Foregoing the Linking: An SEOs Story

Via SEOmoz comes this gem from SEO Chat in which an SEO decides to forego the linking for a more on-page focus:

I inherited a stale store site without many links and a low PR. I came to the conclusion early on that trying to jump to Google’s crazy dance was not worth the effort. Links acquisition is dog work — and then you might get penalized (or even dropped) at the end of it. You only have to read the threads on Google Optimization for a few days to see the agony and frustration that’s involved in dancing with Google. And what happens when G wakes up and decides to drop its obsession with links?

It’s true that G has half the searches, just by itself, but the rest together also have half, and they are a lot less weird and idiosyncratic. If you make Y and MSN happy, you make almost all the rest of the also-ran SEs happy.

Writing good content, making every effort to help and guide the visitor around my site, and leading her to checkout with as few difficulties as possible was my first task. That helped conversion and was also a good start on SEO.

Then by choosing my top 3 KW phrases carefully, and doing a minor rewrite of the existing good content to emphasize them without getting (too) spammy, I was able to get all three KW phrases on the first SERP page for Y, MSN, askJ, and Alta Vista. (The other SEs tend to be more like Y than like G, but I haven’t checked them out to see where I am).

He’s right. For “natural” link building that won’t get you in trouble, many times you just need to focus on the content and the links will come. In a sense, good content breeds links, but links don’t breed good content. And even without aggressive link building, you’ll do just fine most times.