Building good content and updating it frequently may be the single most important thing you can do to promote your website. Good content has to take into account two constituencies:

1. your target content consumers (i.e., the people whom you want to read/view/play with/listen to your stuff)
2. search engines

Of course, merely pandering to search engines like Bing, Google, Ask and Yahoo! is not advisable. To be sure, without good content, there is no reason to give any thought at all to how search engines will view your content. And, content purists will go one step further, telling you that it is “all about the content, damn the search engine results pages.”

However, put simply: those content purists are naive.

You should always take the search-ability of your content into account – once you have gone to the effort of creating good, useful, valuable, readable content. For more on my view of how to do this, check out my article that was published in the Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the ISSS (International Society for the Systems Sciences). It is called: “A Systems Approach to Streamlining the Creation of Web-Based Content.”