I just recently finished doing an interview for Article Depot that will be appearing on Padawans Directory and Article Site and he asked a few questions that I think I may have given different answers then most. The cliche that seems to be used the most is "Content is King". FOr the most part SEO's will disagree and throw back the cliche "Links are King, Content is Queen" I actually disagree with that and believe that content is the number one most important piece of SEO for a website. I am actually looking for disagreements here as although I've seen it mentioned, there isn't a ton of debate on the subject. Here was my response to the subject: That is just a starter so feel free to add your own or rip apart my comment. I have lots of ideas on this so hopefully this sparks a bit of SEO debate (Maybe even changing my mind on a few things)
It's pretty obvious to me: You can rank #1 without content but with links for a reasonably competitive phrase (Google we're talking mainly here). You can't rank #1 with content and without links. So to me any debate on this is just denying the facts. For ranking links is more king than content is. For online business/conversion there is no doubt in my mind that content is WAY more important. You can't sell/convert without content but with links. You can sell/convert with content and without links (PPC/word of mouth/other advertising). So when talking about King's and Queens we need to know which castle/country we're talking about. SEO castle or business castle?
I argue both castles. By having content as King, I'm not implying that linking is thrown out the window. You still need links but where should you focus more of your time? This also applies in a general sense, not a specific one. A focus on content at the expense of links won't get you number one for "Online Casino" . That is a specific one. By general I mean overall uniques and conversions regardless of how they got there.
If you simplify it black and white though, my bolded examples above stand firm. But of course it's the combo that's important. The King and Queen together need to make sure there will be a prince/princess...
I agree with everyone of your points above but I will add a real world example. I have a site that was #1 for its terms through linking but it was really a limited amount of terms (each one high traffic) I added a related forum to that same site and it took off fairly quickly. What I found was that the millions of little word combinations each only brought a hnadful of uniques but together they brought more traffic than the main words. Not only that, they converted better! Now I realize that without links those pages would have never been spidered so with a newer site I tried something similar. This time the site had realtively few backlinks and was still in the sandbox for the big money terms. What I found was all those small terms brought instant uniques and made some good money while the site was in the "sandbox". I now bring it a step farther by having realted articles throughout in an SEO freindly way and it has the same effect. The key is that because many of these articles are reprinted elsewhere they need to be surrounded by unique related content (even if its a small piece) to outrank the other copies. That outranking is done with content, not links. What do you think? (I realize a lot of people practise these techniques sometimes without even knowing it but its signifigant to be specific on why it works)
If we're looking at the real world, I got a decent amount of Google traffic from sites with poor PR and few links because they had good content whicih made for lots of unique phrases. Of course if you're doing content that's rehashing what others have done, links are king. An example would be a car site with buying vs leasing, insurance overviews, etc - your words and viewpoints could be very original but you'd still be in the same pool as hundreds of others and would need links. OTOH a site like http://www.rootes-chrysler.co.uk has content with fairly unique keywords and does moderately well without any links. (Not VERY well but moderately well.) Unfortunately of course rootes doesn't have keywords that bring up good ads on AdSense, so revenue is about 1% what it should be compared with a more up to date site (that is, one covering modern cars that large numbers of people own, e.g. Toyota Corolla or Dodge Neon).
Re Yfs1's post. Very true indeed. Check your logs on any given day and you'll find more terms you didn't optimize for than those you did SEO for. In this case the required link is for indexing and not for ranking purposes. That's why I mentioned the 'reasonably competitive' note. But turn that around again and it takes only one targeted multi word link to rank for that same obscure-ish word that just got you the sale. Without much content necessarily. In the end there's multiple ways to achieve the same thing. Finding the right balance that works well for your specific situation is the key here.
I would argue that you can rehash it in a unique and clever way. By doing this saving you huge amounts of time and money. Tops- It is true the words are non-competetive it would only take one link but if you are talking about 20,000 phrases, thats a lot of links, most of which wouldn't be suitable or accpeted as an anchor text. Not to mention mispellings which give you an edge.
Lol...I'm just trying to stir up a good bit of debate. Lets try a different direction. When you start a new site what is your main focus for the first 3 months. Im assuming its not a completely dynamic site that generates content for you. Do you spend the majority of time getting realated content, whether its through Article Sites or Freelance writers. Or do you get dug in with linking either by recips in Linkmarket or actively persuing webmasters. the easy answer is both but if you are anything like me you tend to focus a bit more on one.
So content has the same importance as links right? So we have twins now But what about updating? If you have a well build site with content that converts, do you need to put all your work into linking? or do you keep updating the content too? and how do you update it? Change lines here and there? Or build more subpages etc.?
More subpages in my opinion. Build your bulk with relevant, well laid out, easy to navigate, useful content. It does wonders for retension and each new page can rank independantly meaning a lot more 1+2 rankings. By the way, the full article is live and can be viewed here And commented on here
If you have the content, you will get links. Content yields links, but links do not generate content. Obviously, the best approach is the well rounded one - working on both content and links. IMO, acquiring (free) links is soooo much easier with good content as your foundation.
True but whe're talking about what you as a webmaster/SEO would do. Your approach implies sitting back waiting for links. Other webmasters might link with 'click here' and what not. If you want to take charge of what will happen you will build links, not wait for them. But as you say, take the Hovis approach. Get the best of both!
I've seen a lot of Webmasters write some pretty contreversial copy and get a whole load of forum links. They won't be 100% optimized but they don't need to be as they will feed on themselves. Its all about generating links without having to get or mantain them. Let other people do the work. I found when one of my sites was featured as cool site of the day, not only did I get a lot of links at that time, I'm still getting them to this day.
This post is ironic to me. I wanted to start a similar thread and it never happened. I see new forum owners told all the time by some support people that "Content is King" in regard to their forums and what they can do to get traffic and posts. However, they use the word content rather loosely. No one really takes a look at what content means and they go off on a posting tangent. Content may be king, but before you crown your content, you should really step back and see if it's actually just words or in fact content.
You're not kidding. So far this month I have received traffic from the following keyphrases: 2005 peat producers email directories, pharmaceutical liquid formulation, panama city beach forum. These are not keyphrases I have targetted for, but are due to content on the website, namely other peoples link details.
Indeed, to me, content can mean a great many things including: text/copy video interactive scripts (polls/reviews/forums/blogs) downloadable content/software etc.
useful text content is part of the "king" for both search engines and for your customer, but without links who will see your content?? We can go round and round on this subject but I think most of us here agree, just the symantics get in the way. But then again, he was looking for the argument to start with, to bad there is sun in florida today.... LOL....