The more you research SEO, the more you’ll hear it: The most important part of your SEO strategy is your content. Content is critical. Content is the core of any good SEO strategy. And so on and so forth; I could go on, but you get the gist. It might sound cliché, but there’s truth in every cliché and this one is no exception. If you want your website to rank well, you need good content. You need fresh content. And it needs to be relevant. In short? Content is…well, content is king.

It’s good to be King!

So why is content so important? To you, your website’s primary function is to generate income, either by ads traffic, or by getting leads on potential sales & customers. Well – content is how you do that. High quality content gets your site indexed by the search engines and pushes you up in the rankings – and keeps web surfers on your site once they’ve made that all-important first click. And it won’t just attract customers – high quality content increases the chances of someone linking to your site or article, which in turn helps push your site further up the rankings. Quite simply, good content is win/win/win and needs to be a major focus for any SEO strategy.

With this basic tenet in mind, take a good, critical look at your site, and ask yourself three questions: Do you have enough content, and do you have enough relevant, quality content? And finally – do you have regular content additions?

If your site is bare, the addition of articles or even a blog can go a long way towards boosting your site in the rankings. Keep your content on topic though; if you have a fabulous article about pen and ink drawings but the rest of your site is about realty, the search engines are smart enough to catch on. Superfluous irrelevant content won’t help you – it might even hurt you in the rankings. Instead, you want copy writing that is pertinent to your site and makes careful use of the keywords you want to target. Your articles can also contain links to other appropriate relevant articles and pages; not only does this make your copy more enticing for readers, but link karma can pay off with future link backs, too. Don’t forget to proof-read, too. Good copy will help draw in and retain readers too – remember, the entire purpose of content on a site is so that people will read it. If you do a good job – they will!

But simply having quality content isn’t enough; you can’t simply slap articles on your site and never do it again. While that will initially boost your site in the rankings, eventually the search engines will start categorizing your site as stale or possibly even abandoned and you’ll slip down the charts. The solution is regular infusions of quality content to give the search engines new content to index frequently. And not only will the search engines be happy – your readers will, too.