Backlinks or Code

“What is the main thing we should focus on to build our SEO campaign: Backlinks or Code?”

SEO companies get asked this question so much these days, particularly as SEO moves more and more into the mindspace of business owners and directors. Backlinks or Code may seem like a savvy question to the uninitiated but it is almost exactly the wrong question to ask.

Let’s take a look at what each one does:

Backlinks build up your authority on a subject. This is based on The original model of a self policing web, where website owners link to content relevant to their own, and that is deemed by them to be of good quality – thus the more backlinks, the higher the respect level of other webmasters. This is the basis for Google’s PageRank calculations and how they determine the most authoritative websites on a particular subject. On its own High PageRank does not guarantee a high position in the SERPs, if it did the BBC (PR9) would come up number one for every search.

Code Optimisation and making sure your website matches the W3C and WAI standards is very important. It ensures the accessibility of your information across all browsers, even to the level of being readable by blind users and navigable by those using devices to overcome physical disabilities. Google and Bing like this, not just for the concern it shows to less able bodied users and the eagerness to comply with standards, but because it makes the crawler’s job easier. The Search Engine Crawler is the program that navigates the web, following links to find the location of all of your data. The crawler then brings page the raw information that is analysed by the Search Engine Index. The Index ‘reads’ your content to understand the subject matter of your page. Code Compliancy makes it easier for these systems to do their jobs, speeding up index efficiency and letting the Search Engine work through more pages and present more relevant results to their search customers.

And there it is: The realization moment. Code Compliancy and Backlinks are hugely important but on their own they do little for the core purpose of a Search Engine. This Core Purpose is Relevancy. If a search engine does not display relevant responses to a search query it will lose its market share, simple as that. Backlinks, excellent coding, even really creative blog posts like this one can help your site along a lot but at the heart of it, if your content is not relevant to a clearly defined topic… it will not be shown to search engine customers.