SEO Or Page Rank - What Is More Important?

I know that this statement of mine is kind of provocative. So why do I say that?

Because search engine optimization or SEO in short, is based on a combination of designing your website and to through content into it and to do this in a way to best satisfy the needs and recommendations of search engine algorithms. It is however required that you do not build your website for search engines alone, but your human visitors that in the end have to decide if they will find your site useful and informative, or not.

Today's search engines and search engine algorithms are so advanced that if you achieve to build a search engine friendly website, you will also build a visitor friendly website at the same time, almost automatically. And if a human visior likes your page, he may stay longer or bookmark your site and come back later, maybe browsing for more of your content and finaly one or the other of them will make a purchase (search engines do not make purchases on your site, do they?)

Now imagine for a while that you considered Page Rank or better said Google PageRank as being more important than SEO. You may fire up a website, more or less usefull, not caring about SEO and user friendly content too much, but rather going to get lots of incoming links to your site, thus only or mainly focussing on PageRank instead of SEO.

We all agree, besides other factors, incoming links from other websites are the lifeblood for high PR (PageRank) on Google, Yahoo and some other search engines.

But if you only focus on backlinks, not other SEO factors, what about your page visitors? Will they like your page? Will they be likely to come back and buy something? And what about your ranking in search engine results for your most important keywords? I can tell you that despite the believe, keyword ranking in search engine results has not much to do with overall PageRank!

If you spend more time on building links than on creating lots of quality, unique content for your site, you will be at the losing side in the end. Your site may slighly rank higher for some terms and keywords, but it would not do the big move because the basic ingredient, unique, theme based and keyword packed quality content to feed the search engines result pages and make your site visitors happy would be missing.

I do not say "don't build links to your site". But I give a warning to put the main focus on it. The figures are open for discussion, but generally I would recommend to put much higher effort and much more time on SEO (including content creation) and less on incoming links and backlinks. I think if you do about 70% SEO including content generation and about 30% Page Rank effort to get incoming links to your site, you would be on a good balance.