The post-panda Internet has left many website owners desperate to regain former rankings. The main directive of the new algorithm was to force websites to produce higher quality, relevant content on their websites if they hoped to remain competitive and to keep or increase their SERP rankings.
With the advent of social media en masse, Google (and the web in general) began using the public sharing of a website’s content across social networks as a predominant search engine ranking factor.
While this was a wonderful idea from a user perspective as it forced sites to produce better quality content for their visitors, many content developers found that their rankings were still suffering due to an apparent inability to generate interest in the wonderful content they were developing.
"Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases."
Often we produce what we feel is great content only to find our efforts falling upon deaf ears. In most cases it is not the content that fails but is more often the result of what we do (or do not do) once the content has been created. Great ideas do not simply propagate themselves into the collective consciousness of the public. Viral web content is the reward of a well devised promotion and a carefully planned implementation strategy. The deployment of your content marketing strategy is crucial to its success.
Most of us rate how "great" content is by the number of page visits, tweets, or likes that the post receives; but what makes good content and more importantly, what can you do to ensure that it is distributed by as many visitors as possible?
Credibility
The best content comes from writing about topics that you know about. Those subjects that you have intimate knowledge about or are derived from your own experiences will always make for more credible content and will be considered higher quality content from a reader’s perspective.
Good content takes time and effort to develop. Great works (in any media) rarely come on a whim or spontaneous inspiration. If you have taken the time to prepare your piece by researching the subject and can offer something that is new, fresh or can communicate it in an especially novel or exciting fashion, it is much more likely to be shared by your readers. If you are particularly passionate or verbose in your delivery, your content becomes an effective vehicle for instilling confidence in the readers mind and generates credibility thereby allowing you to be considered a "specialist" in your area of expertise.
Actionably
Effective content should illicit an emotional response, or create a call to action for the reader. Try to make your content actionable. Leave your readers with the sense they have gained wisdom from your piece and give them something they can take away from it. Content will be shared more readily if it speaks to your readers directly in a more actionable way. A particularity well written piece of content will almost share itself. If you can be proud of the content you have developed and are excited to share it with others, chances are that your readers will want to share it as well.
Marketing
Once you have taken the time to do your research and have composed a wonderful piece of content, how do you get others to read it and share it? While great content is more likely to be shared virally, it is utterly useless without the uses of proper exploitation and a comprehensive marketing strategy.
The first distribution base for your content can be to the friends, coworkers and acquaintances in your email contacts. Remember that it is probably okay to ask your close contacts if they would mind redistributing your content as well. Customer newsletters are still a viable option to use if you have one in place.
"Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty."
Effective syndication relies on your company having a strong social media presence. Reach out to your online community, through your social media profiles that you have setup. While there are a myriad of social networks you can share your content with, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most popular and are the best places to start syndicating your content. Don’t neglect other niche market social networks that may be closely geared towards your industry as well.
Delivery
Timing is everything. You will need to ensure that your content is not being syndicated at ineffective times. Plan to release your content on a Monday morning rather than on a Friday afternoon or on the weekend. Statistics show that most people check their social accounts at the beginning of the work day and after lunch. A 9-5 Monday through Thursday deployment strategy will typically be more effective, with Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays being the most effective days. Remember that it is okay to tweet your content in the morning and again in the afternoon. However, over-using this tactic can quickly annoy your followers.
Plan your content publishing as you would plan a product launch. If it is a particularly large story or news item, you can pre-announce its coming as well. This is an effective way to build consumer anticipation. Consider using a press release with a noteworthy online content syndication service such as PRWeb for your press releases.
Promotion
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons marketing content fails to attract views is due to the lack of follow-through and ongoing promotion of the piece. You need to continue with the promotion of your content long after it has been initially syndicated. Develop a promotion plan that includes reminding people of your content via your social networks and actively work to build links to your content on relevant sites through press releases, your website, guest blogging, online advertising or online radio shows. Any medium where you can gain exposure to your content will be beneficial in securing views.
Any online content takes time to develop traction and get noticed. The Internet has caused most of us to believe success happens overnight. Careful planning and implementation over the course of a well planned promotion, will always yield better returns.
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 11:48 am
Today Google announced they are ready to let users claim pages on the G+ domain. It’s a bit busy over here: Create a Google + Page
The servers over at Google+ must feel a bit like this?
… but you may want to bother with the line however because this is where you claim your name, brand, trademark, for Google+ pages.
Since I’m waiting in said line-up, I can’t demo the experience and relay first hand info, but I can share what I do know:
- Pages are ‘private’ right now.
