Karim’s posterous

Guy Kawasaki recently referred to a very useful post on the importance of writing good content for achieving high search engine (read google) rankings. Some of the tips in the post included writing good titles for your blogs/webpages (which is actually a key weapon in any SEO expert's arsenal). Kawasaki then goes on to state that "Google's in the business of finding good shiitake. You should be in the business of writing good shiitake."

I've always believe that you should write your content for humans and not computers to read, however, the idea that you can be a complete unknown, write great content, and then magically get a lot of traffic and have Google find your 'shiitake' is naive at best. Although I agree that writing great content makes things a lot easier, a heck of a lot of networking, promotion, and consistency is required to generate awareness of your content. Unless you're like Guy who had some major online gurus touting his blog when he started it out, it'll probably take a lot longer for you to get your blog up and running and found by google for any meaningful or useful searches. That is if it's not part of the 95% of blogs started then abandoned.

Also, think about this in the context of a commercial website. You may write the wittiest, most thought provoking content on blank DVDs but that won't be enough by itself to boost your SEO. Without other websites linking to your content, without people referencing it in forums or messageboards, or tweeting it or posting a link to it on Facebook or seeing it in the Youtube, your content will exist in a vaccum. You've got to combine this great content with hard work to get your content out there. Let's face it, the VAST majority of commercial websites are brochure sites with STATIC content that never changes. So how useful is the mantra 'just write it and they will come'?