Well, this is a contentious area.
First of all, I would like to say content is very important. Its the lifeblood of a website – a website without any useful content is very unlikely to be a good website, and is very unlikely to rank well for anything in a search engine.
Most of the time when the SEO community say “Content is King”, they are referring to text content – the food for search engine spiders. Image and video content is important for your website users as well, and can act as link bait, but this type of content wont help you rank for specific terms in a search engine, as they can’t read any words that would appear in here.
So is content still king? I’m not so sure that it always is. If you look at the top 100, maybe even 1000 websites for some of the most competitive keyword phrases, you will see great content – usually unique to that website. These pages will often usually be well optimised for the phrases that they are targeting and have every chance of ranking prominently for that phrase.
So what sets these 100s of web pages apart? Is the content on there alone enough to drive traffic to the website? In a niche area, with no-one else mentioning a phrase, then absolutely, that content will be enough to rank in most major search engines. But what about for something that everyone wants to rank for?
With competitive phrases, content alone is not enough to achieve a prominent ranking. How can a search engine look at content alone and decide which resource is the most appropriate to the search term they are looking to serve information for?
There needs to be another, equally or more important measure that allows search engines to decide on the most relevant result for a search. To differentiate between the numerous top sites on a tough phrase its the quality and to some degree quantity of the links that point back to the site, that are usually used to distinguish between them.
The search engines need to be able to be able to measure external opinions on the worthiness of one websites content over the other and links are what are used to do this. In very simplified terms, links act as a vote that the page being linked to has good content that might interest others. The more of these votes from sources, the more likely that this page is to rank over a site that has no votes saying the content is worthy.
When you add in an extra measure to these links that looks at the source of link and scores it by authority, you get to a situation where not all links to a site are equal. A link from an education resource or similar authority website (places like the BBC or a link from the website of a national newspaper), is worth a lot more than a link from a blogger with a handful of readers.
So, I think that possibly content is no longer king – its now links that are carrying the most weight – when supported by good content. Either of these alone are insufficient to ranking prominently for a competitive keyword phrase.
One other area that we also possibly consider as at least as important as good content on a website is communication. Whether this is us communicating effectively with our clients, or helping our clients make their websites communicate more effectively with their customers, the importance of communicating effectively in incalculable and is at least as important as good website content or a large number of links pointing to a website.
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