Considering both page ranking and website links are crucial for ensuring good exposure and attracting more targeted visitors, it is generally recommendable to create a balance between onsite and offsite optimization instead of favoring one approach over the other. 

With the fierce competition for niche dominance and search engine rankings in today’s internet marketing landscape, website hierarchies can change virtually over night, as search engine optimization has become the determinant factor in how webmasters gain or lose ground in page results. Although everyone running an online business understands the importance of proper SEO, many webmasters are unfamiliar with and reluctant about using certain types of optimization available. To help dispel some of the confusion surrounding SEO and to simplify your task of selecting the optimization methods that are best suitable for you, the following section is dedicated to the fundamentals of SEO, specifically offsite and onsite optimization.  

A proportionate mix between onsite optimization and offsite optimization can improve search engine rankings radically. Onsite optimization describes the aspects you have control over on your site, which can include text, links, keyword density, and so on. By contrast, in the case of offsite optimization you have no direct control over the ranking factors, and the decisive factor are the links leading to your website. Both offsite and onsite optimization considerations establish the search engine rankings of your web pages. 

A large number of webmasters choose to place the emphasis on onsite optimization. As a result, they focus on optimizing the text found on their web pages, work hard to get a proper keyword density, pay importance to the way they optimize the web page title, but they completely ignore their links.

On the other hand, many webmasters swear by external links being the most effective way to get prominent search engine rankings. Therefore, they fall into the trap of spending top dollar to get links from other websites, while omitting the optimization of their site content. Although accenting one of the two methods may prove useful under certain circumstances, the experts usually recommend going for a combination of both onsite and offsite optimization.

Search engines trace and analyze websites mostly based on website content, hence the need for proper optimization in this area. The optimized content found on your pages indicates search engines that your site is highly relevant for a particular keyword or key phrase, which means your site receives a better placement in search engine rankings for that search term.

However, when multiple websites in the same niche compete for the same search term, search engines may have trouble identifying the better website in the bunch and this is the part where links start showing their true importance. As a rule, when two very similar websites can’t be separated solely based on keyword density and relevance considerations, search engines attribute the higher ranking to the site with the largest number of incoming links. The more fervent the competition for a particular search term, the more important it is to create and maintain a good balance between content optimization and number/quality of incoming links. Relying exclusively on offsite or onsite optimization factors may work just fine for search terms that are less disputed, but whenever the need arises to fight with other sites over the same popular search term, optimizing both factors becomes a necessity.