Many SEO experts say that “content is the king”. However, one blogger doesn’t believe this, rather he believes that “relationship is the king”, content is only subsequent to it. Any thoughts?
If you want relationships, use social networks. If you want content, use almost anything else (blogs, media sites, general websites, etc). Good relationships with your visitors are a factor of a successful website, but not the reason for one to be in existence.
Without content how you will target visitors to your site?? For my opinion content is the KING.
Somehow I believe that giving the visitor something for free is king, coz later he/she will be willing to buy what’s paid if he/she likes it
I don’t think anyone will go behind any paid service. All of us are trying to access information as free. Who going to pay for that?
That’s a hard nut to crack. With most of the content on the web available free of charge, you need to have something pretty darned special to get people to pay for it. Yes, you can sucker people in with free content and then start charging them for it later, but that will often backfire, your reputation will sink like a stone, and people will start ripping your work off and posting it elsewhere for people to access free of charge.
I don’t believe that content is king.
Why? Because content itself is worthless. On its own, content is just a bunch of words on a web page. What makes content worth anything is how highly it is sought after.
This is where the SEO spammers always fail. They constantly tout the line “Content is King!” and write absolute, albeit original nonsense that there is no market for. One only has to look at these forums to see the same, typical group of spammers that spout rehearsed lines in order to peddle their wares.
Bringing up the “relationship” is a novel idea that I quite like. The reason for this is because there needs to be a relationship to content, otherwise it will never be perceived by users or search engines as worthwhile. Someone with a real relationship with their users and with their content will produce better work than someone who realises that SEO is popular and decided to cash in on it by copy/pasting “seo sites like digg make seo better” a thousand times on Web Development forums…
Relationship can be just limited to your fans or your customer base. But with good content, you can actually get new fans. So, i think relationship follow good content.
Relationship are very important for SEO but without informative and unique content your site is noting for Search Engines, If you have unique and updated then Search Engines and Users will surely like you site. Because User don’t know anything about SEO they required related results of your their searches. So According to me Contents are very important.
The key difference here is “quality content”. Content can only be king if the crown it wears is made of gold and not flimsy paper 
Assuming we have quality content, this is what builds the relationship. But, as in any relationship, trust is important. Once you have the relationship built, your fanbase/readership/etc. will trust you to provide quality content time and time again.
So the relationship is built on this trust which, in turn, is dependent on the content. Whew.
i use more content on our website but results are in 5 th or 7th place in search engine what i do </snip>
I agree with BoltBryan, they key is quality content. The web is almost getting drowned with junk so if a visitor see something produced with quality he will notice and come back and maybe even share.
Yes it is king till today. Now it is seen that Google doesn’t like the duplicate content. With the quality content you have more chance to attract the new visitors, so that is there is a chance of conversion.
I honestly believe that today, content is King and will always be King. If you have good quality content that is relevant to your users/visitor needs, then they’ll keep coming back.
Relationship does matters when you have loads of quality content and your website needs a push. Content can even fetch good search rankings on Google without being optimized with fresh content. Once you Add your URL to Google, the rest is taken care of the crawler and the content, so its known as KING.
This is the peril of calling something “king”. It implies an absolute when in fact there’s no absolute. Content alone means nothing, relationship alone means nothing, technology alone means nothing, marketing alone means nothing. Only putting all together against a solid business plan it starts making sense. Mess up any part of it and you have your king naked.
Tell that to Clickbank. Most of their revenue comes from people selling information that is available free of charge on the web. Their “earnings paid out” counter has $1.8 billion at the moment - I’d say they’re cracking this nut pretty darn well.
Let’s talk chess terms.
Content = King - A powerful, dominant force that will hook in to both search engine spiders and real users, content is a foundation upon which you can build your empire. However, it will move you SLOWLY, just like a king on a chess board, content will move you one step at a time in SEO.
Members = Pawns - Having members creating user-generated-content is like a sea of pawns supporting your content kingdom. The more pawns you have, the less work the king has to do to maintain the foundation of your empire! Woohoo!
Tools = Queen - If you can create tools that are powerful, useful, and not available elsewhere, they will be your queen. You can rank QUICKLY and HIGHLY with good tools, and you can kill virtually any competitor if you don’t misstep. The key here is in knowing the formula that makes a good tool.
Links = Rook - Link acquisition will move you linearly. You will quickly reach your limit and will have nowhere else to go. Also, you’re always open to being blindsided if you get jiggy with link farms and other questionable such activities.
Tricks = Knight - Playing around with SEO trickery is like a knight. You’re never quite sure where you’re going with these tactics. Could pay off big-time, or could smack you in the face (or both, sequentially, e.g. with recent JCP news). Best not to play around with gray-hat trickery lest you get banished from the Empire. 
Ultimate brings up a good point. Pure content on it’s own isn’t necessarily going to do you any good. It has to have value and meaning.
I also like transio’s chess analogies. =p
Content might be “king” over at Google…
Notice how the crappy content mill is so close to the top, despite it not having anything on its page that actually says anything about the search terms (it doesn’t), and not only that, it shows up 2 and 3 times (depending on search terms) taking up valuable space that could have actual, real, content.
How about, “Google likes content no matter how irrelevant, stupid, spammy or off-topic it is” and just leave it at that… since all spammers care about, besides stealing people’s money and wasting their time, is Google. Not real content.
So in this section, that’s all you need to know. Recycle poorly-written rehashed says-nothing content and Google will be your friend.
That is partly true. I would pay for a service if that would save at least 10 minute a day for me. Sure~ I can do the leg work or finger work to get free info. I’d even pay free VOD services from Fox, CBS, and etc… if I can skip the commercials.