Once upon a time in a search engine long ago, content was king and little else mattered. Then along came the links in an attempt overthrew the king – now everything is messed.

Back links are very important in placing well in the SERP’s especially for highly competitive keywords, however content is still the king, and without it your sites are as good as lost! So what is a site owner to do when you’ve expressed and said all there is to say and are left with only a 5 page website?

If your target market is quite specific and you’ve carved out your own little niche, a 5 page site may do just fine in the SERPS, but if your target is at all competitive it will be much more difficult. In most cases you’ll need more content.

One way to throw up some relevant pages of content fairly quickly is through the use of articles. For nearly every industry there are articles and newsletters. Most authors will happily give you permission to post their work providing they receive full credits including a link back to their site.

Depending on the topic of your website you may be able to find an extensive amount of content. Coping these articles to your site, however, may present a significant problem – duplicate content. Google in particular, as well as many other SE’s frown upon duplicate content, and it may result in diminished rankings.

So if you shouldn’t re-produce all these articles, how can they help you? One way around this is to simply place a link to the entire article, and provide a description or summary of that article along with the link. Providing around 100 words about the article along with the anchor text embedded within the description, will give you unique, relevant content. Placing 5 or so links to articles per page will give you numerous pages each with around 500 words of unique content.

This technique will involve putting in a fair amount of time in the beginning, but once you have it started, it will be quick and relatively easy to maintain. By adding a few articles a day (or week depending on the popularity of your topic), before long you may have dozens of on topic relevant pages for the spiders to sink their teeth into.

Posting articles written by others will work well, but what about writing your own articles, or putting out your own newsletter? The biggest drawback to these options is time, but the positive impact it can have is quite significant.

Not only will creating your own newsletter, or writing your own articles provide you with highly targeted original content for your website, it will also give you a new stream of incoming links. By providing an interesting on topic newsletter, you will also get another avenue to promote your products and website. Other webmasters that publish your articles will have to provide you with an incoming link to your site, this combined with the new content to your site, will ultimately increase your search engine rankings.

The necessary time required to write newsletters and articles may be substantial, but it is certainly worth considering. Even as little as writing a single article a week and posting it on your website will greatly help you to build content and credibility.

Regardless of how you go about increasing content on your website, it is certainly an important aspect of strong search engine positioning. By adding new articles and content you give the spiders a reason to return to your site regularly, and increase your chances of securing that top spot in the SERP’s.