Content is king, but SEO is important

Post to Joomla forum, after a poster expressed doubts SEO is important:

Sorry if you’re finding webmasterworld links require membership. I’m a non-paying member; paying members get access to inner sanctum, the supporters’ club. Hadn’t realised need even basic membership to see pages as I linked too.

Webmasterworld, as I mentioned, is by webmasters – people doing websites for a living, some of them making v healthy money (see thread on generating a million US from adsense in a few months: a rare case, but are people making plenty of money, and doing so with much effort).
Have you built websites that rank well for competitive terms, Hackwar?

Content is king, but not always crucial. Yesterday, say, I searched for flights from Shenzhen to Nanning; came up with Priceline page fairly high up, yet with near zero content, and then found can only book flights originating in US thro the site.
Several other times, too, I come across lousy pages, content wise. There’s plenty of “spamming” the index.

I’ve experienced boost with improved page titles.

Seen pages go into supplemental index apparently as meta descriptions all the same meta description (w joomlaboard; asked about fix, but no answers yet I believe; maybe back to main google index since, not sure why [yes, are mysteries too; should you care to actually learn something about the issue, you’ll find google keeps algorithm secret, and makes changes, including to try to combat people who can acieve rankings without any good content).

I’ve also seen duplicate content pages listed in google; one page doing well, the rest down the list.

Seen, too, that my joomlaboard threads can rank well in google, even tho don’t have SEF URLs; I’ve written of this before, agree with compass that it’s in fair part a human friendly issue, but think they can help. Key thing, though, is eliminating those ItemIDs if any chance of more than one URL for a given “page” of content: with Joomlaboard, that’s mostly true (as my “top 5 posts” module content changes fairly often).

So, writing partly from experience with building websites, seeing how they perform, making changes.
On webworld, people doing likewise, but far more gung-ho and expert.