brought in, the result of an improper campaign setup most likely. PPC specialists can help with this. A high ROI search engine ad campaign is completely possible at a very low cost.

The Sooner A Search Engine Marketing Campaign Is Started The Better

Achieving high organic rankings and running a successful ads campaign in Google takes time. How much time exactly can’t be answered but in some cases 3 or 4 months may be needed. For this reason, the sooner a search engine marketing campaign is started the faster it will start contributing to the business’ revenue.

Budget shouldn’t really be an issue for most businesses as search engine marketing is comparably a much cheaper alternative to traditional TV and radio advertising.

Ready for a professional to create and optimize a high ROI Google Ads campaign?

How about a traffic rich SEO campaign for valuable, relative keywords?

SEO For Voice Search

Voice search only continues to grow in popularity as it tends to be quicker than typing for most people on the move. Looking for local businesses by speaking into a smartphone is not just a trend, it’s here to stay.voice search is becoming increasingly popular Making sure a business can be found with voice searches is imperative to business owners who depend search engine marketing to attract customers.

Of course voice searches aren’t new, but they are considerably improved.

Simply put, that accuracy of voice searching has seen a huge improvement in recent years. Currently, voice searches are more than 20% of searches through Google’s mobile app. It’s predicted that by 2020 more than half of all searches will be vocalized.

A Few Tips On How To Optimize A Website For Voice Search:

  • On-page keywords should be incorporated into more conversational phrases
  • Add metadata (when applicable)
  • Update your Google My Business listings. Voice search looks at local listings as a priority many times (think “{search query} near me”)

    • Voice search will continue to become popular and, as technology improves, will eventually pass up typed searches.

    SEO For Search Engines That Aren’t Google

    SEO Isnt Just For Google

    For anyone that has followed this blog, or is familiar with my search engine marketing expertise, it is understood that I am a “Google guy” meaning that, when it comes to finding things in search engines, I turn to Google every time. However, this doesn’t mean that Google is the only search engine. There’s Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ebay, LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, and countless others you probably never heard.

    When it comes to ranking content in a search engine Google is your best bet due to the sheer number of people who use it and the fact that Google is highly transparent with the core fundamentals of their search engine.

    But, what if you wanted to rank an auction page in Ebay? Or, if you are looking for new opportunities in LinkedIn and want your personal profile page to come up first for key searches? SEO is the solution to these problems.

    As I stated earlier in this post, Google is highly transparent with the core fundamentals of their search engine meaning they pretty much tell you what you need to do to rank high. Obviously, the execution of their instruction is a whole other ballgame but the fact that the execution is clear makes SEO’ing webpages for Google completely feasible.

    So, how do you search engine optimize content for other search engines that provides value and exposure for people and businesses?

    Bing SEO

    Like with Google, links are a powerful ranking signal that Bing utilizes.

    From Bing Webmaster Guidelines:

    “Links pointing to your site help Bing discover new pages on your site. Traditionally, it is also regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is essentially telling Bing that they trust your content.”

    Although Bing search representatives have never commented directly on the complete on-page factors for ranking most seasoned search engine marketers seem to agree that keywords play a stronger role with Bing than with Google. Google uses LSI (latent semantic indexing) so many times the keyword being targeted doesn’t even need to be on-site in an exact match format. With Bing, keywords, exact match key phrases, and exact match domains all seem to carry a lot of weight. It’s as if Bing’s search algorithm is trailing behind Google’s a good 5-10 years.

    All in all, a high ranking in Bing pretty much comes from the majority of the same practices as a high ranking in Google does.

    Yahoo! SEO

    Since October of 2011, Yahoo! Search has been fully powered by Bing. However, over time the search results between the 2 engines have been quite different at times (depending on the search query). Yahoo! is even more tight lipped about their search engine and, since it’s “outsourced” to Bing, Yahoo! probably won’t reveal much on it. If the goal is ranking high in Yahoo! then the best course of action is to focus on ranking high in Bing.

    DuckDuckGo SEO

    When it comes to privacy DuckDuckGo is the “White Knight” of search engines (or white duck in this case). DuckDuckGo does not store the personal information or the search history of the user nor does it follow it’s users with ads or track users over time. DuckDuckGo has been known to call out Google in this regard. Although, the search volume market share in DuckDuckGo (0.22%) is pitiful compared to Google (72%). It has been slowly growing over the years however. In time DuckDuckGo could prove to be a valuable traffic source.

