It's a combination of things. Not just content. Content with well researched keywords, tags included on the page, alt tags on the images, social bookmark buttons at the end, maybe some monetization widget there too and then... what some forget, content promotion... If you are creating good content, that's not all though. People will never just show up just because you wrote something nice. You have to distribute your content.... Places I do it: Facebook pages Twitter Digg Propelloer Mixx Linkedin (through my own blog updates) Onlywire Recomment to all of your friends Repurpose your content, give something free on that page, give something really good and make your visitors recommend their friends on your facebook page in order to get it. I am putting a good example of all of this together but I will send to whomever sends me a pm.
A contraversial one, this one, I know, but I thought I'd share my experiences... Tonight, while submitting a site to DMOZ I decided to check out a client site I submitted to DMOZ a couple of months ago and then forgot about it. To my surprise (after stuff I've read about DMOZ recently) it was listed! That prompted me to check out the site's ranking in various serach engines. I've done no serious SEO on it, just designed the site, added the content, put in the meta keywords, published the site and submitted to the major SE's, and that was that. Moved onto the next project. There's around 50 pages of what I would consider good quality content on there (at least in human terms), but the site has very few backlinks at all. We're talking possibly (being optimistic) just into double figures, from sites that are pretty relevant, but don't have significant PRs. In it's present form the site's been up about 8 months. With the two keywords I think it's most likely people would use if they were looking for information on the subject in question, I got the following results: Google - 36th Yahoo - 20th MSN - 4th Ask.com - 11th AltaVista - 9th
I have a few coding (c# and mysql) tutorial/blog sites that are purely content, and I have done very little in the way of SEO or link building and they are generating quite a bit of traffic. I suspect with some link building I will be able to increase the position in the search engines but as the content is good people are linking to it naturally now as well. For me this is almost the hoy grail I dont have to build links myself just continue adding quality content.
Directory submissions are still of value for SEO, regardless of the read count. In other words, even if you received no traffic from the article, the link from the article to your website, improves your website's search engine ranking. Robert
First you got to have a good content that you can promote and after that you can think of getting backlinks. So they are related. There isn`t one without the other.