Content is King?

[MattatKaras]

I often hear this expression but I can't help wondering how the hell can a bot detect and rate content, especially complex multimedia.|confused|

[Maj. Stress]

From a search engines perspective content = on topic unique text.

[Agent]

Like anything with SE all you can do is pick a philosophy (unless you're an engineer at Google and design these things) and run with it...

When it comes to rating content I think inbound links are counted, obviously, but the content surrounding that link is placed into a context. While Google can't understand that a video is of a football game and rate/index it accordingly by opening it up and "watching it" (as far as I know!), it can slurp up text and links which give it a context so that when someone looks up football videos on Google, the SE has already associated it with certain keywords.

It would also take into consideration numerous other variables we can only speculate on. There is this old debate, content vs. links. Four years ago I'm sure they were BOTH incredibly important but you had people arguing one or the other. And they are still important. But SE goes far beyond content and links. Even we are involved in influencing it now, the users, in various ways just by the way we use our computers.

[Agent]

Also note how Google seems to love the blog format (even if a lot of web surfers don't). They have all sorts of services for blog authors. I think blogs are very useful to Google. You have 20 blog posts, across 20 blogs, on "Topic X", each linking to a new web site featuring more information on "Topic X". It gives Google a good context when it needs to index that site so as long as the linking looks natural (not artificially setup by spammers.) And if I'm a decent writer I am naturally introducing many more related keywords to the context, and links referencing external sources, just by writing about Topic X. Google no doubt is designed to recognize natural language, it should be the holy grail of language parsing.

[Ramster]

Content is King refers to a click throughs and conversion ratios and rebill rates. Mainly for paysites meaning rare/exclusive/unique content will covert higher and retain members longer than a paysite using content that everyone has. Hence content is king!

[Halfdeck]

In the world of SEO,

"Content is king" is true in the sense that great content will attract links. The word "content" isn't restricted to text on a page. It also refers to unique services like YouTube or Myspace or Wikipedia.

The opposing school of thought "its all about links"/"if you just build it they won't come" says great content will die without marketing/word of mouth.

A reason alot of SEOs recommend blogs to companies is that blogs can attract links instantaneously (people may start linking to you 2 seconds after you hit publish) and a blog post can generate backlinks passively over time. More importantly, blogs are a way to increase your brand visibility and network with other thought leaders in your vertical.

[arturobraganza]

Content is king because it is one of the main reason why sites gets more backlinks, more chance to be indexed, more chance to top SERPs, and higher chance to get traffic

[Foxxy]

Originally Posted by Maj. Stress

From a search engines perspective content = on topic unique text.

Yeah, it's not so much that content is king. It's more that unique, relevant content with a decent keyword concentration is king.

[arturobraganza]

And one thing, get your content more catchy and grabs more visitors.