Content is King, but…

It’s a catchphrase that has been used by most in the Internet marketing industry. Whether you’re talking about social media marketing, search engine optimization, or lead conversion, the idea that “Content is King” rings out as a mantra amongst most who are trying to drive traffic, links, leads, or all three to any given website. For the most part, this is correct, but…

In many ways, it’s a naive cop-out. Why? Because behind almost every King, there’s the people who really call the shots.

Content In Social Media

If a Twitter update falls in the woods and nobody is following that account, did it really make a Tweet? If a Digg story is submitted by someone who gets no Diggs to it, can it hit the front page? If a Facebo…

You get the point.

You can have an exclusive video of Barack Obama dancing with Marilyn Monroe in the White House and post it on your site, but if the right people aren’t there submitting it to Digg, posting it on Facebook, Stumbling it, or Tweeting it, it doesn’t have a chance.

Meanwhile, a picture of a guy standing next to Mark Wahlberg can go viral and get over 80,000 views on Flickr if the right people Digg and Tweet it.

In social media, having strong accounts, a sound strategy, and a little luck can go 90% of the way. The last 10% – that’s where the content comes into play. Having strong content in social media is extremely important, but by itself it won’t make a difference.

Content In SEO

Back in 2005, content was truly everything when it came to search engine optimization. You could stuff keywords, hide keywords, magnify keywords — if you wanted to rank for a particular keyword, it just wasn’t that hard.

Google and the other search engines soon figured this out and started going in a different direction. While the content was and is still important, they decided that offsite factors such as inbound links would need to be used to determine the true relevance of a page in relations to their keywords.

The theory is easy. If trusted websites link to a web page and anchor the link with particular text, the search engines see this and believe that the link must lead to an authority for that keyword. It’s like a vote. Not all votes count the same; a link from the New York Times is counted as a much stronger “vote” than a link from justinandhisspamblog.blogspot.com.

While content is still read and helps tremendously with rankings, it’s the inbound links that have the real juice. It’s possible for a site to rank without links, and it’s possible for a site with links to rank without content, but combined the two provide tremendous power towards achieving strong search rankings.

Don’t Stop with Content

That’s the moral of the story. You can put out the best content on the Internet but without a proper strategy to shine the right lights on the content, it will go nowhere.

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Read more about Internet Marketing Strategy on Hasai.