September 5th, 2010

There are only so many hours in a day/week/month for website owners, SEOs, and other site managers. So it’s a balancing act to divide time between content creation and other SEO oriented activities. So yes, we include content creation as an SEO activity.

Search engine algorithms are predicated on the assumption that better content (i.e., the best websites in their respective categories) will naturally gain more external links based on their superiority. And by virtue of this by-product the best sites will become apparent. In the real world site owners and managers usually need to devote dedicated time to building website content and then also gaining attention. It’s not quite the ‘field of dreams principle’ … build a great site and people will come … but they definitely won’t come if the site doesn’t offer something of value.

So for us we divide time on creating content, on-page optimization, generating off-page attention in the form of links, and of course up-front doing the keyword research and making intelligent choices about which ones to target. So if making your site better by virtue of improving its content is not part of a systematic promotional plan then chances are your SEO efforts will not be as successful as they otherwise could be. As part of any website’s promotional plan make sure someone’s giving attention to making the site grow and get better. In the absence of that any SEO campaign risks being much more push than pull.