A search for the well-known phrase “content is king” returns over two million results on Yahoo! Search. It basically means that websites which provide quality content are likely to achieve popularity. However, some site owners and promoters have sought to use certain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques as a replacement for content. Read on to learn why content is still “king” of SEO…

1. Various undesirable SEO practices which attempt to simulate real content have been cracked down upon by search engines, because of their deceptive nature. These have included putting lots of keywords at the end of a page in small text, or feeding entirely different text to search engine “spiders.” New SEO techniques of this type can still be temporarily effective, but search engines eventually catch on to and penalize them.

2. Quality content often generates voluntary links, a major aim of most SEO campaigns. Other websites, forum users, and bloggers are more likely to voluntarily link to a site if it provides good information. This requires much less effort than gaining links through reciprocal linking or link purchases, and is viewed more favorably by search engines.

3. Search engines rank duplicate pages less prominently in their results than unique text not available elsewhere on the web. Trying to avoid the effort or cost of original content creation, by obtaining articles from public domain sources or article directories, is unlikely to produce the same SEO benefit as unique material. Still, the unique text will more effectively gain traffic if it is SEO optimized.

4. Even if a website can attract visitors using methods which don’t rely upon quality content, there is a reduced probability that they will find the site useful. This reduces the chance that they will continue to explore the site, click on ads, return later, or recommend it to others. It is generally a waste of bandwidth and SEO work to attract internet users to pages they are unlikely to find useful.

Basically, SEO is important and often necessary for a web site to attain high search engine rankings and become more popular, but should not be used to replace quality original content. Providing material of this type is more beneficial to both website visitors (who want valuable information) and search engines, which want to provide the most helpful results to users. This is why good content should still be considered the “king” of SEO.