First, let us define content: Whatever the visitor has come to your website to find.
Second, let us define the purpose of a search engine: To present the most appropriate content for a user’s search.
Third is found by adding First and Second (double entendre intended): Both the search engine and the visitor have the same goal in mind - to locate whatever it is the visitor is looking for, which happens to ALWAYS be content, whether in the form of products, news, video, audio, information about health club locations in Cincinnati, etcetera.

Of course, it isn’t really that simple. The search engines also take into account things like: how many links the site has linking into it, the quality of those links, the text displayed within those links, how many pages the website has on the topic, how long a visitor spends on that page and/or website, and on and on and on. The reason for all of these considerations has partly to do with unethical SEO practices. Every time an unethical search engine marketing firm (see our ethics policy here) finds a way to trick the search engines, the highly-paid, highly-trained, highly-intelligent ivy-league search engine algorithm engineer at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, or any other major search engine is going to find a way to find the cheater and push their website back into the abyss. Therefore, unless your search engine optimizer has a PhD from MIT and full access to the algorithms used at all major search engines, success by shortcut is invariably temporary.

With that said, it is still important to build links from respected websites, preferably with appropriate keywords in the anchor text - This is Anchor Text. But here is the catch - other websites, especially “respected” ones, are most likely to link to sites with good content. To see a website like http://www.fda.gov/ link to a website with poor or sparse content is like seeing a supermodel kissing a short, fat, balding, rude middle-aged guy driving a beat-up station wagon - it rarely happens.

Relying on PPC advertising campaigns or press release distribution to drive traffic to a website with poor or sparse content is like seeing that supermodel with the same guy, but this time he’s driving a convertible Porsche. Sure, he was able to spend lots of money and get the girl in the car, maybe even into his bedroom, but this rarely results in a faithful, long-term relationship. OK… so that analogy was stretched a bit. But you get the point: The kind of customer base you want to develop is long-term and faithful, and nobody wants to return to a website that doesn’t have the content they were looking for.

Whether your search engine marketing strategy involves paying for traffic, building links, cleaning up your code, creating a beautifully designed website, or sending out hundreds of press releases, none of it is going to be of much benefit without first developing quality content.

And that is why the cliche lives: Content is Still King