Content, Content, Content
That is right. A number of years ago, content was king. Then, “link popularity” or link building became all of the rage…and for good reason. But, I think the people that have really won out recently were the sites who kept building more and more content. With all of the turmoil at Google and the theories around what they have done, I decided to just keep on building content. Articles, blog posts, adding to existing content and more. What I have found is that more content on a page may be better than less…which is what was not the case a while back. For instance, we have a number of pages that are formatted with what I consider to be a good method to get a page ranked in Yahoo!:
keyword
Content about keyword. Maybe 7 sentences or so, mentioning the keyword in various forms 3 or 4 times.
Keyword 2
Related content to Keyword 2 which is related to Keyword. Again, around 7 sentences mentioning Keyword 2 in various configurations.
This worked very well for Yahoo! as well as Google. I changed about 30 pages and removed the second paragraph and heading tag. Those pages fell in position soon after. This is obviously not a scientific study, but combining this with what I am seeing on other high ranking pages we have created recently, appears to point to something along these lines.
I think link building is still an important part of SEO/SEM, but people should never lose track of what it is that the user is coming for, the content.