Welcoming the Wisdom of Webmaster World

I had the pleasure of spending three days last week at the Las Vegas Convention Center attending “PubCon” or the Webmaster World conference. There’s a lot of information that I intend to share on this blog, but, for openers, I would like to make a bottom line observation:

Great Content is Now King
The old axiom that “Content is King” seems to be maturing and I would update it by saying that “Great Content is King.” At Webmaster World, there are all kinds of discussions of all kinds of search engine optimization tactics from “duplicate content” (content from other places that may appear on more than one page of a given website) to paid links, and other kinds of artificial as well as authentic link acquisition strategies.

What became apparent to me this year is that Google and the other search engines are now working more intensely than ever to differentiate between “authentic authority” and “artificial authority.” Authority being the term for those sites that earn strong positions on SERPs (search engine results pages) by merit of the number of links from other sites pointing to them.

While some “artificial” link acquisition strategies may still work, I think that, based on what I learned at Webmaster World, it needs to be said that, long term, it is going to be only the links earned “the old fashioned way”–specifically from great content that merits authentic links from real people who appreciate that content–which will be recognized by the search engines with valuable results page positions. I believe this trend is now more substantial than before and is irreversible.

So if you are working on search engine optimization and organic search engine marketing, the most important strategy is now (and perhaps has been for a some time and will continue to be for the foreseeable future) the creation of not just content, but great (meaningful and relevant) content that will earn meaningful links based on that content’s own merit.

Coming soon:
More posts inspired by Webmaster World including the young publisher who is making major moves on some of the established publishers in the video market via the web, a major entrepreneur who is raising big bucks and buying huge volumes of web traffic, great free search engine marketing tools and much more.