    So, what is known about DuckDuckGo’s ranking algorithm?

    Links (go figure).

    Directly from DuckDuckGo:

    “Nevertheless, the best way to get good rankings (in pretty much all search engines) is to get links from high quality sites like Wikipedia”

    There are 2 takeaways from this statement from DuckDuckGo…

    First, DuckDuckGo believes that links are so powerful that they even say they matter in all search engines (not just theirs).

    Second, Wikipedia is the link example they use. Wikipedia is a nofollow link meaning in Google’s eyes it does not pass authority and therefore it will not help with rankings. This means that nofollow links are not a problem in DuckDuckGo and link building is much easier…for now at least.

    eBay SEO

    Cassini, eBay’s internal search engine, first emerged in 2013 and with it came a chance of actually being able to SEO an auction listing and increase the chance of the listing showing up first for related keywords. Before 2013, people were mostly in the dark on how eBay’s search engine worked and really couldn’t actively SEO a listing, leaving everything up to eBay.
    Cassini ranks listings based on 4 metrics: Item Title, Item Specifics, Category, and Catalogs. These for metrics are influenced by keywords. Using eBay’s keyword research tool, Terapeak, it becomes possible to build a powerful keyword list and implement it into a listing’s HTags (H1-H6) found in the HTML editor, a standard SEO tactic used in other search engines.

    LinkedIn SEO

    LinkedIn has grown in popularity for business networking in recent years. You can find jobs, employees, and promote your business here making it one of the more useful social media platforms, especially for business development.

    Luckily, SEO for LinkedIn is pretty straight forward. SEO’ing a LinkedIn profile page (like any other page that shows up in Google) starts with keyword richness through content. There is a lot of content that can be added to a LinkedIn profile so it’s best to use the space to fill in some good keywords. This includes pictures too. Rather than just a name of a person, putting in decriptive keywords in the file names of pictures uploaded to LinkedIn gets picked up by LinkedIn search algo and helps improve rankings. In other words, naming a profile photo “John Doe” is not nearly as effective as naming it “John Doe – mechanical engineer with 15 years experience” and so on.

    Things like posting and growing a network by reaching out to other profiles in the same field also affects ranking. It is widely known that LinkedIn profiles with larger networks show up first in search more reached than ones with smaller networks.

    Facebook SEO

    The cream of the crop when it comes to social media. SEO for Facebook is the most dynamic. The number one factor is content. It is well known through out today’s digital marketing circles that the more relevant content on a Facebook page, the more exposure it will get for relevant keywords. Don’t worry about getting likes and growing followers. Worry about competitors putting up more relevant, useful content.

    On-site keyword SEO practices can effectively be applied as well. For example, naming the page the desired keyword will increase ranking. Regular posting with targetted keywords in each post will further influence rankings and increase the chance of the page getting found.

    Instagram SEO

    The “social media platform for the kids” is how many seasoned digital marketers look at Instagram since so many Gen Z and even younger Millenials are there. Instagram is photo and video intensive and there is not much room for anything else.

    Here are a few basic rules to follow when it comes to SEO for Instagram:

    1. Use high quality photos.

    2. Use captions. These fields are primed for relevant keywords.

    3. Use Hashtags. Again putting keywords in here can greatly increase ranking within the Instagram network.

    4. Put content out regularly. Visual content is 90% of what’s on Instagram so putting content out regularly can help.

    If a business offers a wide variety of products, listing them on Instagram can help. If it’s a business that provides services such as tax specialists and accounting firms then Instagram will probably not work so well.

    Amazon SEO

    “A9” is Amazon’s search algorithm. Since Amazon users are looking for products and are more interested in buying rather than just reading and researching (like with Google), A9 really only focuses on 2 main factors: relevance and performance.

    Starting with the easier of the 2, relevance is influenced by keywords. The single most important element of Amazon SEO is the product title. The most relevant keywords go. These title keywords can dramatically change the rank of a product listing so getting them right is crucial. After that it’s the backend keywords that users don’t see but Amazon’s algorithm does. This is very similar to Google’s meta tags.

    A seller on Amazon has 5 lines that they can insert their backend keywords. Each line has a maximum character input of 50. That’s 250 characters total for backend keywords.
    So, once again, good SEO in Amazon starts with a good keyword list.

