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Ask a web designer what they think about 'optimizing' a website and many of them will tell you that "Content is King". This 'build it and they will come' mentality is downright naive -- and harmful to your (potential) wealth. Ask anyone with even basic formal training or experience in marketing the same thing -- either in the real world or the online word -- and they will tell you that it is how products and services are perceived that determine their value -- it is very rarely to do with the actual quality or usefulness of the item in question, or any other factor for that matter.

Perception is king, not reality - and the same kind of thinking should apply to marketing your website.

Think about a can of Coca Cola; does the world think of 'the real thing' or just fizzy water with colorings, caffeine, harmful acids and sugar? Yes, even a can of Coke has content, but the quality of the content is not important when compared to how the world perceives the brand.

If you want your website to get sales / customers then you have to present your content in such a way as to convert as many visitors to customers as possible. Forget about on-page keyword density and all that garbage, it's just a way for your web designer to sound clever and it's pretty irrelevant to your success on-line, as I will demonstrate. I have one website that is just 600ish words of content and a 'buy now' button and it consistently tops the search engine results, bringing a regular flow of new customers into my 'sales funnel'.

Yes, there are a few basic rules that will help you, like making sure your keywords are in the page titles, site description and so on but seriously folks, don't sweat it. Worry more about WHAT your website says rather than where / how often it says it and you'll convert more visitors to customers than ever before.

Your website should be like a sales letter not an encyclopedia. It must appeal to human emotion rather than robots. If you have to pay a copywriter, trust me it's better than leaving your content to a graphic designer any day! Yes, your website has to have SOME content, but often not as much as one might think. And of course, good quality, readable, interesting content will get you a lot further than a string of keywords repeated too often.

So, your content now evokes an emotional response in visitors. "I must have it" your potential customer thinks. Good. NOW you are ready to generate traffic in large numbers and to do that you need to spend a fortune on pay-per-click campaigns OR get your website listed at the top of the search engines for your target search words or phrases ('keywords').

There are basically two factors that will determine how well your website ranks in the search engines. Unique, relevant content and inbound 'links'. I said earlier that I would demonstrate why perception is more important than content so here goes:

When I first started trying to make a living online, I created two websites and launched them both at the same time. Both websites were targeting the same keyword searces. The first one had 30 pages of keyword rich, unique articles, written by an recognized authority in the subject and then these articles were 'optimised' to a certain 'keyword density'. I set up this website to grow by 1 new page per week after learning that search engines love regularly updated 'relevant' content. We'll call this site 'A'. It had no outbound links at all.

The second site, call it site "B" only had five pages, one page for each keyword and even then, the keyword was only mentioned once or twice on each page in addition to the page title. Keyword Density was never looked at. Site B didn't have any new content added after launch and like site A, had no outbound links at all.

Five months after launch, site A was positioned at number 34 on Google for its' main keyword target while site B was listed at number 2. Any guesses which one had the most visitors?... site B got about 400 visitors per day whilst site A got 1 to 2 visitors per day.

So surely there must be something else that site B has that site A does not. You bet. What site B had was over 200 one-way links to it from other websites in similar niches. Links are the fuel that drive the search engines!

Think of each link to your website as a 'vote' of confidence. The more votes your site gets and the higher the 'quality' of those votes / links, the more the search engines 'perceive' importance.

Next time your web designer / 'tech-head' says content is king, show him / her this article and ask why is it that sites with lots of inbound links and poor quality or limited content get more visitors than sites with high quality or high quantity content and fewer links!

So there you have it, it's really a no-brainer. Quality content is better than poor content, of course. But for success in the search engine results?...links, links and more links. Got it?