SEO is dead. How many times have you heard this lately? Probably more times than you care to think about; but guess what? The truth is, SEO as we know it is dead. Long live content marketing!
With Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, web-spam got a jab to the face and left hook to the jaw in an effort to improve the quality of search results. SEO is no longer about spinning an article out to as many content farms as possible, or getting as many links as you can afford to buy, or overstuffing your content with keywords. The focus is on producing engaging, informative content. Quality, not quantity.
Content marketing and SEO is a marriage made in marketing heaven. Creating a continuous stream of quality content such as blog posts, white papers, guides, and even visual content like videos and images will feed the hungry search engine beasts helping to keep you on top of search results. But did you know there are tricks you can do with your existing content that can earn you some sweet SEO treats? Here are 7 simple content marketing tricks you can start using right away to get an SEO boost:
1. Update your text content with visual content. Add fun images to your blog posts optimized with alt text. Got videos? Embed a relevant video into a blog post (for an example, check out what we did with one of our webinar announcements after the webinar occurred). Embed slides from a presentation into a post or the body of related sales copy. This will not only enhance your text content, but give search engines additional content from your website to index which means more possible traffic!
2. Re-imagine your existing content into new formats. How many different ways can you combine the ingredients of one recipe to make something completely different? Look at your blog posts, white papers, or even your sales brochures (online and printed) and think about ways you can repurpose that content into different forms such as an EBook, infographic, or video.
3. Break long-form content into fun-size pieces. We live in a mobile world, where we take our content to go. Make it easy to digest by breaking longer content into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Create a series of videos from a single, hour-long webinar; or post partial chapters of your latest EBook in a series of blog posts.
4. Curate content into “best-of” pieces to attract links. You’ve seen those posts listing the “best of” something, right? These are easy to put together, and can attract links if your list is particularly useful, or even from those websites you’re linking to. Try an end-of-week post with all the best stories of the week in your industry or topic-area, or put together one big, comprehensive list of tools, resources or people.
5. Create optimized landing pages for each of your content downloads. Are any of your content assets downloadable (i.e. white papers, checklists, infographics, etc.)? Make sure each of those assets has its own keyword-optimized landing page so they too can be indexed and found easily in search engines.
6. Publish your content on other platforms. Different content will work well on different platforms. For instance, images get 20 times more interactivity on Facebook than plain ol’ text posts. Content doesn’t have to be long-form or time-intensive to create, nor does it have to live on your blog or website. Experiment with posting images (such as memes or your own photos) just on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Google+ to get your fans and followers engaged and yes, it IS indexable (bonus)!
7. Get back on the Google+ bandwagon. Many people are convinced Google+ is a ghost town and isn’t worth the time. But Google+ has several SEO benefits that make it worth reconsideration. One benefit is that +1s on your Google+ posts influence search results, since they’re like endorsements from your network and a social signal that will raise your ranking on Google when searchers are logged in on Google.
Author: Kari Rippetoe
Courtesy of www.blog.search-mojo.com