What a great question! Impossible to answer but the debate it generates is so insightful.

It’s a bit like asking a professional golfer which is more important, driving or putting? Some will be fabulous drivers, other fabulous putters but you need elements of both if you are to be successful.

We created the Linking Matters Report, http://www.linkingmatters.com to test how effective a linking strategy on its own would be. On Google, we now rank between position 8 and 10 in results for the term ‘linking’ (6.5 million results returned) and positions 1 and 2 for the term ‘linking strategy’ (1.6 million results returned).

The LM report is a free guide to link building and we launched in February 2003 using only a linking strategy to promote the site. We also linked out to over 50 other sites and resources.

In 7 months, 12,000 copies of the report were downloaded, we attracted nearly 1,000 inbound links and rose from a PageRank of zero to PR6. We did no formal SEO though our pages were search engine friendly.

Our strategy was to identify the top 50 information sites for online marketing and we succeeded in getting links and editorial from over 30 of them including SearchEngineWatch.com, Clickz.com, SitePoint.com, WilsonWeb.com, WDFM.com, SearchEngineNews.com, DrWeb.de and of course WebProNews.

Then in August 2003, we revamped the site and for the first time optimized pages for a core set of 9 keyword phrases. Within weeks our search engine traffic doubled and we rose to a PR7.

We have since dropped back to PR6, probably because we concentrated on client work and customer conversion issues rather than writing new content. However, we’re now back with more content and more outbound links and our traffic figures have jumped again.

The lessons I would take from our experiences are:

• You absolutely must have great content (and should never be afraid to link out to great content)
• A linking strategy, targeted at top sites can produce tremendous results
• Those results will be greatly enhanced through SEO
• Keep adding content.

Hope that’s of interest.

Now where are those golf clubs ...