The heart of any website is the content it contains. It’s what draws visitors, keeps them coming back and influences how the search engines (particularly Google) value your site.
A site that’s all bells and whistles with little or no real content will always be outperformed by a more plainly designed site that has content.
In other words, a site that has somthing to offer human visitors is what you need to strive for.
Many newbies to website building make the fundamental mistake of attempting to tailor their sites for the search engines, forgetting about the people who’ll (hopefully) be visiting them. The flaw is in thinking that because you get better rankings in the search engines you’ll get a lot more (human) visitors. Initially, that might be true, but sites that don’t have anything to offer visitors will soon start dropping in the rankings. So you’ll see that initial quick rise in page rankings, a short-lived peak and then a gradual (or sometime sudden) descent through the rankings.
The trick is to design your sites for people, not search emgines. People bring activity and backlinks. Search engines notice that and reward sites accordingly by increasing their rankings.
But this brings up the question of where to get content for your sites, especially if you’re building sites about a topic you personally know little about. So here are some suggestions on ways of getting content for your sites (most, unfortunately, are not free):
