SEO what? content is king!

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i noticed recently A LOT of debate on SEO vs content on this forum....

i've always been a believer in content.. and do no work at all on SEO...

did a test last week to see how far content SOLELY can push a website up the serps, registered a new domain.. did no SEO (off or on page) and only wrote 1 article per day..

1 week into the test.. here are the results..

competition in google in "quotes" is ~30,000.

btw.. rankerizer shows 30 backlinks but i think its a bug.. it has 0 backlinks.. verified in majestic SEO annd google
#search engine optimization #content #king #seo
  • btw.. not trying to prove anything here.. all sites are different and 10000000000000000 variables will affect your ranking.. just sharing what happened to my site..

    now go post some content on yours!
  • No doubt content does work - but always believed that backlinking should be involved to a degree as well as social networking.
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    • How about posting how many EXACT monthly searches those keywords get too?
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  • well....content is king..i don't know man

    can you do this with content?

    YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.
    YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.
    thats just my opion

    mike reynolds
    arnold55
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    • are you asking how to put content for when you have a video?? you could use tags.. or just put content on the same page as the video?? not sure what you're asking. sorry :confused:
  • Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've seen like two or three threads in the last week alone about this subject of content vs SEO, but it's a good one so I guess I won't complain

    My first inclination would be to say that you got lucky with your niche selection, unless you're just deliberately targeting low competition keywords.

    I would be more interested in how much actual TRAFFIC you're getting. Rankings are a way to get traffic, so if you're not getting traffic then it doesn't really matter what your rankings are. Even if you're just getting 10 - 20 uniques a day from those rankings that'd be worth noting.

    Sorry, I don't want/mean to rain on your parade, I really do appreciate the time and effort that went into this case study. I'm hoping that you can offer some traffic stats for us to further help us understand what you've done

    - Stephen
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  • SEO and content both are equally important...
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    • Not really.

      I can rank bad content in a competitive serp with SEO. I cannot rank good content in a competitive SERP without SEO.
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  • Content is king
    Backlink is God
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  • I believe content and SEO both play an important role to enhance page rank.
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  • What you say and have experienced can be technically accurate but it does not reject the roles played by links. For example, assume some of your contents and newly published articles catch attention of a few bloggers and then they give links to your inner web pages. Such editorial links will be superb from SEO perspective and even a few of them would be enough to push up your web positions to the front page of Google which can be a very great piece of news.

    Upon entering the SEO world, webmasters should be thinking about their net audience, and search engines. Naturally, contents should be written in a way to be liked by net visitors and human readers. Such quality materials can at the same time get awarded with strong one-way links from other sources. In such cases, a combination of good links plus valuable contents will do wonders online. Your case is true but do not forget about building links at the same time.
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    • bobcarlsjr,

      Perhaps this story can best relate the point that Mike and I are trying to make to you...

      In SEO terms, your competition is the top 3. #4 to whatever number of results show up, do not matter at all. If you can beat the top 3, the rest are insignificant.

      On top of that, you can find some pretty ridiculous search terms that have as many as a few million results show up, and it is clear that NOBODY is "competing" for those terms.
    • perfectly put. thank you.
  • Hi bobcarlsjr,

    I think you, and many others, have the wrong idea about exactly what SEO is. SEO is what you do to content, you cannot do SEO without content. The more SEO'd content, the better your performance will be in SERP.

    First, search engines index individual web documents, not websites.

    Second, search engines are pretty good at figuring out what your content is about without you consciously performing SEO. In other words, creating high quality content with users in mind you naturally create semi to fully optimized content.

    Third, if you were using a blog CMS platform, Wordpress or something similar, it is likely has a certain amount of built in optimization as well as promotional techniques built in to the CMS design.

    As Mike pointed out estimated pages that may contain part of the words of a query is not your competition. There is never more than 1000 pages liste in SERP and typically most of those are not competing for your targeted keyword. Your true competition is the 10 URLs listed on the first page of SERPs.

    There is no backlink tool that will show you all of your backlinks. Backlinks are created by many different methods and are not limited to your own efforts. Internal crosslinks are backlinks too, are you claiming you have not created internal links?, because if you have, you cannot honestly make the claim of "no backlinks".

