I’ve recently begun challenging the annoying mantra of “content is king”. It really is a load of BS and I’m pretty sure we’ve all known it for years. In the very least, be specific. Do you mean that the amount of content is king? Is it the depth of content that matters? Is unique content king?

I’m just tired of hearing more and more people throw around this “advice” like that know what they’re talking about. They, and we – don’t. Algorithms are simply that… Computer driven formulas that retrieve, archive, parse and ultimately rank web documents to match potential search queries.

Is content a factor? Sure it is. It’s just not the king.

At the Boston SEO meetup Monday night I used an analogy I’ve thrown around in the office for a while. That being, if you were take all of the ingredients needed to make a cake and throw them in a pan together… Would you have a cake?

Of course not.

You can pile up your ingredients all day long, but it’s what you do with them that makes a difference. It’s how you mix and blend them together, and, how you bake and frost those ingredients that will make the cake delicious.

Rather than feeding people with cake, in the world of SEO you’re tasked with feeding spiders with content.

If you came over to visit and I told you I baked you a cake you could eat… Would you want to eat it off the bathroom floor? Hell no. Just like the spiders don’t want to sift through 20kb of worthless code only to find some potentially awesome content buried in the midst of some poor markup.

There is no Easy Bake Oven. It’s up to you to find ways to create, organize, format and deliver your content in a manner in which the engines can not only digest… but appreciate.

And the next time someone tries to dismiss you with a comment like “content is king” – make them clarify what they’re talking about. It could prove to be an interesting conversation.