The Intrinsic Value of a Page of Unique Content

What is the true value of a page of unique content? What value does it add to your site?

There are plenty of people out there who would rather skip the step of creating unique content. They say, "I'll just buy this software program that scrambles up existing articles, and spits out 'new' articles. It'll save me a lot of time, and Google will never know the difference." Or, more commonly, people will say "I'll just type up a bit of introductory text and link to this existing article on another site, and use the same title as the existing article. That way, if they rank #1 for a keyword term, I might end up ranking #2 and grab some free traffic."

Both of these methods are used quite commonly by some of the biggest sites around. Both of these methods completely miss the point, and in my opinion, you can not build long-term traffic this way. To me, one page of unique content is worth more than 30 pages of content generated in this fashion. If you want to build a true juggernaut of a website, one that is sustainable over the long-term, you need to develop your own unique content. Research, write and edit. Unique content is gold.

When you write an article, what are the good things that might possibly happen after you write the article?

1. Article places high in the search engines for the keywords that the article is about.

2. Other sites will link to your article, creating supplemental traffic to your site and increasing the strength of your site in the search engines.

3. Possible inclusion into sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg, Google News, etc.

Write unique articles is like throwing a plate of wet spaghetti noodles at the wall. Some will stick, some won't. Some of the articles that you write will get viewed by hardly anyone, and will barely see the light of day. However, one popular article can make your site. If you write an article on say, how to recover data from a corrupted hard-drive and you get onto the front page of Digg, then this will make your site and give it a huge boost in the search engines. The popularity of this one article will boost the ranking of every single article on the site. You will gain a bunch of one-way links pointing inwards to your site, you will receive more pagerank from Google, etc. etc. The benefits of having a popular article are limitless, and are the building blocks to any successful site. You are much better off to write one solid article of unique content per day, rather than try and take the easy way out and put up 30 not-so unique articles up.

The creation of unique content can be a long process, but the benefits are endless. Unique content eventually creates a flow of unstoppable traffic as you acquire more and more links. Look at sites such as stevepavlina.com. Even if he stopped posting content tomorrow, he would have a stream of traffic from referring sites basically as long as there is an Internet, because he has created useful, unique articles that have received thousands of links over time. His is the model that you want to emulate.