I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks when it comes to content creation, and the constant preaching that Matt Cutts does when he discusses the value of creating good content. Cutts main concept is that good content trumps SEO efforts.

“Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it,” says Cutts. In fact, Cutts says that Google tries to make it so that sites “don’t have to do SEO.” – Cutts discussing how even the best HTML website still gets beat out by having good code.

At this point, the more I read and the more I look into websites, it seems that social signals have the ability to trump SEO for a limited time. However, that immediate impact is then replaced over time with the value of good SEO.

If having well written content was the end all case of being seen, then backlinks would be less important and we wouldn’t have to worry about having those important links pointing back to our site to stay number one or even on the first page for that matter. That being said, we know backlinks are still very important in the eyes of Google. While most of the discussion points come from Cutts saying that having good content can still be better than having an accurately coded and clean SEO site structure, to me that’s yet to be seen.

If having good content were the case, I wouldn’t have seen a site that had limited spun content rank number one for a certain keyword just by having back links and a ton of fake social media accounts give likes and shares. In the past few weeks, that site has dropped in the rankings but it trumped the thought that content was king.

What that site had however, was a boost in backlinks to the page it was ranking for, and all kinds of social signals pointing to that page. Regardless of the content that was on it, it still ranked number 1 for the span of a month based on the virility of the website using external factors. Depending on the keyword ranking, that one month could bring in more leads than anything else they do and it far outweighs the penalty that’s going to come. Especially if the site owners follow the route of buying a new domain and doing the same thing the next time to organically rank number one.

Content, SEO, and Social Media must work together

Now I’m not saying that content isn’t king, because it most certainly is. What I’m saying, is that even as much as Cutts wants to ignore it, SEO is still the queen, and social media is the prince. Without good content, it doesn’t go far in social media. However, with mediocre to bad content, you can still rank number one or even within the top five important spots on the first page by power of SEO.

The part where good content shines with SEO is if that content is helping you convert, which is something that mediocre content won’t do, even on its best day. The point of all of this is that it’s not just one or the other; they all have to be on point to create a long last effect in the rankings. Good content only gets you so far, just like good SEO does. Having both SEO and content working together along with the involvement of Social Media, can take you and your website to the next level.