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If you have ever lurked around any of the webmaster forums you may have received mixed signals in that there doesn’t seem to be consistency on what’s most important to achieving good search engine rankings.

Some forums tell you to just get a bunch of links.  The quantity of links is what’s most important to ranking you website.  Others say that just a few high quality links is all is needed, while even more forums will tell you content is what is really needed.

In my years of experience I can tell you that there are many factors which will impact your search engine rankings.  Even properly constructed internal navigation can have a huge positive impact on rankings.

But today I’m here to tell you that the most important aspect to your site, and one that in many cases is most overlooked is content.

As the saying goes – Content is King.  This was first coined a few years ago, and still holds true today.

Sure building links is mandatory, and proper site structure is also important, but really, content is what gets indexed and ranked in the search engines.

Without content, the search engine doesn’t know what your site is about.  Therefore how can it rank it?

Too often I see image driven sites, or sites whose content is all in PDF’s or worse, embedded in flash or images.  And the reason they come to me is because they can’t be found in the search engines.

Yet when you explain to them that the flash content just won’t get indexed, the first response is “yeah but I spent tons of money to get that flash developed!”

It’s generally at this point where you have to decide – do I want to work with this guy? (But that’s a whole other topic to be covered at a later date).

If you look at search engine results today, and I mean really look – don’t consider PageRank, or the domain name.  Just start checking out the results – click on the top results and see where you go.  Notice anything common?

In most cases its the content which is causing the rankings.  Sure you’ll find exceptions to the rule, but in most cases – the content IS the key to good rankings.

This is why you will see lots of blogs ranking at or near the top of the listings.  because that’s what a blog is – a perpetual content machine.

Just look at this site’s blog – it gets between 5 and 10 new entries per week – that’s up to 40 new pages per month.  While it’s early for this blog, it soon will become an authority on the web because most if its content is about one thing – search engine positioning and marketing.

While blogs have been around for some time, their true value has only begun to be realized.

So does that mean you need to create a blog?

The short answer is no that doesn’t mean that in order to be successful, you need a blog.  Far from it in fact.

Remember the topic of this article is content – and it doesn’t matter how it gets on the site just as long as it does.

The reason many sites now use blogs is because they are much more efficient at managing the content.

The blog software creates a search engine friendly hierarchy of pages which the spiders can quickly and easily find and index.

But you can do this yourself, manually, by creating a similar structure.  The goal is to get the crawlers to find and index that content, so it can begin to rank in the search engines and drive traffic to your site.  You don’t need blog software to do this – just a desire and motivation to continue to create new, unique content for your site.

So, what is the recommended amount of new content?

Well that depends.  One thing you could do is look at your online competition – are they doing some form of content program?  If so, how often are they updating their site?  If your competitors aren’t look at a few other sites to see what they do.  Remember how I said this site can get around 40 new pages per month? 

That may be a little much for many people – especially if they don’t have the ability to write.

Me, I’ve been writing like this for quite a few years, so it’s natural for me to spout words onto paper like there’s no tomorrow.  However, this isn’t the case for most people.

And that’s ok.  But if you can commit to even one new page per week, that’s great.  Over time you will find that as your writing improves, you will be able to get your ideas on paper quicker, and perhaps increase to two per week.  Soon you can be doing one per day – and it only takes a short time per entry.

The important point is to not get frustrated with the process.  I find that I get article ideas at odd times throughout the day and sometimes, I forget them, only to remember a few weeks later.

I find myself composing articles in bed, at night.  Not writing anything down, just mentally making notes which, for the most case, I remember the next day and write down.

In fact, the idea for this article just occurred to me a few hours before writing it.  I was making breakfast for my family and myself when the idea hit me.

As the bacon was cooking I was mentally arranging my thoughts and trying to make sure I hit the key points.

Now, as I sit at my desk and write, it’s a matter of recalling that information.  Really, most of the article has already been composed, it’s just up to my fingers to keep up with my mind with as few spelling mistakes as possible :)

Granted, like I said, I’ve been doing this for some time, so it’s more natural for me.  You may find this process doesn’t work for you.  I remember the first article I wrote for a website took me over 3 hours.  I strained to get the words out.  But as with most things – the more practice you have the better you get at it.

What’s the key to writing good web content?

This is sometimes a catch 22 for many web authors.  Once they begin writing, they switch into a mode where they are writing for search engines.  Trying to hit the proper keyword density, trying to ensure that the keyword appears so many times on the page and so on.

In reality, writing for a search engine involves only 1 thing – writing for the search engine user.

In other words, write the page for the person who is going to find it, not the search engine.

That means make the page as interesting as possible.  You have got the visitor to your site – it’s essentially a captive audience.  They have picked your search engine listing for a reason, now convince them that it was the right choice.

The page should be easy to read.  If it’s about a product, don’t be afraid to go into detail.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone product shopping, landed on a website only to find a picture with a generic description and nothing else.  When I’m in shopping mode I want details.

And don’t be afraid to set the visitor up to purchase.  In other words, give them an easy to follow conversion path.  It doesn’t have to be so obvious that it’s tacky, but make it an option for the visitor.

You’d be surprised how many sales happen on many e-commerce sites through non-traditional conversion paths.  by this I mean that most sites expect their visitors to land on the home page and browse the product listings before selecting something and continuing through to the purchase.

In fact, many people start at that product page and may continue the conversion from there, or look at other products on the site.  They rarely see the home page unless they go looking for it.

Another tip – don’t make your pages too long.  Try and keep them to around 500 words (yup that’s it – 500 words) and break larger articles into smaller pages, keeping around this 500 word limit.  That way, if the visitor wants to complete the sale, and doesn’t feel like they need to read more, they don’t have to.

And from a search engine point of view four 500 word pages are generally better than one 2000 word page.

So before you start sweating about how you’re going to make a page a week, don’t.  Think of it as 500 words.  All you need to keep your site up to date is 500 words per week about your product or service.  You probably speak more than that during sales calls or visiting customers, so 500 words per week should be easy.

Granted it can be difficult to make those words go from your brain to the page, but that too can happen over time.

In the end, you need to try and commit to that regular content.  Once you have it in your mind that that’s what you need to do then the rest gets easier.