Why Content and Social Media Marketing are the New SEO

2014-07-04-seobestpractices.jpg

SEO is the process of making your web site more accessible to search engines. Google’s algorithmic updates the last 3-5 years (“panda” “penguin” “hummingbird“) have reshaped the SEO marketing landscape permanently.

It’s s a myth to think you can and should be manipulating search engines with back links, page keyword stuffing, duplicate content development, etc. It’s old school and much of these processes are no longer relevant to Google.

Today, SEO rankings are a primarily combination of creating and sharing great content, building a web site that works for your visitor, coupled with basic on page SEO best practices we’ve outlined below.

Best SEO Practices for Today’s Content Soaked World

  • Think of Twitter as Google’s new SEO discovery engine – use Twitter to tell Google what new content has been added to your site, with hyperlinks embedded in your Tweets to the blog post or page.
  • Build your site on WordPress with these basic page attributes to drive SEO: Title and Descriptions consistent with your copy and use the Yoast plugin.
  • Make sure your page construction HTML “score” is correct – use the W3C Validator to check your code by pasting in a URL and checking.
  • Write shareable copy; by “shareable” we mean with excellent, well written copy that educates and informs your audience and use the ShareThis WordPress plugin so visitors can easily share your content across their social accounts.
  • Don’t have a slow web site! Google penalizes sites with poor load times: checkout Pingdom’s site to understand your critical load times for a page. You want to be less than 2.5 seconds of load time per page.

2014-07-04-SEO4.gif

  • Use PlexiSearch (click on search insights) to understand how keywords are rated and ranked by Google and Bing – back links are passé – “social” really drives SEO rankings.
  • Monitor comments via your web site and/or use Disqus for on-baord commenting to make the job easier: site popularity will drive spammers; know this going in.
  • If need be, outsource a portion of your content marketing to help you brand get more lift in the marketplace; this blog post will give you a sense of content marketing costs.

2014-07-04-biggestcontentmarketingchallenge.jpg

  • If consumer facing brand and/or you have sufficient marketing budget make sure  your updating Facebook on a regular basis; this will drive Bing search results which are picked up by Google.
  • Be proactive with Google: makes sure your Google Webmaster Tools account is working with Google analytics and monitor Google’s “read” of your site.
  • Create relevant “intelligent” URLs that have keywords and informative text embedded in the URL string. This helps to drive more traffic by letting a viewer doing a search quickly get a sense for what your page is about.
  • A critical takeaway for savvy SEO Marketing is understanding SEO is just one strategic part of your overall marketing mix and should be integrated with other strategic marketing initiatives: content, ads (don’t forget about re-targeting), social media, email, offline and commenting on other sites.

    2014-07-04-conversionoptimizationvsseo.jpg

    Effective SEO 30K Foot Notes for Smartphone in Hand Execs

    • Don’t obsess about SEO! It’s an important part of your overall marketing strategy but it is not as important today as it was 3-5 years ago.
    • Do an informal or formal SEO audit depending on your marketing staff and/or budget
      • Create great content with embedded keyword phrases. We’ve been using Wordtracker for over ten year. It’s our go to “Swiss army knife” all purpose keyword research service.

    • Share and syndicate your content across the social web. Consumers and other businesses are ignoring search and increasingly relying on content accesses ed via social and/or smartphone apps, search is being bypassed.
    • Three Critical key metrics your brand should be aware of: Search, Social and Mobile.
    • Data is exploding with 10X growth with 44 Gigabytes of information online by 2020 – critical to create great content that helps your brand stand out from the crowd, with associated SEO rankings.
    • All brands today are becoming publishers chasing a digital audience that is increasingly fragmented.

    2014-07-04-ResponsiveDesignboxes.jpg

    Content Marketing Best Practices that Drive SEO Marketing and More

    • Start slow: content marketing is a marathon process that is inherently iterative: you learn as you go.
    • Establish benchmark measurements at the outset: social engagement, revenue, email subscription, eBook download.
    • Keep moving forward: don’t get bogged down in the proverbial trenches.
    • Align content marketing with other strategies.
    • Involve your entire organization whether it’s five or fifty people: great content ideas come in all shapes and sizes: sales, customer service and/or exec staff.
    • Great content marketers “newsjack” and “borrow” from others. Content curation (great research) is critical to success.
    • Mix and match snackable short form (images, under 300 word blog post, videos) with long-form “evergreen” high value content.
    • “Chunk” and repurpose and syndicate content to leverage costs. An image curated and sourced for your web site should be featured on your pinterest board, shared on Twitter and recycled via multiple blog posts.
    • Great images help to make your brand stand out, which is increasingly important with today’s crowded markets.
    • Used an Editorial Calendar (this link will take you to our blog post with an embedded Editorial Calendar sample): it imparts discipline to your ongoing content marketing and can be integrated with a site like Trello to drive collaboration via teams of people.

    2014-07-04-contentlifecycle.jpeg

    SEO marketing is still a critical part of your overall marketing strategy: but, much of the old school strategies are no longer relevant!

    Savvy marketers and brands realize an integrated marketing strategy drives SEO rankings. Your baseline focus has and should be writing and sharing “smart” content that informs and engages your target markets.

    Please know this post is far from a comprehensive overview of any and all critical SEO practices. The intent is to point you in the right direction and help you move away from some of the old school mythology that still seems to permeate SEO marketing.

    One final point: marketing strategy, technology and tactics are evolving like never before, we live in an algorithmic tech immersed world with applications and machines “deciding” what gets shared across the social web.

    Smart marketers and execs have to invest quality time understanding what’s going on in the world around them.

    Four of my absolute favorite Newsletters and Marketing Sites I recommend: Marketing Profs (founded by the stellar Ann Handley), Content Marketing Institute, Chief Martec (great deep “dive” into marketing technology by Scott Brinker), EConsultancy (technical, crisp informative writing with a wonderful European flair).

    Related Posts on Strategic and Tactical Marketing

    “How Content Heroes and Heroines are Made Not Born”

    “What I Learned About Social Media from Andy Warhol”

    “How to Generate More Revenue and Lower Costs with the Cloud”

    “Why Every Marketing Campaign Lives or Dies on this Foundation”

    “Four Critical Marketing Strategies to Stand out in Today’s Noisy World”

    “Why so Many Web Sites are Lipstick on a Pig”

    “How to Win Your Darwinian Digital Battles”

    “The Ten Second Race to Content Nirvana”

    Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-traupel-/why-content-and-social-me_b_5556734.html

    Related Posts