Quality is King

In the crazy world of content on the internet, quality ends up winning out in the long run, despite what people may think.

Sure, there are plenty of tech-savvy people out there who want to direct traffic to their less-than-great web properties to make a quick buck from a prominently displayed text ad unit. Many of us have been to these ad-laden landing pages. Cyber squatters still make a lot of money by snatching up domains by the thousands in the hopes that people will happen upon these domains, which are either laced with common words or misspellings of real websites. I suspect that many of these people are successful in their efforts. This is blatant opportunism is definitely a negative aspect of the internet, but it musn't spoil our overall image of the internet. It's not a shortcoming of the medium itself, but the result of an internet user base that is still in the process of learning how to surf the web. When internet users have a firmer command over where they go on the web, and have a greater knowledge of the best places to find content, products, and services on across the web, opportunism will end up losing its footing. In the long run, this will be a huge windfall for internet users and high-quality web entrepreneurs alike.

Another perception that is perhaps well-founded, but not necessarily sustainable, is that low-quality and/or spammed-up sites often find their way into important search engine results. This is result of many unsavory SEO techniques, as well as a Google bias toward older, yet less useful, websites (since older sites tend to have more backlinks since they've been around for so long). I see both of these causes having much less influence over search engine results over time. Eventually, newer and better waves of websites have an easier time populating search results because current trends on the internet make linking much more prominent, as well as more indicative of quality. For example, the blogosphere (I don't like that word either) is very quick to pick up new websites and link to them on a massive scale that wasn't previously possible. Also, there are newer sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us that give the web much more collaborative/democratic feel and functionality.

Aside from the technological advances that have pushed quality to the forefront, the 'quality is king' statement is more of a practical credo for entrepreneurs than it is a conjecture that one must prove over and over again. In business, no matter what the industry, emphasis should be placed on making something useful. If you're a web entrepreneur, work only with concepts that are interesting, and create content that is useful to people. Techie tricks will always be useful tools for the webmaster, but quality must always come first. Quality is King.