More Important: Back links or Meta Tags/Content?

[B Set]

Which is more important for SEO - back links or Meta Tags/Content? I always thought the later but I just spoke with a analytics company and they said back links are even more important. Is this the case or were they just trying to sell their product?

[Aviator Joe]

Both are important -- specially after Panda update.

But just content will not help you rank - it is links. Links are the most important part of ranking, ALONG with good content and optimized titles and meta tags.

If you have bad content and hundreds of links, your site will not rank. In fact, it may get sandboxed or banned from the whole search engine at all.

If you have excellent content and no links, your site will not rank.

If you have excellent content AND quantity of backlinks, your site will rank very well. Be sure that you are getting quality links and enough IP diversity.

I hope I was able to explain the point, let me know if you have any questions about what I posted above.

[amritrr]

They were not wrong. Back links determine the importance of your website. Once your importance is established, then comes your content.

[Matt Ward]

Aviator Joe pretty much nailed it on the head. I've found that creating great content and then following that up with some quality backlinks does wonders for SEO. I'm not saying it's impossible to do well with SEO without both of them, but it's definitely easier if you make quality content as work with that.

[faceblogger]

Back links & Content

Meta tags are almost useless