It’s All About the Links
After a certain point search engine optimization is all about links. You can only generate so much quality content or do so much on page optimization. This isn’t to say that on page optimization is pointless, but after you spend enough time doing it, you’ll see little benefit for the amount of time you input. Every other factor search engine ranking factor has a theoretical cap with regards to how much you can do to maximize it. Links on the other hand are limitless.
Let’s say you go through every single webpage on your site and start doing some on page optimization. You run through the pages and change the tittle, meta, and html tags to be more appropriate; you even revise the content while doing some keyword optimization. All of those images missing alt tags get fixed, and the anchor text of links on pages gets adjusted and refined as well. It’s possible your ambitious enough to do this entire process again just to fix some of the things you overlooked on the first run through. After you do one thorough or a few quick passes through of on page optimization, you are going to stop seeing benefit for the time you spend and things are going to flat line near that theoretical maximum.
Let’s take a look at link building now. Maybe your website’s niche is extremely small, and it’s possible that you could tap out the number of links to your site. That means you would have hit the theoretical cap for links. Didn’t I say that was impossible? Yes and no; if a website’s niche is very small and targeted, it is probable (but also very hard) to hit that max. For the vast majority of people this will not be an issue, but if it does happen to be a problem, don’t worry because it’s really not. Expand your options and and look at the broader picture; start link building from the more general niche that your website belongs to. So if your website sells hypoallergenic suntan lotion and you think you’ve hit the link cap, you haven’t. You just need to look into the hypoallergenic or suntan lotion supplies market. It’s always possible to take a step back up in your vertical.
When it comes to seo, every other factor aside from links can only do so much. Although, you are a fool if you only improve upon a few factors affecting your serps because search engine optimization is the sum of these factors. Yeah, you can build a successful website with pretty much only links or incredible content, but that same site could be substantially more successful if all factors were focused on. Plus, whenever search engines modify their algorithms, your website is going to be that much more stable in the serps. That being said once you’ve approached the cap of all other factors, links are the only thing that can take you higher.