Some of us can remember the days when SEO was a no brainer. Throw up a page of garbage, get a few useless backlinks, an adjustment here and there.. and voila! You could take over 4 or 7 of the top ten spots. The traffic would flow. But times have changed. As the business of search has matured into a multi-billion dollar industry, they’ve put an enormous amount of money and effort into making our jobs as search marketers hard. And what they found is this: content is hard.

More and more now, it’s all about good content. And not just any content but well-written, relevant, and unique content. And not a page or two, but lots and lots of it.

The Problem of Content

As a professional SEO, I wrestled with the problem of content for some time. I even hired full time editors for article generation! But while that’s effective to a certain degree, it isn’t practical on a large scale. Of course, others experienced my pain. And predictably, some original ideas about how to ‘fool’ the search engines into believing that webpages are original were developed. Some were very clever.

Scraping was born, and word randomization. Automatic site generation gave advertisers the ability to fight the search engines in a new way. Instead of working feverishly on one perfect website, it would be death by a billion paper cuts… or in this case,a billion websites.
Read on …