Publishing a blog post that is filled with a 3% to 5% density keyword phrase takes about five to ten minutes, depending on the content quality, blog CMS and the topic you want to post about. The SEO results can be seen in no less than 24 hours for most search engines. In some cases, your efforts in basic optimization take effect instantly. That in mind, you can say that basic SEO produce results that vary in terms of immediacy, but are nonetheless very quick.
That’s the thing with link building that makes a difference. As opposed to keyword optimization and META optimization for websites, building backlinks takes time and patience. You can’t easily appeal to one website to give you a backlink. Even an attempt to talk another webmaster to give you a backlink in return to a promised backlink you will give him will take time. It’s never a sure task, which is the complete opposite of on-site optimization. The advantage, however, is that backlinks are more believable. Search engines look at your backlinks and think that you have a relevant website. They see your SEO efforts and they know that you’re good with SEO.
The compromise of the advantage mentioned above is time. Link building is a process that takes time for you and the search engines. You will usually wait weeks to months in order to see the results of your backlink building efforts. While that is inconvenient for the nearsighted webmaster, it’s definitely better in the long run. The backlinks that you receive will always be there and, in case they get changed, search engines keep these links logged into their system.
The best of both worlds is to combine the efforts in building backlinks and on-page optimization. Doing so will give you both the immediate and the long term results.