The importance of website content?

Hello everyone, I am new at Ten Golden Rules! - and I will be blogging about my favorite subject; internet marketing. This week while I was driving I kept thinking why google and other search engines emphasize on content? We all know that search engines "reward" websites if there is a constant flow of new content on a site, but why? What is the reason behind this? If we take a look at any news website, look at their page rank, in most cases is always a high number.
In a snapshot, all internet marketers know the importance of content - titles including keywords, meta descriptions and meta keywords (although meta keywords are not that important now), body copy, etc. - okay, we know all these basics but the reason why search engines "reward" websites for content is because at the end of the day everything comes down to business, right? - and search engines need to make money. If they do not have all of us creating content on the web where will they place advertisement? They need us to give them content to be profitable and keep their business growing.
Another example I always think about is why google (you'll be hearing a lot of "google" from me) gives away so many free tools, because they are nice? And how can we learn from this idea and incorporate it on our own website? In addition, I will also be covering the list of free google tools in my next couple posts - so come back because there is always one cool tool you might not know...

Don't Use Auto Content Generation Software

It's not always easy to think of new, original content for your website, and sometimes webmasters are tempted to cut corners by investing in auto content generation software. But before you invest in these tools to generate content, you need to consider:

• Source of the Content - if you're not writing it, then the content needs to come from somewhere. Most of these tools are using RSS feeds to pull in that information or scraping content from other websites, putting you at risk of creating duplicate content that violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
• Google Doesn't Index RSS Feeds - in December 2007, their blog announced that Google would no longer be indexing RSS feeds because of duplicate content issues. So if the software is using RSS feeds to get the content then those pages created by the software probably won't be indexed.
• Copyright - Most companies copyright their information. If you're using a tool to scrap content from other websites, you might be violating copyright laws.

Don't invest in auto content generation software, invest in writing original content. Yes, it takes more time and effort, but it's more likely to be indexed, you're not breaking the law, and creates a better user experience.