Many people say that if you want to rank better you need a lot of quality content on your site. Is this true? I ask because I see lots of sites that have good rankings and don't have a lot of content!
Unique content is very important, of course.. websites that rank without it are established websites, with many authority links.. one of the main criteria for ranking are keywords within your content ..
I have over 1,000 content today but only getting 8,000 pageviews a month. So i think we need to emphasize QUALITY and CONTENT PROMOTION.
It is extremely important to have Quality content. Google does not ant duplicate or SPUN content that does not make sense for the reader. I'd also recommend setting up all your Social Accounts. Social Signals are now EXTREMELY important to ranking websites.
The reason for high quality content is to build legitimate authority by attracting people who want to see your high quality content. You will however need to get that High quality content in front of its target audience. That's the tricky part, once you have reached your audience and they approve of your content it is more likely they will come back for more and/or share you content. The sharing of content will bring about natural authority by way of links which will in turn increase rankings, which will bring a bigger audience, which will create more sharing/authority, and so on and so forth. But you can make the best content in the world but if you have no audience it wont be worth the time spent to make it. What you need is a thorough plan from start to finish, Who is your audience? How will you reach them? What will you offer them? How will you profit? What can you do to keep that audience and continue to profit? These are things that you need to think about before you begin creating content.
Please read Google's Webmaster Guidelines, then you will get clear picture about your problems and solutions.
It is really not necessary to be established to be on top. There are more than 200 factors responsible for rankings. And forget about the keywords.......... don't use keywords forcefully. Use keywords wisely and only if required. I've seen people writing, "SEO Company India" offering SEO services, web design services, website and web application development services....... blaah blaah... what is wrong with "Company Name" offering affordable web promotion, and development services. which one looks good while reading? Please don't write for search engines, write for humans and Yes, content is definitely a key, provided you write for your visitors not search engines. You may trick search engines once or twice, but not for whole life. You may achieve top rankings for a short period but can not manage it in a long run. So when anyone says that content is the key, it doesn't mean that only websites content should be good. Along with your website's content, your articles, PRs and posts which you post on third party sites and blogs should also be of good quality.
You don't need A LOT OF content, you need it to be UNIQUE and QUALITY (without errors!). I can easily rank a new blog/website with 2 articles WITH UNIQUE CONTENT on 1st page for low and medium competition keyword... while it would be really hard to rank on 1st page a blog with DUPLICATED content for a medium keyword...
I wish if I could also preach 'Content is King or Key or any other K', but the sad truth is, it's not so with relation to Google's rankings. By no means, I am saying that content is not important, I am just trying to say that for rankings, content means much little than we tout for it. I have my and my clients' sites with loads of high end content, large number of natural links followed by huge referral traffic..... And when it comes down to Ranking.... you know what.... A 7 days old website with hoards of spam links, stale content, ghost traffic, simply outranks me, leaving me behind wondering about Google and its promises. Now Content is the BIG KING, I wont argue if someone calls it Emperor, because, it's what helps converting the traffic into clients and clients into repeat clients. So, I would suggest you, Shoot Google for her broken promises, and get real about business.
Content is king. You’ll hear that phrase over and over again when it comes SEO success. In my opinion without quality content your site have no worth and if as you said you look some other sites have good ranking without it so dear am sure after Google update they will lost their rank.