SEO or Link Building Which is Better Way to Build Search Traffic?

It was a question 'Search Engine Optimization(SEO) or Link building which is better?' that bothered me for several months when I was trying to build search engine traffic for my web pages. Few months I worked well on SEO, tried may SEO tools and software to optimize my web pages to cent percent. But I could not see any improvement in search engine traffic. Then one day I thought to make an analysys on top 10 webpages of search engine results for a particular keyword.

I had downloaded 10 different SEO software which give an analysys on SEO for a webpage. I had taken a keyword and taken the top ten results for that keyword in google. I analyzed each result that I got in google search results separately with each SEO software. I had recorded the percentage of search engine optimization for each page in different SEO software and prepared a table.

When I had seen that report I was shocked to see that in every SEO software the top 1 result was given a SEO score less than 65 percent. And another thing that shocked me is that the results in positions 7, 8 and 9 have a SEO score of more than 90 percent. I had done the analysis for the same keyword in yahoo and I have got almost similar SEO report. I tried for 20 other keywords in different search engines and in 16 cases the top results have been given a SEO score less than 70 percent.

I had then started another analysis on the link popularity of each domain for top 10 search results. I had opened alexa website information for the domain in each search result and watched 'sites linking in' for those domains. I could see a big difference in inbound links for those domains. The domains in top results have huge number of 'sites linking in' while the domains in low ranked results have very less 'sites linking in' compared to the top ones.

From the next day I had started link building for my webpages. I had submitted my domains to the directories, submitted each and every webpage to the social networking sites, I had commented in many sites with my domain name and had utilized every resource for link building. I few days I could notice a drastic change in search engine traffic. Not only the keywords that I targeted are ranked well but many other keywords with combinations have crawled up in the search engine rankings.

Finally I caught the secret for building search engine traffic. Here I would like to say that building a webpage well optimized to the search engines is not enough to build search engine traffic but also need to build external links. A webpage that is optimized to 75 to 80 percent is enough to take that top on to the search engine results provided the link building for the webpage or domain is done perfectly and in proper way.