Executive summary: for a website to be truly successful, it can't just be a shopping cart, a page full of advertisements, or a lead capture form. You can keep such sites alive with massive advertising outlays. But to enjoy natural traffic, a website needs to be a destination that people actually want to go to willingly. And that requires some kind of content. Almost every successful website is built on content, as I'll show with some big-name examples.

If you think about it, there is not a single solitary major successful website that is not based on content. It's amazing how often businesses on the web forget about this. Partly that's because we've come to think of content so narrowly, usually as static text.

Certainly, most content is text, and text usually presents by far the best return on investment. In no small part because it’s a magic amulet that draws search engine traffic to a website like suitors to an unmarried princess. But there are other kinds of content besides text. These other kinds of content include games, quizzes, and other interactives, but above all, images. In short, no major website has ever gotten along without some kind of content. True, you can advertise your way to the top, but that's a whole lot of free web traffic, not to mention mindshare, goodwill, and sales opportunities to pass up.

Don't believe me? Let's look at some of the web's most phenomenally successful sites and how they depend on content. For the sake of argument, I'll leave out the sites everyone would recognize as content sites, such as newspaper sites and online magazines such as cnet.com, bankrate.com and salon.com

Oft-overlooked Content-Based Sites

• Google. Content: the search results. Would you use Google if it were just the ads and the spare graphic design? No, you go to Google because it produces the best search results. You may not usually think of the search results as content, but they are–and some of the most carefully planned content on the web. An untold investment of cash and brilliance has gone into every single page of search results Google has ever produced. It may not be art, but it's certainly a lot more than spare design and little advertisements.
• Yahoo and MSN. Aside from search results, numbers two and three in the search game boost their traffic with informational articles and news, including some of the catchiest headlines in the world. Yahoo also complements its articles with games.
• Match.com The ultimate in user-contributed content: members' pictures, profiles, and personal descriptions are the content on this site. Match.com stands out among the personals sites for beefing up this content with professionally written articles and even some seemingly high-tech personality profiling webware.
• Naughty picture sites. Responsible for perhaps 25% of all web traffic, the seeming bonanza won by sites offering naughty-naughty pictures convinces many people that content isn't necessary. But these sites are all about content. Only the content is rarely text and most often images or videos (at least, that's what I've been told by informants who know people who know people who've visited these sites). This sector has not gotten wealthy through links, advertising, and check-out pages alone.
• Play-for-money sites. This is a category of sites I dare not mention by name for fear of this article being filtered before it can reach you. These sites have been phenomenally successful at separating the gullible, curious, addicted and just plain stupid from their money. Again, there aren't many articles here, but the games themselves are content enough.
• Craiglist. The ultimate bastion of user-contributed content, this site is remarkable for its near abandonment of graphic design, advertising, and artificial SEO, the mainstays of most website budgets. Craislist owes its phenomenal success to giving people a space to say whatever they want to say, and putting their words front, center, and everywhere else.
• Amazon. No small part of Amazon's leg up on the competition comes from content, particularly text. Amazon displays every shred of information the manufacturers or publishers provide about an item, not just the tiny blurb most sites rely on. Then there are the famous customer reviews. Finally, Amazon puts a finishing touch on its content with professionally crafted reviews written especially for the Amazon site. Don't think all this is important? How often have you bought something from Amazon after not having read through a good part of the information on the page?

I've deliberately chosen the above sites because they don't rely exclusively on articles, the most traditional type of web content. Still, for most sites, articles are the way to go. Their natural advantages include the facts that they are magnets for search engine traffic, and have a built-in audience in the still millions-strong group of literate web users, who may not like images or interactive content as much.

In short, while you can throw advertising at a lead capture form or shopping cart and make it successful, for truly natural success, a site needs something that makes people want to come on their own. And that means you need content, whether naughty pictures, unique web-software, or well-written articles.

About the author: Joel Walsh writes extensively about web content and marketing, and owns UpMarket, a service dedicated to writing web content: http://www.UpMarketContent.com