I see this everywhere and still cannot believe that people do not get it. Content is still king on the web. The most important thing you will ever do for your website is to put in good content. Great content will get you links and your position in the search engine results will be because of the content you put into your website.

Hundreds of back links will not get you ranked well with poor content. Great content will get you good keyword positioning with or without back links, therefore, content is still the most important aspect of your website. Great design, flash, graphics, and a cool banner will not get you ranked well for your keywords and phrases. Great content will!

Let's first look at the content in your website. Images are great with alt tags. That helps. But it is the text on the pages that, when done correctly, will help your search engine results. This text is also what will convert your customers into sales.

This text is what your customers will read or not read based on it's quality. This same text is what the search engines will analyze when they decide how relevant your WebPages are to the search phrase you wish them to send you visitors from.

Now, let us talk about article marketing. If you know about article marketing at all, you know you will be submitting articles all over the web. The links in the author bio at the bottom return visitors to your website if they read and like the articles, you write or have written for you.

Just having your articles in thousands of article directories is not the goal of article marketing, although there are article-marketing gurus out there who think it is. The goal is for webmasters to find those articles and place them in their blogs and websites. If they use your article, their website or blog is likely related to the same topic as your website.

You are looking for these quality links. The links for just being in the article directories do not hurt you, but they do not help nearly as much as those from related websites do.

Your other hope is that thousands of people read your articles. Do you really want people to read poorly written articles and associate that poor quality with your website? Well-written articles get people to read them all the way to the bottom where your links are located. Well-written articles reflect well on your website.

If the articles are of great quality then likely your products and services must be great as well. The reverse is also true in the reader's minds. If the articles are written poorly, then likely your products and services are of little or no value as well. It is not only about the number of keywords and phrases placed into the article folks.

With all of that being said, I still find all over the web, especially at freelancer websites, people going in and saying things like; "I need 400 articles written for SEO and I'm willing to pay $1.50 per article." Or they say something like; "I need someone to write content for my website and I'm only willing to pay $10 per page."

I really try to refrain from telling people they are, well . . . stupid, but I am finding it harder and harder each day when I read this stuff.

They will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have their website designed so it looks really pretty, but the text, the stuff that will actually get good search engine results and sales, they don't want to spend any money on.

Writers that know how to write text that not only is appealing to the reader, but that is also written with the keywords and phrases in mind, are worth being paid well. The moment you start hiring better writers and paying for text that converts sales, you will begin to be successful on the web. That cheap content is not going to make you any money.

A website that is beautiful but gets no traffic and sales may as well be an ugly website. An ugly website that ranks well in the search engine and that makes sales gets more beautiful by the dollar.