Since the early days of the Internet, one mantra has been commonly extolled by many of those who are "in the know": "Content is King!" is what you'll hear over and over again. Essentially, the core meaning of this statement is the philosophy that the content is the most important thing, and all other aspects (design, marketing and so on) are secondary, because Internet users will be naturally drawn to quality content, and that is the only draw you need.

This may have been true 5 years ago, but these days? Content is no longer king. While it remains an extremely important factor of a successful site, according to the official Google blog, as of July 2008 the Internet was growing by " several billion pages per day". Think about that number for a second, several billion... and while not every single one of those websites will be chocked full of quality content, even a small percentage of that number results in a vast number of new websites with quality content being added to the Internet every single day.

What does this mean for the old "Content is King!" mantra? It means that those (for the most part, there are of course exceptions to every rule) who focus solely on quality content and ignore other important factors like a professional design and marketing will have their quality content lost in a sea of other quality sites, while those site owners who focus on all the important factors of running a successful website will rise to the top and be successful.

Content is very important, but so is the design of your site, along with a successful marketing campaign. Your content has to be good, but you need more than that these days.