    Performance isn’t as easy to tackle as relevance is when it comes to Amazon SEO. Things like conversion ratio and reviews weigh heavily in this area. Even price can affect your rank (If you charge significantly more or less, do you offer flexible pricing, ie. payment plans, etc).

    In conclusion, focus on what you can control in Amazon: Keywords. Relevant keywords on page and in the backend section can go a long way. If a high rank is achieved from this and then subsequently drops look at performance metrics next and make adjustments accordingly.

    Is Facebook Dying? No, My Facebook Page Still Shows Up In Google

    This is why I love SEO.

    When it comes to search engine optimizing content for major search engines no matter how much popularity a social medium platform seems to have (or lacks due to SEO Your Social Media Pagesgeneration preferances or bad press) you can always optimize social media pages to show up in search engines. After all, at the end of the day a social media page is just a page regardless of the domain it’s a part of.

    So, what does this mean?

    This basically means that all those free social media pages you created by themselves may seem limited and practically useless for business development, like Instagram with it’s lack of ability to post a clickable link in a post, LinkedIn with it’s restricted network making it so that you can only connect to certain people at a certain time, and Facebook with it’s elite-ism among it’s users (try friend requesting someone you don’t know and don’t be surprised if they don’t accept it), but in truth they are all extremely useful. If it’s a page that can show up in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even DuckDuckGo (yes people are starting to use this search engine more) then it’s a page with potential value.

    Today, my Facebook page is ranking on the first page of Google for some of my major keywords. As someone who strives daily (weekends too!) to grow his business seeing one of my social media pages on the first page of Google is huge. I don’t even use FB much since I never really got into social media much. I’m pretty old fashioned, I prefer to call, text, or email people I want to talk with rather than use social media for this. This doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how valuable a free page on the Internet can be. It improves my search engine “estate” a great deal when I rank these types of pages.

    In conclusion, social media is a valuable tool simply because it can provide a business with more free exposure in search engines even if the social media platform itself seems to lack any business development advantage for a business. A free page online can be a powerful promotional tool if effective SEO practices are applied to it.

    Content vs Links: Which Is Strongest For SEO?

    Ever since Google announced it’s main organic algorithm influencers last year, SEO, something that was too theory based for many traditional marketers, has gained a lot more popularity in the world of digital marketing. Google SEO - Content vs Links Simply put, SEO marketers aren’t playing a “guessing game” when it comes to search engine marketing practices anymore.

    Or are they?

    It is a fact that links (that aren’t nofollow links) pass authority to other sites thus helping them rank for specific keyword groups related to the desination site’s content. It is also a fact that relative content on a site’s page helps that page rank for specific keywords related to said page’s content. 2 questions are drawn from these facts about how Google’s search engine work:

    1. Which links are the most powerful ranking influencers?

    2. How much content is needed?

    As for the answer to the first question, when checking their backlink profiles, Google has instructed webmasters to question a link’s purpose “Why is the link there?” “Does the link provide any value?” The most common interpretation of this is that if a link is contextual (A link is in a body of content as a helpful resource to the content as a whole or, at the very least, a specific portion of the content) it is powerful. This is theory however and must be taken with a grain of salt. A link is a link (assuming it is not nofollow) and a link anywhere on a page that has authority in Google’s index will pass some of that authority.

    The answer to the second question is a bit tougher to answer. There is no suggested length of content, although many swear by the 500+ word rule when writing articles for SEO purpose. The real key to content that helps SEO is relevancy. How relevant is the content to the keyword group you are tyring to rank for? For example, if you are writing about apples, then write about apples, not fruit in general.

    Now for the big question: Which is more powerful, content or links?

    Moz, the leading third party SEO research company in the world, did a study on ranking content without links and the results were very interesting. Simply put, it’s near impossible to rank content without links. So does this mean links are more powerful? Not necessarily because it IS impossible to rank a blank page with just a bunch of powerul links pointed to it. From this we can gather that content is more important than links. In other words, if I had to pick one and only one I would pick content.

    “Create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off” – support.google.com

    Google has stated multiple times that they want to see good, relevant content on your website. This alone should tell all SEO professionals that content outweighs links.

    In conclusion, both content and links are important and necessary for a page on a website to rank high for related keywords. However, priority one should always be creating high quality, relevant content.