It is often said that “Content is King.” What this means is that no matter what, the best content in today’s Internet will reach the top, regardless of marketing efforts. While we all know this is a bit ofan exaggeration, it is still important to realize that without good content, SEO is worthless – you’ll drive initial hits, but you’ll never convert anybody to readers. How SEO and content go hand in hand is a process that is deceptively difficult, but they must go hand in hand. Without content, your site is useless. Without SEO, your site is unread. The relationship must be made – but how?
Consider how Google and other search engines are designed to find you. Not how it actually finds you, but how it’s designed to. Google crawls through the web looking for links to content from other content, ranking it as “important” along the way. The algorithm has developed whereby that’s not the only way it finds content, but that’s still an important way. You can spend ages building backlinks, but it’s much simpler, but less likely, that you’ll write a killer post another blogger links to in his content, and I believe Google can recognize that link as better and rank you higher. Built backlinks are great, but are no match for these.
As I alluded to in the first paragraph, SEO without content drives initial hits but doesn’t convert them to returning visitors or readers. Readers are the currency of bloggers – they come back to your blog for each post, and read your content almost religiously. These are guaranteed future hits, and not just the initial hits your drive from SEO. This is what I mean by hand in hand – you get them to come with SEO, and you keep them coming back with good content. Good content is more valuable, because you could abandon SEO after a good long while and still have a ton of visits coming from readers, whereas readers abandon you if your content lacks.
Finally, SEO only concentrates on one portion of incoming visits – the Almighty Google. I’m not saying that Google hits are bad, and shouldn’t be pursued, but this is a classic case of putting one’s eggs into only one basket. If your content is good, people will link to it. These links get followed, and are more likely to be converted to readers. If bloggers embrace good content, Google could disappear and they would still get hits from these content links.
Keep at your SEO strategies, but keep in mind that good content is indeed king – it leads to better links, more readers, and allows you to diversify your marketing strategies. It seems too simplistic, but it indeed can accomplish these things, when placed along a good SEO strategy.
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This is a great article. I have now left the rat race, never to look back. You’re right that the only way to make any decent money is by running your own business!
Hey Dan, nice, informative post. No doubt, content is the king, but again, if your pages are not optimized properly then no matter how great and awesome your content is, it would be very hard to be found on the search engines. I think one should strive for original content as well as put efforts on optimizing their sites. Seo and great content should go together, and it would certainly be a strong force. In today’s internet world, seo is absolutely necessary if you want to rank high on google or other searhc engines.That does not mean, you can be totally oblivious towards your content. I would say utilize the power of both seo and great content, that would definitely help you in all aspects…
Content and SEO – old friends going hand in hand, aren’t they?
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Interesting and useful content can help a lot, and if it’s really great it can even take care of your link building, as people will be linking naturally. That’s an ideal, which many of us are striving for.
Andrew
You are right content is king. A little marketing is all it takes, as soon as webmasters or blogers see that your content is link worthy your backlinks will begin to explode. Personally I noticed this with my site, I have hundreds and hundreds of backlinks that I did nothing for when I investigated it I noticed that they were bloggers that placed my link on their site because it was helpful to their visitors. What happened to my site in the serps? I went from 30+ to 34 for the keywords “make moeny free” I was suprised, but it is proof that placing quality content on a website or blog will pay for itself.
I think you eventually have to make the decision of whether or not you’re blogging to make money, or blogging to produce nice, readable content for your readers that will keep them coming back for more every time.
If you go with the second choice, the first choice should come naturally assuming you’ve SEO’d your blog and adsense’d it properly.
I’m also from Philly! I never agree that content is King because you need a little bit of everything. Great content, blog commenting, forum posting, social networking, videos, everything! Some people do spend most of their traffic building through SEO, and as the post have mentioned that if Google ever shuts down, then those people will have serious problems.
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A good discussion about this age old topic. Some adsense based sites specifically rely on SEO because they just want people to come and leave their site by clicking on and advertisement. One has to accept that regular readers don’t click on advertisements
However, I agree with you that a good balance must be achieved between content and SEO.
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