Content this, content that... its a bunch of CRAP

Exactly what I wanted to say when I first posted on this thread. Only you managed to say it better and with fewer words

 

Jim, if you read my post I was referring to business websites, not bible reading sessions

Of course content is a major aspect for a blog, with all these things, there is not one answer to everything, hence people who simply say add content to your site and you will be fine, there is more to online marketing than that.

 

My take is that you need good content for many reasons
1) Repeat visitors
2) Good authority domains will not link to you unless they feel the website is the 'real deal' and hence nnot risk to link to.
3) People talking < Viral marketing > about the site ( more prevalent in certain markets )
4) People building specific lists of useful sites as a resource ( primarily prevalent in hobby based markets - the less commercial the better ) although as pointed out you need to be visible ( or a brand ) to be included.
5) Brand building - You will never build a successful BRAND without looking like you know all there is to know about your chosen market. Content writing is your primary method of communication to prove yourself and incite trust.
6) Longtale search - about 80% of my visitors come through long tail search. Primarily they come through articles written by my copywriters. All the artilicles are unique and focused on isues 'here and now'. Blogging is also a similar method of using content to instigate long tail search which I employ as it creating a forum ( although stimulating participation can be tricky ).
7) Helping your clients - remember they are primarily your revenue stream and people do not buy from whom they do not trust.

 

8) Don't forget social marketing. Whilst for the most part i view social marketing as a damp squib for linkbuilding, if used correctly itcan bring in prodigious amounts of traffic. This will not happen without the kind of quality content that a truely content focused company can produced.

Finally I would like to finish by making th point that dispite my list above I personally do not belive that content is enough in the more commercial gambling / finance markets.

A truely diverse marketing mix is nessecary both to gain rankings and ultimately traffic.

Regards,

Aphp

 

Understood, Business Services, and you were clear about that.

My point, though, was that there are websites (like mine) which have content that continually draws people back. As mentioned, I get 9,000 repeat visitors a month, coming back to the content. And BTW, the site does not have a bible reading section. In fact, the most popular portion of the site is the one with about 150 of my previously preached sermons. Pastors and other ministers come to it for sermon ideas. It's the content that draws them back.

 

I agree with the original poster.

Sites like Canadian Viagra arn't going to get link backs. Nor are real estate websites.

2 Reasons, your not going to tell your mates you cant get it up when your about to score - because they will thing your queer, 2ndly if you find a treasure real estate site your not going to tell people how your getting rich in the real estate business.

The big winners in social wild fire are social networks like facebook, twitter, myspace, fourms, blogs etc because of a need for others to use the site for it to be "useful" and particularly bloggers will write flame bate topics that you will share with friends via different mediums like social networks.

I think Google needs to re-write there algorithms to evaluate the required link back a site will attract.

Pierce

 

The trouble with these conversations is people only read the last post and then make a comment, therefore naturally losing the theme of the thread. Linkmaster rightly pointed out that simply adding content to a site is not a good way of generating links and there was more value to adding strong links than just adding content.

I guess the beauty of the Internet is there are no set formulas. We are free to use our own strategy, if its working good, if it isn't well are you in a position to offer advice to others?

Everyone appears to be an expert in Internet marketing, yet how many people have a site that ranks highly in a competitive sector?

For what its worth our marketing site receives 800-900 unique visitors per day, not great but satisfactory at this stage of the sites development.

 

That's correct, and that's why I posted earlier this comment on his original post:

"You could have said all that in this one sentence, which says what needs to be done: (1) build great content AND (2) go out and get links to that content."

 

How can you say SEO will be obsolete when its just getting more competitive than ever?

 

Linkmaster is correct in that content alone cannot be depended upon to get links. As he said, when everyone in your business is writing "content" who is going to mark you out for linking to?

For links, you cannot depend on your website content. You have to do article marketing, forum and blog participation, social media bookmarking and such other active campaigns.

Good website content can, however, do a few things.

• Firstly, it can impress the visitors who land at the site with the valuable information they get.
• Secondly, it can bring organic traffic from search engines.
• Thirdly, if the content is focused on one theme, and different pages are optimized for different "long tail" keywords, it can help bring targeted visitors to your site, whom you can lead to your sales pages. Incidentally, sales pages also fall under the term "content" and have to be good to get a sale.

Good content predisposes readers favorably to you and you have a better chance of getting a sale.

Content is thus valuable for your business. However, if your hope is that people will link to you because your content is good, well you're in for a big disappointment.

 

And that second point is very important. Keyword-rich content will draw search engine traffic — which, in my case, is 89% of my daily visitors.

 

Exactly why I said its the implementation of content that is key

Good discussion here, better than the mr PR went up 1 down 1...lol

I do agree with your thoughts Jim, my own site www.businessservicesuk.com is contextually based and will be developed upon in the future. Just there is no cut and dried method. If you are in a competitive sector you need to do everything well

 

One of the best reasons to add content is not just have people link to you - it's to have plenty of fodder to show up in search results. I have a site that I update daily with short posts, but I make sure there's plenty of keywords and make the text a bit wordy because SEs love text.

 

Good content is nice but if you dont have any incoming links , you won't even get indexed in google , forget about domination the SERPS. It's bit like the chicken and egg problem. You need visitors so that they may link to your good content, but first you need links so that visitors may find your website

 

What good is having 100 links from PR 5, 6, 7+ sites that either you buy or are entirely organic when people get to your page and leave immediately because the content sucks?

Anyone here can get 10,000 hits a day to their website but if the content is bad they won't be any better than people who use stumbleupon to visit sites.

 

The fact is, no one thing works in isolation. Love it or hate it, you have to do some stuff that is just hateful. If you are creating a site and solely responsible for everything: the idea, the domain, the content, the linking, the promotion, the navigation, the colour scheme, the graphics, the affiliation ... etc etc etc .... there's obviously some stuff you're going to dislike or even fear or hate, but somehow, no matter how small a token of effort, you have to really do everything at some point. Keywording, SEO, backlinking. You've no idea what will work best, so you just have to do/try everything ... and no 2 sites are the same for success/effort.

Oh .. and it's never ending too

Deep joy!

 

Some very good read in this thread..I must say!

I would like to sum up the whole thing with just an example from offline business. If we make a good product, there is still a need to advertise and market it for people to be able to see it!

The same principle applies here as well...Hence the stress to not only build good content, but also do good networking for the same....The approach for the second activity varies from person to person, but the end goal is the same!

Regards,

RightMan

 

lol, content alone certainly won't get you to the top but its a good thing to have once you get there, otherwise you're going to have a pretty high bounce rate.

Secret to the top is to choose your anchor text > get links from sites with high PR and few outbound links

Build slowly and you will see the power of anchor text makes pretty much all other aspects of SEO negligible.

 

Its true! Most people don't have the patience or work ethic to get the job done.

Link building is definitely something that takes time and is boring to many.

 

This is a good thing though. A lot of people view this as a negative thing, but if it was easy just imagine the amount of competition. If you think its bad now, just THINK of what it could have been. Door swings both ways on this issue