Content should be King - but is it? - By: Rodney J Smith

"Content is King" - the idea that unique, quality content is the most important factor for a successful website - is a familiar and well-worn concept. But is it true? Perhaps it depends how one defines success; one good and objective measure is search engine rankings, and this is the one I have in mind whilst writing this article.

It's certainly true that it's hard to rank well in the search engines without a certain amount of unique textual content - although what constitutes quality will doubtless vary from writer to writer and reader to reader. What I haven't seen ranking well lately is the automatically generated drivel that some spammers still insist on propagating, so it seems clear that the search engines have figured out how to detect it and suppress it in their results. I think it's fair to say that human-generated content stands a better chance of success, although that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be Hemingway to do well.

Having done my share of blogging though, I dispute the notion that good content alone is enough to rank well. Yes, you may achieve accidental high rankings for some obscure long-tail keywords, but to do so for anything vaguely competitive requires targetted linkbuilding: quality inbound links to your pages that use your target keywords as their anchor text. I've heard it said often that if your content is good enough other sites will naturally link to your site, and while this does happen occasionally I don't believe it's enough to get you very far.

No, in my opinion, to do well in the search rankings you have to proactively go out and build links to your pages. There are many ways to do this, including blog commenting, directory listings, link exchanges, blog carnivals and article marketing. And I contend that this is a more important (and more difficult) aspect of owning a website than creating the content for it.

So while in an ideal world my website would be judged solely by the quality of what I have to say, the reality is that what other sites say about it carries more weight. Some say that artificially building links in this way is cynical and merely an attempt to "game the system"; I say it's a realistic assessment of the state of the internet which you can choose to embrace or reject, so long as you're prepared to accept the consequences of that decision.

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