Create content or more link building?

[scanlin]

For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities:

-- creating new, original content for your site

-- work on getting links to your existing content

I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?).

Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it.

I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content?

Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.

[RyanOD]

Boy, this is a tough question because it varies from site to site, page to page, and keyword to keyword. We publish new content every day and much of it is exclusive to our site. Beyond that I focus primarily on creating content to capture long-tail traffic.

To begin with, I would ask myself the following questions (which you may have already done)...

1. What keywords are really driving your business? Have you pinpointed which keywords are most likely to lead to conversions? Make sure you are building links for the keywords that lead to revenues...not just visits.
2. Of the keywords pinpointed in #1, what does the competitive landscape look like for each? Be sure to prioritize which keywords/pages you are working on based on a combination of potential return and level of competition.
3. What links do your competitors have? Is there an opportunity to catch up by getting the same links?

Second, there is always an opportunity to combine content generation and link building. Try to identify content other sites need or are lacking. Create that content and then reach out to let the site owner know so they can point visitors to the page.

Finally, to avoid the huge time suck (or to manage it), consider scheduling link building time and content generation time throughout the week to help yourself be focused and efficient. Jot down content ideas and/or potential linking partners whenever they come up. Then on during your scheduled times, work through your list of ideas / sites.

All that being said, there is no 'right' answer. Link building and content creation are both difficult tasks that take time. Which reminds me...have you considered hiring an intern to be your content writer? Just another idea...

I'm pretty sure this doesn't answer your question, but I hope it helps.