Your content pushes your brand forward or downward

For the longest time, many online entrepreneurs and online publishers viewed online content as primarily digital hooks to land search engine traffic. In other words, they would build content that would contain certain keywords which would snag free traffic from Google, Yahoo, or Bing. This keyword sniping approach work beautifully up until recently. Sadly, this old trick no longer works.

Moreover, this old approach actually failed to create successful online brands. Since the focus was just to drum up traffic by capturing search engine queries based on certain keywords, there wasn't much emphasis on creating content that truly adds value to the lives of readers.

Now that the game has changed, the focus of online content is where it should be in the first place: building trust and credibility. At the end of the day, the main definition of quality online content boils down to a question. This question is simple: Does this piece of content add value to the lives of its readers?

That's it. That's all there is to it. No magic formulas. No scientific mambo jumbo. No fancy algorithms. It all boils down to end user value. Will people walk away from your content knowing something that they didn't know before? More importantly, will they feel that they got positive values from what you offer? Sadly, most of the online content out there offers very little value. Most of it is focused on one particular question: What can the publisher get out of the reader? If this is your attitude, chances are you will lose in 2014. You have to turn things around. Instead of asking what your websites' viewers can do for you, instead ask what you can do for your viewers. The moment you achieved this fundamental mindset around, you will make a great progress in 2014.

What do you guys think about Keyword related posts? Is it the future or the past?