epiphany Posted April 22, 2012 Share Posted April 22, 2012 It honestly does make you wonder why you bother going that extra mile to try and provide visitors with quality and valuable information when: 1) You see competitor sites with blatantly much thinner content outrank you. E.g. their pages are text-only, providing no real information, plastered with banners and affiliate links. Google LOVES this! 2) Their link programs are blatantly just reciprocal "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine" link swaps rather than seriously considered votes for sites that actually help your visitors, regardless of their page rank. People keep saying "content is king", but I just don't see that in many cases. Are we still in the age of search engine manipulation, where those with the best SEO tricks win over those who pour their heart and soul into creating content rich pages? In other words, I need to know if I'm wasting my time because believe me if I could get more out of spending about half an hour as opposed to a day on each page I would. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indizine Posted April 22, 2012 Share Posted April 22, 2012 Or you could ask, do you want lots of traffic....or lots of sales. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epiphany Posted April 22, 2012 Author Share Posted April 22, 2012 Traffic, but targeted traffic. The traffic I get is very targeted since it all comes from people typing specific keywords and my pages over-delivering on those keywords. What I don't get, or what is increasingly making me think that "content is king" is a bad mantra with which to attain the best results, is how some sites with very thin, but clearly well optimised content are still able to beat Google's supposedly every smartening algorithms. I mean, surely their bounce rates are through the roof. Isn't Google supposed to monitor visitor behaviour? And this is not just me having a moan, many website owners are noticing this, especially after the latest Panda updates. Google refers us to its quality guidelines, but is this just in anticipation of future improvements in their algos? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indizine Posted April 22, 2012 Share Posted April 22, 2012 Can you give us some examples of these competitor websites? It's hard to contribute to the discussion when we can't see what you can see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epiphany Posted April 22, 2012 Author Share Posted April 22, 2012 I'd rather not do the naming and shaming thing, I am just asking the question - is content really king? Should creating high quality content be my number one priority if I want to get the most traffic possible? Or is it really a myth that needs dispelling? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CricketFan Posted April 22, 2012 Share Posted April 22, 2012 Content alone won't do that much to gain you traffic. What content does is help convert the traffic that you get into new business. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indizine Posted April 23, 2012 Share Posted April 23, 2012 What's their to shame if they are top of their game and Google are clearly okay with it??!! Good quality, unique content is not a myth however, a lot of folks are STILL not doing even the basics that supports SEO. So without seeing anything, we are clutching at straws as only you can see your website, your competitors websites, etc, and you know the keywords, etc, so you know exactly what the score is and people here can only guess what your problem might be. But apart from that and forgetting what others do, how good is your own website? Without seeing it nobody can help you specifically, only in a generic advisory sort of way, which you can find anywhere on Google. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamDowning Posted April 23, 2012 Share Posted April 23, 2012 IMO content is king. Especially for new websites. You do however also need to know how to write your content to an SEO standard. Then again, it does vary on a lot of other factors, backlinks, third party articles, on-site SEO, keyword selection etc... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steveroberts Posted April 23, 2012 Share Posted April 23, 2012 It honestly does make you wonder why you bother going that extra mile to try and provide visitors with quality and valuable information when: 1) You see competitor sites with blatantly much thinner content outrank you. E.g. their pages are text-only, providing no real information, plastered with banners and affiliate links. Google LOVES this! 2) Their link programs are blatantly just reciprocal "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine" link swaps rather than seriously considered votes for sites that actually help your visitors, regardless of their page rank. People keep saying "content is king", but I just don't see that in many cases. Are we still in the age of search engine manipulation, where those with the best SEO tricks win over those who pour their heart and soul into creating content rich pages? In other words, I need to know if I'm wasting my time because believe me if I could get more out of spending about half an hour as opposed to a day on each page I would. To answer your question. No, content isn't king. It is one of a number of factors that Search Engines rank. Remember that SEO is all about linking people with a question to those with an answer (or those with a need and those with a solution). The answers are based on a number of factors: 1. The quality of the information relevant to the person(s) asking the question (with the need) 2. The number of people who rank the quality of the answer (those with the solution) 1. Is all about site optimisation (including, but not exclusively, content) 2. Is about search engine optimisation (the quality, first, and quantity, second, of inbound links to your site) Buy and read SEO for Dummies, it will be the best £25 you will ever spend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indizine Posted April 24, 2012 Share Posted April 24, 2012 I'm afraid Steve, content is king as far is Google is concerned. Their algo changed and sites with excellent, useful and unique content will be ranked higher than those with little, low value, copied/duplicated or poor value content will lsoe their rankings. It's the content after all, that makes people want to link to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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