We’ve been discussing the importance of content on this blog our website Home Business Research for a few years now and the fact is that it’s just as important now as it was then, in fact even more so.  Several years ago you could get decent rankings on the search engines just for having a few well placed keywords and a lot of traffic. Traffic exchanges were doing a brisk business because they generated traffic, albeit broad based un-targeted traffic. Then it seemed almost overnight that the paradigm changed. It wasn’t so easy getting top search placement, now you actually had to earn it by having, not only,quality content but fresh content as well. This was in addition to all of the other SEO stuff like prominent and relevant keywords, keyword based articles, on-page and off-page links and so on. This is actually a good thing.  It keeps website owners and bloggers on their toes by forcing them to focus on their respective topics and niches by providing quality information.

The other important factor is that in some ways, if you have a garbage site you get garbage placement as well, search engines will usually downgrade the importance of your site if you just provide junk for your readership. Although I like to earn revenue from my sites and blogs I also believe that I have a responsibility to my viewers to provide unique and timely information.

Back to the issue of content.  It’s very important to get fresh content that is closely related to your website or blog niche. One way to do that it is to utilize a quality article directory. A good article directory will have hundreds of categories on many different topics that you can use on your site. In fact writing articles for distribution to article directories is another way of getting quality traffic to your site.

Either way quality traffic is easy to obtain when you approach it in the right way.

I’ve been experimenting with different types web site types and find Joomla to be a great alternative to standard website builds.  Don’t get me wrong I still use standard html driven software such as XSite Pro however if you want a really simple way to design a site than Joomla will do the trick.  There is a learning curve though, and you may want to consider it before you run off to put up a Joomla site.  It’s not what I would call a technical curve but more of “this is what you need to do to put that here” type curve, meaning that there are many,many different rules to remember as you are building a site.  What you won’t have to worry about are things like “what size should all of my headlines be?” and “will this article fit in this space?” Joomla handles all of that with aplomb.  If you want a completely custom site then Joomla is not for you as there are many Joomla templates that are not exclusi

I think that most SEO experts would agree that website content weighs very heavily in the search engine algorithms.  It’s not enough to have exclusive content but to have fresh content on a regular basis to get the highest rankings from the top search engines.  It’s currently estimated that Google has a 65% share of all search volume and the remaining volume is primarily shared by Microsoft and Yahoo taking up the biggest part of the remainder. Microsoft has made sizable gains in the past 60 days.

It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s Google, Microsoft or Yahoo content is still one of the primary drivers of ranking.  Remember ranking is the process of keyword prevalence within the searching process.  So that if you want to found for searches about mountain bikes you have got to have content built around “mountain bikes” within your site. That means articles or other content with the keyword phrase of “mountain bikes,” in and around your website.  In your META tags, page headings and articles.  The important part is not to “keyword stuff” your content because it will work against you.  You need to write articles that have the correct balance of keywords throughout the article.  There are several ways of doing this however one of the easiest is to use software that is designed to manage your keyword placements.

There are other ways to do this as well. For example utilizing a good source for PLR content works well if you don’t have the knack for writing your own articles. Private Label Resale or PLR content sites offer unique opportunities because they provide pre-written content that you can adjust and modify for your own site.  You can do this manually by ensuring the proper balance of keywords or you can utilize content software that can “spin” your article into new content.

The big issue with spinning content is that you really can’t “cheap-out” when selecting a legitimate source.  If you do you’ll suffer in the long run because the search engines will easily pick up on this.  You want your content to look fresh not spun into gibberish.

Finally the take away from this article is content, content and more content will get you noticed and return fresh targeted traffic to your website.