Your content pushes your brand forward or downward

"Sadly, this old trick no longer works"

Stoped reading here... Don´t listen to Matt Cutts, he just spills propaganda. If you know what you are doing everything just works like before.

You're right. SEO no longer works, so please don't even try.

That way I'll have less competition :-)

(in other words, SEO is alive and well and the VAST majority of my traffic comes from the search engines)

There's an old adage - if your content is weak, your traffic is weak. Still holds. Bring the value. Thanks for the post.

I agree with Marco that generating content for the sake of getting ranked in Google shouldn’t be the main priority in Internet Marketing.

The web is stuffed full of garbage churned out by desperate bloggers purely to get visitors to their sites. Thankfully, Google has put the brakes on the tsunami of spun articles that were threatening to overwhelm the internet just a couple of years ago.

Most people realise that an unreadable post stuffed to the brim with keywords isn’t going to win any prizes with the big G.

Now I can’t blame anyone for producing content for the sole purpose of improving their standing in the SERPs, we all want visitors. That’s what makes the internet work.
But, if they’re just going to glance at our content and leave 10 seconds later, what’s the point.

Most people on this forum are both producers and consumers. We create content but let’s not forget, we’re also the poor sods that are searching for something interesting to read.
As I surf the web I often have to visit dozens of blogs before I find what I’m really looking for.

I’m sure we’re all sick of seeing thousands of articles that all cover exactly the same topic in much the same way.

Yes we want valuable, unique content, but we also want to feel moved or entertained.
We want to have our emotions challenged one way or another.

By publishing articles for the right reasons, people will come and they will stay. Who knows, they might sign up for your newsletter or even buy something if that’s your aim!
Furthermore, if Google’s a clever as it thinks it is, the laws of natural selection will see that you make your way to the top of the rankings..

That said, we should write for the people we want to attract rather than for Google and if Google doesn’t like it, tough.

David really put it well. Think about it this way - quality content builds a following. Content for the sake of ranking may grab some short term traffic, but will it convert?
If you put quality as your first priority, you will build authority and respect, people will follow you and eagerly read whatever you put out there. And by giving first, results will follow. Cheesy, perhaps. True? Definitely.

True. As search engines emerge that aggregate social shares engaging, unique content will become even more crucial.

These engines won't rely on backlinks, like Google and Bing do. They will simply rank content by the number of times it's been shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

Having your content appear in the results provides instant social proof that can bleed over onto your product.

Note that it's important to write content that people will find useful. This means that your focus should be on helping people, and not on promoting your product directly.

Creating valuable content should be the top priority of every Internet marketer. A website with relevant and useful content is more likely to have a higher conversion rate than a website with poor quality content. However, SEO is not dead. It's still important. If you want your content to be found, you need to optimize your site.

I too was guilty of in the past just knocking out content that was aimed at pleasing search engines rather than focusing on high quality stuff that really engaged them and built up trust, a relationship and a brand.

Seems crazy when I think back to it.

High quality content is where it's at and you can still get organic traffic from Google.

I no longer spend too much time on 'traditional' SEO related activities anymore yet Google is my 2nd biggest source of traffic.

For example I don't spend hours hunting down low competition keywords and don't build artificial backlinks to try and trick Google (it's such a short term approach to things anyway).

What I do is create high quality content either around my subscribers problems or create content that is bigger and better than an already great piece of content in the niche.

Afterwards I'll have a quick look on Google Keyword planner to see what terms people are searching for and if they fit in my content I will sprinkle in but never keyword stuff or put where they don't make sense.

I also check the LSI keywords of the top 10 articles on Google for my keyword and try and sprinkle them in - this is obviously what Google wants from the content it chooses to rank high.

Then when the content is published I'll go through my blog promo routine and syndicate, share and suggest it to the various sites I use for marketing.

Once that's done I'll carry out some manual outreach to gain exposure via social media and high quality links.

I'll have a list of bloggers who like to share my content / have shared before and tell them about it.

I'll contact people who have shared similar content and let them know they might like it.

I'll tweet out to big name bloggers which huge following in my niche and suggest their audience might enjoy it.

I'll email people who have linked to similar content and tell them I've created something bigger and better that they might like - great way to get high quality links.

With just a handful of tweets and links I'll see huge flows of traffic and some good rankings without having to build hundreds of fake links or stuff articles with keywords.

Backlinko.com and Quicksprout.com are the 2 best sources of 'intelligent' SEO that I know.

No blackhat spammy stuff but powerful SEO techniques that are long lasting and work well without much effort.

I agree with this concept, but quality alone is not enough. You also have to promote your work everywhere.

Those times have changed for sure. Pages were originally built around keyword spamming to fool the search engines into ranking you higher. Now you have to concentrate on quality content, and linking your pages within quality content on other related and high quality websites. In short, it's about quality anymore much more than quantity. No matter if you are talking about keywords, or links or content.