A client asked me this question the other day and I had to stop and try to place myself in her shoes B4 answering. After thinking about it, I had to answer in the only way that I could….with a resounding “It depends!”.
| | You can get to the top of the most popular search engine on earth with little or no content, if you have the right amount of IBL’s. HOWEVER, it is foolish to place all of your eggs (SEO efforts) in one basket. |
Links, IBL’s or more precisely, In Bound Links, are key to getting good results in Google. Google uses a “page rank” system that counts each IBL as a “vote” for your website. The more votes, the more important or relevant your site must be and as a result, the higher it will show in the Google results. Will just any ole’ links do? Well I am glad you asked Petunia…NO! Links from Link farms, linking schemes and other sites built for the sole purpose of linking are either already banned from Page Rank ( and therefore useless ) or they are in the process of being banned ( close to useless ).
Quality links from sites that are somehow related to yours are your best bet. By quality links, I also mean they should have a Google PR value or 4/10 or higher. While Google counts each and every link to your site, it will only show those with a PR4 or higher. In addition, there appears to be a logarithmic scale that Google uses to increase PR. For instance, it appears that a PR4 is six times more valuable than a PR3…and a PR5 is around six times the worth of a PR4…so stick to PR4 or greater when seeking IBL’s.
With all of this talk about links, is content worth anything these days? After all, we have grown up over the past few years hearing the mantra “content is King, long live the King”. Well, yes and no. You can get to the top of the most popular search engine on earth with little or no content, if you have the right amount of IBL’s. HOWEVER, it is foolish to place all of your eggs (SEO efforts) in one basket. Yahoo, AllTheWeb and AltaVista can all generate plenty of valuable traffic for any given site if you rank well enough there. On these sites, content is still King. Yahoo uses a mixture of content and links but relies almost exclusively on content. The other majors pretty much follow suit.
The point? Optimize your site (each page on your site) for content that people will want to naturally link to and come back to visit. Get as many links as you can and you should be well on your way to developing multiple streams of traffic (sorry Robert Allen) that will ensure your web-success.
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