- Only the creator has access, so for a company, use the company account
- Access on company pages for other users is coming
- Expect page invites to be a bit excessive on larger profiles to start with
Oh joy my page is waiting for me to setup! Are you folks still reading this? Go!
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:55 am
It’s nice to do good things for good people and who could possibly be better than our valued blog readers? 
Today is the last day of October and we have a surplus of pre-paid press releases via PR Web to use up and it has to be today. This places me in the wonderful situation of giving away press releases to you … and I’m not even going to do a “so we can give it to you at a discounted rate” kinda thing. Nope, I’m giving them away free. What’s the hitch? There is none other than the fact that come 5PM today I’m going to read through any submissions I get and pick the ones I like best to go out.
Because it’s free I’m not going to be able to followup with stats, etc. but better to use them than to not and hopefully karma will play it’s part and if not … well, I get to have that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that our visitors get another benefit from reading our daily blog.
If you have a pre-written release (has to be new and yes we’ll be checking) just send it to freerelease@beanstalk-inc.com. You’re welcome to include details as to why we should pick yours but the main thing will be the quality of the release itself. And as per our general “rules” don’t bother sending them over if they’re in the areas of casinos, adult or if you’re another SEO firm. This isn’t any type of judgement, we just don’t work in these areas and don’t work for our competition.
And to all a very happy and safe Halloween.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 10:54 am
I came across a great post today from JR Cooper on the SEOMoz site in which he was discussing how to use backlink checkers to find broken links and how to use these to obtain new links. First off he recommended a great new Chrome extension called "Check My Links."
I have just installed the extension myself so I cannot comment directly on it. But the great things JR Cooper reports about it sound very compelling.
"Pretty much, it’s the greatest link building browser extension I’ve ever used. First of all, it’s extremely fast. Like almost too fast. It usually checks half the page in under 10 seconds. It also finds the links that are quickest to check, saving the links with long load times for last (I still don’t know how they do this). Best of all, I can check multiple pages at once, which saves some serious time because I usually find 50 pages at a time to check. As a bonus, it even tells you what kind of page error the broken link got (i.e. 404, 500, etc.)."
The description from the Chrome Web Store:
"Check My Links" is an extension developed primarily for web designers, developers and content editors (and SEOs).>When you’re editing a web page that has lots of links, wouldn’t it be handy to be able to quickly check that all the links on the page are working ok? That’s where &Check My Links" comes in. "Check My Links" quickly finds all the links on a web page, and checks each one for you. It highlights which ones are valid and which ones are broken, simple as that. HTTP response codes and full URLs of broken links are published in the Console log.
As most of us in the SEO industry are finding, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build links to your client’s websites. Tactics that were once widely utilized are no completely ineffective. At the risk of repeating myself again and again; the Panda algorithm has effectively changed everything about how links are obtained. For instance, subsequent updates have rendered posting to forums virtually ineffective for these purposes.
Cooper goes on to detail how this extension can be used for dead link building. The first tactic he describes is Direct Find and Replace. This is where you generate a list of broken links from blogrolls and link pages. You then contact the webmasters of the sites and ask to replace one of the dead links with a link back to your site.
The next method he describes is Content Replacement. He suggests looking at the actual pages that are broken and using the Internet Archive’s "Way Back Machine" to find the original content that was being linked to and then to recreate the content on your own site. You can then contact the webmaster to update their links to the new (and improved) content. Subsequently, you can then use free tools such as Open Site Explorer or Yahoo Site Explorer to discover other sites that were linking to the original content as well and ask if they would like to link to the new and improved content as well.
The last technique he describes is Broken Blogger Blogs where you use the tools to find broken links on blogrolls that point to subdomains on blogspot.com and then looking to see if he can register the blog himself. If so, then he puts up a static page with a desired keyword linking back to the new blog location. Not only does this give you the anchor text of your choice, but it gives a link with a higher amount of link juice (depending on how many outbound links are pointing to that page). He does state that this is a fairly "greyhat" tactic and has requested reader feedback on the ethics of such a tactic.
To recap; the Panda updates are forcing all users to generate better content. It is a bold effort by Google to reduce the amounts of web-spam that have inundated the SERPs for far too long. As an end-user you should love Google for their efforts; as an SEO it means that the whole game has changed and that we have to continue to evolve with the changes to remain effective in our industry.
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 11:53 am
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Bart sprang back a fair bit, had to zoom to see the wilt!
Bart’s beans are sprouting!
Yesterday, over on the Google Inside Search blog, Matt Cutts shared 10 recent changes to the Google search algorithms from the last few weeks. 
