Online Content and SEO: Two Different Roads you can go

It is pretty much common knowledge that producing original and informative content for a website is a key component of getting a good ranking in the search engines. But online content can be used in two very different SEO campaigns, both will achieve similar results, but the timeframe and eventual quality of the results will differ greatly. The two routes and their results:

Online Content Distribution

The first path is to distribute your press releases, articles or other content to other sources with a link, this will build back-links to your website and thus increase search ranking. It may also then be republished by yet more sources thus gaining yet more back-links.

This is probably the most widely practiced method of building back-links and increasing search ranks. It is certainly one of the most rapid ways to build back-links, and it certainly does increase search engine positions over a comparatively short-time to method 2 below:

Sole Publication and Natural Links

This is where you publish the original content that you write, or have written on your website and your website alone. This means your website will initially be recognised by the search-engines as a source of completely original content. In this option there is no active link seeking at all.

This is a less popular option because the real SEO benefit only comes if your articles are so good, and so informative that other webmasters link to them without being asked to. But these links are then completely natural one-way links, which are held in the highest regard by the search engines.

If your articles are good enough and your articles become frequently linked to, this method will eventually lead to your site becoming an authority site on the subject of your articles, these sites take precedence above others in search results.

The downside of this method is that it can take months to build up the sufficient traffic for your articles to start getting linked to, and then many more months to gather sufficient natural links to boost your rank in the search engines. This is often too long for businesses to wait for results from their website.

Combine the Two for Best Results

Taken into consideration the upsides and downsides, anyone who has just launched a website, or had a website for a while with little traffic, and has done no content distribution, should combine both methods:

They should first distribute their content as widely as possible, to build back-links and increase their ranking a little so that they start getting traffic. And then start to concentrate on producing quality content, which is published solely on their site, and cease all seeking of unnatural links.