How much of an SEO impact does blogging have? Is it a necessity to be able to rank?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Ryan Logan: It’s important. More specifically, content is what’s important, whether it’s blogging or building up your category/services/products pages. Blogging is just one way of telling search engines that you’re producing potentially useful content on a regular basis.
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  Francois-Pierre Marcil: Content is not important, value is important. Content is just a vehicule for value.
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  Dominik Mikula: Agree with what has been said but then you look at the other site with local businesses that have not touched their sites in years and rank #1.
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  Nathan Veenstra: Blogging itself will not impact your SEO. As Francois-Pierre points out, it’s about value. Plus: how you use internal links. If you provide proper value, google will see it is a good article and will rank you, you eventually gain links et cetera. ...Lihat Lainnya
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  Michael Martinez: It`s not a necessity for ranking. It`s an option for creating content. The content may earn links, build brand awareness, and make it easier to create visibility for other types of content (such as inventory pages on an ecommerce site). Thus, bloggi...Lihat Lainnya
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  David Gizzarelli: whatever you can do to deliver quality content.
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  Randy Milanovic: I believe good content attracts searchers, encourages them to stay on page longer, and to investigate related content. Time on page, multiple page views and engagement are generally assumed to have a very positive impact on search find-ability and rankings.
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  Kristopher Acuff: SEO to me is creating user friendly content that my target audience will find useful and is looking for to solve a problem or learn new info. Mostly seo is just ways to improve user experience with Relevent up to date content that`s easy to understand that can be read viewed or listened to for their paticular search query. When I create quality content my seo falls in place. I have to Fine tune it, but seo I think is just what a computer guesses real people want to view.