Everybody’s Free (To Add Good Content)
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo) -Update – This page was a pain to maintain with all the links and 404s – so I removed them 
Ladies and Gentlemen of the SEO/SEM/SMO class of 2008
Add Good Content 
If I could offer you only one tip for your website for the future and it’s Success in Google, Yahoo & MSN, adding good content would STILL be it.
The long term benefits of good content have been long proved by Forum Geeks,
whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.
I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy your good SERPS, oh never-mind, you will not understand the power and beauty of your good SERPS until they’ve faded or gone.
You are not as fat as you imagine (but does your site look thin?)
Don’t worry too much about Toolbar Page Rank, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as chewing gum.
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing everyday that scares you.
Get Google PR!
Don’t be reckless with other people’s blogs, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Blog
Don’t waste your time on jealousy, sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind,
the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself (and of course those authority sites).
Remember the compliments you receive in forums, forget the insults, if you succeed in doing this, tell me how – their all geeks any-road (and shouldn’t you be in a forum that allows sigs and gives you free stuff anyway?).
301 those old pages and domains, throw away your old notes about getting into DMOZ.
Stumble!
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your new Free Stumble traffic, the most interesting people I know still don’t.
Become a Link Ninja or Social Media Samurai!
Be kind to your unique page titles and descriptions, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Maybe you’ll get to number 1,
maybe you won’t,
maybe you’ll have subdomains,
maybe you won’t,
Maybe you’ll have hyphens in your domain name,
maybe you won’t,
Maybe you’ll redirect non-www to www (or vice versa)
What ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Test Google!
Enjoy your blog, use it every way you can, don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest sales tool you’ll ever own.
Create linkbait, even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.
Read Google Webmaster Guidelines, even if you don’t follow them. Dofollow.
Do not tell Google about your site, they will only make you!
Get to know your customers, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.
Be nice to your blog roll, they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that Wiki links came and went nofollow, but for the precious few, you should hold on. Work hard to target geographically and know that there is not just one Google.
Optimise for MSN once, but stop before you realise there’s no traffic. Test MSN
Optimise for Yahoo once, but stop before you realise there’s less traffic than MSN. Test Yahoo!
Sphinn!
Accept certain inalienable truths, positions in Google will rise and fall, Adwords will get more expensive, politicians will fail, you too will be up at 2AM tonight as usual, and later when you do you’ll fantasize that when you are, no-one else is, everyone else’s positions used to be crap, Adwords was effective, politicians were miserable failures and forum newbies respected senior members.
Respect your senior forum moderators.
Don’t expect one source of income to support you. Maybe you have an Adsense Account,
Maybe you’re no 1 in Google; but you never know when you’ll be booted out of either.
Don’t mess too much with your site structure and file names or internal anchor text, or by the time you’re done, they might look PR0 or Gray.
Be careful whose links you buy, but, be patient with those who supply them free.
Reciprocal linking is a form of nostalgia, not as useful as it used to be.
Get natural links, join Webmasterworld, Visit Search Engine Land, Play with Sphinn. Learn about the Amazing W3C, HTML and CSS 
But trust me on the good content.
Just a quickie post – a rehash and a sort of “2007 posts to remember” for me, linking to articles I think it’s worth reading again for getting back to work on Monday. And yes of course, it’s Sunscreen
A bit more interesting for me to do than just a list of good posts, which has already been done too professionally for me to compete with
Shaun
We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....
Well put Shaun. If that writer’s strike lasts any longer you may find yourself with some offers.
Ha Ha Cheers Andrew – Just a bit of fun before I attack the Friday night beers
C’mon be honest Shaun, how many times did you have to listen to that song in order to pen the Hobo Dance Version?
I had it sussed after the first couple of lines. excellent work now that is worth some Friday brewskis.
LOL Paul You should try it with what I do
Finally an SEO poet!
Hi Shaun,
Inspiring comparison with a great song too.
a great way to remind us of the do’s and don’t ..
but i dont think this was all your own work… how many others on the office take credit on this master piece. ?
Hi Asif
Ha Ha I don’t let anybody else take credit for anything
@ Chris
Finally – recognition (even if it is clear plagiarism – I will take it!)
Hi Shaun,
I also believe on the value of good content not just for SEO purposes, but for retaining your visitors.
As some put it, content is king
Content should really be a primary focus of anyone wanting to put up a site/blog as its success would be mostly dependent on what you offer to the site’s or blog’s visitors…
We have also realised how important content is on our site and a well written article on a relevant subject really seems to be doing wonders for our website!
Starting a blog and getting the content out there will really begin to help our position on Google.
Well done with this article!
You could turn that into a hip hop song like this guy!
http://www.youtube.com/user/m0serious
Please moderate this line and remove my first post, due to an error. Thank you.
That’s very informative, and extremely well written.
Nonetheless, I only wonder how the issue of duplicate content can still be so detrimental to one’s page / blog / website.
After all, with 18 billion pages indexed, is that marginal percentage of sites with duplicate content really going to make that big a difference?
Does it not just boil down to SEO and Linking Strategies, to come out above the rest, when people using the same content?
Just yesterday I did a search on a PLR article I have, to see if it was worthwhile using; one sentence of it returned a whopping 1,860 users with that article.
However, the point is… 10 of those made the first page of Google.
Obviously, there are mitigating factors in determining the ranking based on duplicate content.
Because, if CNN carries a newspost, and Sky has the same content, as would any syndicate relying on API / Reuters, etc., would one of the big newscorps not even make the first page of Google?
I know content is the king on SEO world, while seems from the author,Content is not the king but the whole world.
Then we still need to pay attention to SEO or just wait google to grow to the date that he need no SEO at all to find and rank all?
Content over Design
To someone that has worked within the advertising and design world for 15 years it seems to me that ESO friendly sites sacrifice great design for functionality.
Many sites that I admire from a design view do not fair well in terms of SEO, which tend to be more text heavy.
So the question I ask, is it better to sacrifice high design for SEO friendly sites?