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Good relevant content also means that others (site owners) believe that you have "good", "relevant" content, thus they will link to you.
The more depth of topic and breadth of topics -- the greater the link potential, and the greater the link potential, the more "good" and "relevant" your content will appear to be.
Dave
To understand why people say why content is king you need to appreciate where most traffic comes from.
A large percentage of people here concentrate on only a few key phrases....they think these are important. The reality is that every site should target a huge number of key phrases, because searchers type a huge number of different terms.
If your site is content rich, by default you will be relevant to a large number of key phases. Phrases you have never even imagined will generate traffic because people use those as search terms.
As an example. I took my most relevant search phrase and measured its contribution to total traffic from search engines. It turned out to be 5% of all search engine referrals, the other 95% came from other search terms. The most relevant and predicted term ranked number 1...but that is not actually that important...simply because it still only generates 5% of all SE traffic!
To increase my traffic what should I do? The answer is not to concentrate on the most important search phrase, but to concentrate on all other possible search phrases.
How can this be achieved?....simple....increase the content, then you become more relevant for a wider variety of search phrases and thus increase the number of overall terms that are applicable.
Never get hung up on one or a few search terms....target huge numbers of search terms....which can only be done though content.
Big commercial companies/sites can have the budget(s) to create endless content and hire linkhunters/buy links.
Non-profits can get links from .gov .org and .edu, which often have a policy not to link to commercial sites.
Small commercial companies often have webmasters with much more enthousiasm, conviction, creativity and passion to create the best content and can be avid link hunters.
I'm not sure about the future, but for the moment, on the whole, the web is still very democratic.
Content is not the most important factor! The site that I have is not comercial, It just promotes a sport and is the most in depth resource on the subject on the net in fact it is the only one. There was one site on the subject, by a friend that was set up before but he lost interest (free hosted on Geo cites)about 2 years ago with almost no content. However our site is nowhere to be seen in Google for key phrases being outranked by sites that have nothing to do with the subject, My friends site is ranked number one even though he has not looked at it for 2 years let alone updated it he was surprised it was still there when I told him. By the way he only had very limited HTML know how.
I have only recently tried to optimise my site after being surprised that it was not ranking well.
Hence me being here taking pearls of wisdom from you folk!
On my commercial sites I rather have a lower position and great conversion than be targeted by lookers that make no money. On the non commercial ones I want to be as high as possible as lookers are what counts.
Its an ever changing mental challenge.... it's great fun.
Content is not the most important factor!
Content IS the most important factor because everything leads back to content.
To show up well, you also have to have incoming links to your site. Lots of them. It is much easier to get people to link to you if you have something worth linking to. In fact, if your content is good enough, after the initial stages you will not even have to ask for links or go looking to exchange links, others will just link to you as the best resource.
In our case we are the only really meaningful resource on the subject on the net yet we are nowhere to be seen!.
We have a site dedicated to a subject! True we only have a few inbound links.
Another site barely mentions the subject! yet has links.
We are nowhere to be seen but the sites that does not even mention the subject are ranked at 2,3,4,5,6.
So inbound links must be making the ranking for them.
Which means it is more of a game of links, than content.
I can understand page optimisation for keywords, but in my field I did not really have to worry about that becuase my research showed that no one else was even mentioning the subject in their content.
I have since optimsed our site for keywords, I will see whether that makes a change.
If it does not then I will concentrate on links!
I believe it will be a good leraning curve!
>> 2. True we only have a few inbound links
This seems contradictory. If you are the only really meaningful resource on the subject you will get links automatically if you are not selling anything yourself that competes with prospective link-inners...
Any other reasons you dont have links?
It does take a while for links to "count". Dont expect much improvement in PR/link pop for 3-6 months.
You are right.. ask a few to link to you and tell other possible webmasters about your site.
You're right in a sense - incoming links are more important than content when it comes to getting indexed, but after you are indexed content is more important. It's a little chicken and egg I grant you...
But the qualified theory seems to be, get the content right and people will be happy to link to you becuase you're a great resource. At that point, the theory is it all starts to snowball.
In my experience that is 100% correct, but in the initial stages you do have to write to other webmasters and get them to link to you. So get writing!
TJ
Actually, non-commercial sites tend to have the edge. Webmasters of non-commercial sites tend to more freely link to each other. This results in higher PR
i've never read that high PR = high ranking here. isn't that a bit misleading? please correct me if i'm wrong.
trillianjedi
incoming links are more important than content when it comes to getting indexed, but after you are indexed content is more important
again, please correct me if i'm wrong but my experience of google and following as much of these forums as i can, has me believing that that is EXACTLY what google has tried to change with last september's update and subsequent algo changes.
content was becoming too easy to forge and thus far more importance was placed (by google) on incoming links and their anchor texts when ranking sites - ESPECIALLY if competition is high.
my hold on the current google algo is that for small searches content rules, but for larger searches where competition is high, incoming anchor text wins out.
we too have a site which languishes behind a no-content competitor (luckily only 1 position behind him) and has done since september - because he has a higher allinanchor:keyword
so i still see links outweighing content when competing for popular terms.
not trying to throw a spanner in the works, just my personal experience.
<added> sorry that might have wandered a bit off topic ;-)
I shall go and implement a incoming link gathering policy.
P.S. I have just check my friends inbound links he only has links from one source that google detects.
So it must be a valuable one!
Once again thanks
There are several reasons why Google has been kind to me, including:
1) I have an editorial focus, rather than an e-commerce focus, which means that I get unsolicited inbound links from magazines, travel guides, academic and public libraries, and reference sites. I even have unsolicited links from several major corporate sites (an airline and a luggage manufacturer come to mind). More quality inbound links = higher PageRank (not to mention referrals from the linking sites!).
2) Although I spend very little time on SEO, I do use common-sense SEO techniques like using descriptive page titles, headlines, and anchor text that make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl and categorize my pages. A lot of corporate sites don't seem to bother with this. They just dump text into a CMS. (I can think of several multimillion-dollar sites run by national tourist offices that have hardly any pages in Google because they spent all of their money on art direction and technical development without worrying about search-engine placement. I guess they think they're too important to need referrals from search engines.)
3) My pages are crawler-friendly HTML "flat files" with simple URLs. Just as important, virtually all of my content is "evergreen," and even though I update my material on a regular basis, the URLs don't change every six months as pages often do at commercial sites (which often redesign their Web sites, install new content-management systems, or make other changes that render existing links obsolete).
Percentages wrote:
If your site is content rich, by default you will be relevant to a large number of key phases. Phrases you have never even imagined will generate traffic because people use those as search terms.
I agree completely. My site has about 3,500 pages of editorial content (all written in-house over the last six years), and on a typical day no more than 5% of the traffic--if that--is on the home page. For everybody who searches on the keyphrases that lead them to index.html, there are many more users who are searching on obscure towns in Italy and Greece, ski resorts in the Alps, public transportation in Amsterdam, sightseeing tours in Salzburg, ferries to the Faroe Islands and Iceland, etc. And, as percentages says, your traffic reports can be full of surprises: Not long ago, after receiving a number of e-mail inquiries about an airport bus in a certain city, I wrote a one-page article on that topic with a link to the official bus schedule. That article now brings more than a hundred visitors into my site each day--something I never anticipated when I wrote the article.
Bottom line: If you build a site with enough editorial content to gain the attention of editors, librarians, and other Webmasters, you'll get quality inbound links without trying...and your "content diversity" will attract users who are searching on many different keywords and keyphrases. But the content has to be real content--not just the boilerplate junk that passes for "content" on so many e-commerce sites.
