Content has to be the Center of any SEO Campaign

“Content is king”

I’m converted – I’ve seen the light.

Content is the core of your website, it is the very center of any marketing or SEO campaign. All of the hype you could possibly buy will fizzle in a day if the content doesn’t deliver.

What I Learned from Cuil

Just take a look at Cuil, a giant bubble of empty hype that branded itself as a “Google-killer.” It took the inquisitive investigators of the internet a full fifteen minutes from its release to realize it was all a clever marketing trick build around a product that isn’t really revolutionary or even relatively useful.

What I learned from my SERP Penalty

I kind of stumbled upon a top ranking for a highly profitable keyword. I was like #7 and making a few big sales a week. I wanted more, I wanted to go up higher.

I figured that “high quality” backlinks (dofollow from related pages) would boost me up the last few points. I stopped writing content and went on a bookmarking frenzy. Within a week I was #37. When I tried to build more links to compensate for that drop, I fell off the results altogether. Nope, nowhere on the 800 pages the search would return my URL.

Now I’ve finally broken through #30 and seen as high as #24. I did the opposite of what got me in trouble. Instead of focusing on building backlinks, I decided to spend more time on my site: testing new designs and analyzing user responses to different visual styles, re-organizing internal linking structures to emphasize my important pages, and writing lots of new content that can’t be found anywhere else. You want a secret to SEO? That’s it right there. Let your copywriters and authors worry about SEO.

You Still Need Links to Get Indexed…but…

OK, backlinks aren’t totally dead. You may need some significant linking juice to get your pages fully indexed.

Skip the mass amounts and focus on quality. What is quality these days? Editorial approval.

Listen up, this is important:

Search engines want backlinks that are authorized by someone representing the site that gives the link. Automated link building is irrelevant to the algorithm so if it is a place where “anyone” can leave a link, it is worthless or at least nearly worthless in relative terms!

You should try to get links from:

• Picky Article Directories
• Blogs with Stricter Comment Moderation

Which ones? There are probably more than I know. Here are the signs: They have high pagerank on the domain, you can’t find any links to “bad neighborhoods,” and a site:domain.com search shows that a large number of URLs have been indexed from that domain.

But wait, they are picky and strict! How will I get accepted?

With GOOD CONTENT!