I was wondering if anyone could comment on the difference between quality seo (i.e. generating backlinks, submitting and being accepted by directories, social bookmarking, link exchanging, etc) of a site whose focus is organized and informative content while generating revenue through adsense vs. a site whose focus is selling a product and content is just there bc SE's like it. Thanks.
A site that is always generating content will rank higher (if all other factors are thrown out) than a site that has static content. Have unique, new, and fresh content will help with linkbaiting and building traffic. Of course, tha above answer is general and is really case specific. Best of luck!
The difference is quite minimal. Every site you create should be informative and useful for the user. The differences in the content is the pre-selling, which really has nothing to do with SEO, but more marketing tactics. If you have a product site, the content should be "selling". Pre-sell the product with the content, while being informative for the user. With just a general content website, like a blog, the content should just be informative and have quality.
I think you should concentrate on the content at least in the beginning. It's impossible to build a large userbase by only submitting to directories, etc. Content is the king and Google loves new original / unique content.
All other things being equal, a site with really good content is better. But all other things are seldom equal. If your competitor has a mediocre site but buys tons of links, that can easily outweigh the links a good site gets through natural/organic methods.
from what I've learned from my many decades of research is that google rewards those who have new, geniune, rich fresh content updated on their site. Also when you have rich content on your page, visitors are more likely to buy your product, than say a static blog dedicated to a pitch page.
but what is 'new' content? Is it actually new, never-before crawled content or is it simply different from the last cached site? Let's say I have three versions of my content and I simply put up a different version right after a SE has crawled my site. Is it 'new' to subsequent crawls? Or do the SE's have a history of previous caches? These are the things I think about when I'm at my offline job.
Generally, new (unique) content means new to the web. Even if a news article or product description is re-written, it is still new to the web in Google's crawlers' eyes. Of course, pages that have not ever been indexed can also be new content. If the get was never seen by Google, then it could be perceived as new, even if the source is very old.