    Finally, the main point that I'm making is that it shows a fundamental lack of understanding the basic concepts of SEO to frame the question as content verses SEO. There is no SEO without content, and most high quality content is optimized for users, and therefore generally optimized for search engines.

    When it comes to highly competitive keywords, you need more content to rank a page, and for that content to be placed in optimal locations, typically spread across many web pages, and often located on many websites. This type of web promotion is also content creation, hence all SEO is content and there can never be a valid argument for SEO verses content.

    Content is king, and SEO'd content is the king of kings.
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    • i don't do anything to content.. i just write what i think about an issue/problem.. i don't do keyword density.. i don't do ANYTHING. no meta tags, no NOTHING. just a blank page with words.. that's all.. using WP..



      common knowledge

      there is a difference between writing for users and writing for google. i write for users. i don't PURPOSELY do SEO. i just write! that's all!

      not without plugins. only header/title that's all. and that's also for the readers. would you read anything at all without a title? forum/books/etc??



      sorry i have to disagree. if you are on page 10, the 1st 9 pages ARE YOUR COMPETITION


      there is no referring domain except google. the site is 1 week old. i haven't put the website address ANYWHERE online. where are the backlinks going to come from?

      no internal links other than privacy page, contact us. anyway, internal link from a pr0 domain, i'd think close to 0 link juice.

      so yes, i will boldly make the claim i have NO BACKLINKS


      you totally don't get the point of my thread. i'm saying my content which i am NOT optimizing at all can be ranked. so i don't see why you keep talking about onpage SEO which you clearly are.

      which basic concept of SEO are we not understanding here may i ask? like i told someone above, unless you are google, everything that you or i or anyone else says is B$

      errrrrrrr......... tell that to all the people above that is saying SEO is better than content.. lol.
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    As far as SEO, content is king. Keywords, internal links, & keyword relevancy, etc... are king (for on-page SEO).

    You can take a page full of gibberish text, SEO the page, build the backlinks & still rank the page in the SERPs. Google can't detect If a sentence makes sense or not. Google knows If a word is relevant to another word, but only becuase those two words are in some database, they still can't recognize a legit sentence. A manual human review would obviously get the gibberish page slapped.

    Google does recoginize the end of a sentence, for example a period at the end of a sentence. I've noticed this in the SERP descriptions, Google sometimes doesn't use the full amount of space in a SERP description & will sometimes shorten the SERP description when they detect a period.
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    • yup.. then see me overtake your site when i have proper content on it.

      like i said, look long term my friends. sleep well at night, don't be like mikey.
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  • Perhaps it is better to do both!
    I really believe content is king but without some SEO a site will not perform well with search engines.
  • PM me your targeted keywords and give me a couple weeks to outrank your terms
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    • And I would do this because? You might want to help Mikey with his seo company if yo have the free time on hand. It isn't doing too well right down. No where in the SERPS to be found. I think he needs more help.
  • I could rank a 1300 EXACT searches number 1 by sneezing hard

    that is not a good example of content is king, it just makes you look like a newbie
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    • Number #1 rank with 0 backlink? If it isn't content what is it ? Lol. R u acting foolish or are you really that dumb?
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  • I'm not sure why content and SEO are ever seen as an either/or. They go hand-in-hand to secure rankings. Better content helps get natural links, decrease bounce rate, increase time on site, get return visitors etc which all help rankings, but usually not enough for anything competitive unless you're also doing on and off page SEO. If you're doing the SEO but with crappy content, then even if you get the rankings, you probably won't make much from them and they may not last as well if your crappy content results in high bounce rate and other things Google doesn't like.
  • Well what I thinks is, Content has never been king in the sense that if I drew an analogy.... !
  • I guess if your site was highly targeted you can do this.

    I had a site with about 100 pages on it and didn't start ranking high until I did some backlinks on it. I believe the problem with my site was that it wasn't specific to one niche.
  • But first you should do strategy for highly targeted.
  • Bob,

    Content is king and that is true specially after the recent panda and freshness update by search giant most preference will be now given to unique and information based content pages and content based link building that will be by backlinks from articles and blogs, forum (can be considered if you contribute yourself effectively). We mostly follow this process only to rank websites and is proven as ranking we got are unbelievable. Within a month or two we reach to 1st page from not in 100 of the SERPs.
  • backlinksindexer for quality backlink. thus no need to make a big strategy for this, just go with backlinksindexer
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