We’ve read it all over the place, and plenty of us have gotten the spam emails from numerous companies – Search Engine Optimization techniques will boost your site rank within the search engines and Search Engine Marketing will bring you top-end traffic that is laser targeted. I never see anyone peddling the important of content though. At least not among the spam I receive.

Fact is a load of quality content that provides a lot of value, information and entertainment can accomplish all of those things and puts you in a great position for the future of search – contextual search and Skynet reading you bedtime stories.

There are also the ancillary benefits of putting together a really strong content marketing strategy. You can snag some amazing perks with quality content that you just can’t get with the truncated, garbage PLR that gets peddled around the world.

-Higher conversion rates

-Elevated sales

-Brand advancement

-Consumer education

-Thought leadership

There’s more, plenty more in fact, that comes from using the RIGHT kind of content in your campaign. You can pay all your want to have a link building campaign run and you can fork over thousands of dollars for SEO and SEM but the fact remains that without quality content you’ve gone fishing without bait and tackle. You’re dangling a blank line in the water and it’s just chilling on the surface.

You might know where the perfect fish are, and you might even have a great method for keeping the fish swimming madly around your boat, but without that quality content (that hook) what are the odds that you’re going to catch anything?

Take a cue from music, in any form, but especially pop and rock. The turn of phrase in a song is the hook, driving into the chorus. A good example is the popular song Boom Boom Pow from the Black Eyed Peas’. The hook in those songs is what pulls you in and persuades you through. It really isn’t important how many people hear the tune once and forget about it – what’s really important is the people who stick to it and spread the word about the song, sharing it with friends.

Content marketing has very little difference. Your content should resonate with your visitors and thereby draw them in. That hook will ensure that they share it, and by making it easy to share your content you’ll be pushing a big link building campaign from your content alone.

General SEO by itself attempts to mimic this process by creating a picture or painting a false portrait to the search engines and users a like. This can carry your for a short amount of time, and even boost site rank but when you have all form and no content you’re creating a very intriguing doorway for people to pass through that goes absolutely no where. That make it easy for visitors to hit the back button and go somewhere else.

Quality content will help position a website for future changes in search, especially as the web moves more toward contextual search. We already saw some of that change with the May Day update by Google. As these changes continue to occur, it will be increasingly important to have an established presence online with quality content – and PLR (even spun PLR) is not quality content.

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