First of all, content is the most important factor in any blog, more so than design, links, SEO, etc. Content is why they will read your blog, purchase your product, or improve their impression of a brand. It does not matter if you sell immortality for a penny and have billion visitors every single day, if you don’t tell your audience why they are there, make it interesting and useful it will do you absolutely no good.

Despite some pop (not popular, pop as in one hit wonder here today gone tomorrow) marketing theories that traffic is everything, it is not. Your ads on your page only pay when someone clicks, if you’re selling something they will only buy if you convey the benefits. How many people come does not matter a bit if they immediately leave; worse, if they get there and hate what you have (which they will if the content is useless) you are hurting yourself, your brand image, future sales and future potential visitors. Also, search engines are getting smarter every day and blatant attempts to garner visits without content will result in being blacklisted, which means you won’t be found on any searches no matter how many links you have or how good your SEO is.

Duplicate Content vs. Unique Content

Spinning articles and content is something of a craze right now, and some bloggers don’t even bother with that, simply copying and pasting another persons content on their own site. Using duplicate content is a horrible idea, though it may seem convenient. It is actually illegal and is considered stealing intellectual property, and while the cops will likely not show up at your door, you do leave yourself open to lawsuits and search engines will blacklist you if it is discovered you are copying other’s work.

Spinning articles are also a bad idea in most instances. While it is used often, especially when massive amounts of content are needed, at the end of the day you are trying to attract people, not impress search engines. Spinning articles can lead to short-term gains in visitors, but never long-term gains, and again, it can hurt your reputation if the wording is funny and syntax is all messed up – which it will be with spun articles.

Keeping your content as fresh and original as possible, and updating it often is essential for any successful blog. You won’t find a successful blog anywhere online that does it any other way. So avoid the cheap shortcuts and put in the work. Or hire someone else to, but make sure they are making an honest effort of it.

Backlinks

We’ve mentioned I think, quite clearly, content is the primary concern on any blog. Backlinks have their part to play though, and are actually a very important piece of the puzzle.

Backlinks are any link from another site that leads to yours. When this whole internet thing was on training wheels it was a primary means of navigation, however today actual navigation relies more heavily on key terms, due to search engines. Backlinks still play an important role in search ability however. Backlinks are one piece of the incredibly complex logarithms search engines use to determine where on a page your site will show up when specific search terms are entered.

So the usefulness of backlinks are two-fold, first having a link from a related site that has a decent number of visitors will inevitably lead to more visits by these individuals, more important though, backlinks in the right places increases your site’s general search ability. Be sure your backlinks are posted only on legitimate sites, and in places that are related to your topic, i.e. don’t have an article about puppies linked to your site if you sell light bulbs, search engines will catch on and penalize your search ability.