*The following is a guest post from David Snyder; life saver and SEO blogging junkie.

I let out a juvenile giggle every time I listen to SEO’s and other Internet marketers’ rail off their initial strategies, strategies that rarely involve high quality content creation plans. So often the cliché, “Content is King,” is screamed through blogs, but rarely is it the king of online marketing plans.

Without quality content why would anyone come to your site? Without quality content why is your site relevant enough to rank? Without quality content how will you convince anyone to utilize your site the way you want it to be utilized?

Ok, step back. Understand something before we continue my rant, coming from a heavy writing background, having taught writing for several years, the reason I got into Internet marketing was my love for writing.

So, obviously I am biased.

If you are still reading this post, it is possible your content needs some help.

How do you measure success?

So you want to measure the success or popularity of your blog do you? My pal Jeff Quipp was thinking out loud again a while ago about this very concept; Measuring Blog Popularity. In the post he outlined some possible measurement tools (sources) and asked for some thoughts from everyone. Once I began to craft a comment I found that it was running away from me early on. And so I shall continue the Canadian connection posting handball habit that my fellow Canuck and I began last year on a few occasions. My beer to his pizza... let's look at benchmarking a blog.

I think the first thing one needs to address is that trying to use analytics to measure engagement will get you no end of grief from many in the analytics sector and with good reason. They are not readily measurable and quantifiable and this can mean some fuzzy data at best. It is a grey area which gives us some insight into other angles of perception more than hard and fast numbers or primary indicators. Branding activities are rarely best served by metrics.

To Each His Own

For me, right away, I felt that each of the proposed metrics have a different valuation in various markets. That is to say that Comments on a Blog might be more important in a demographic where interaction is a large influencer. This would also be true with value of other aspects such as inbound links in the over-all scheme of things. In the case of a seasoned blog over a newer entry into the game, backlinks may be a primary indicator whereas an older blog with a robust link profile may not value this as much. Each factor has unique dependencies that would dictate the ultimate starting valuations. There is no hard and fast rule set that I was able to see. So let’s just play with some generalizations to get the juices flowing