Content Marketing in Modern SEO

In today’s SEO strategies content marketing holds an undisputed king position followed by relevant social signals. Long gone are times when people could just slap some low quality content on their blogs, over-stuff it with keywords, buy a few thousands of keyword-optimized cheap paid incoming links from questionable sites and enjoy first page rankings due courtesy of Google and other search engines.

Short Summary of

the Linking Strategy in SEO

Since then the link factor has been transformed through thousands of permutations and evolved into socially-oriented and authority-dominated search parameter. In fact, it’s a whole series of different parameters.

However, if you’re not a SEO expert, you can use the below sentence as a simplified recipe for the entire linking component of the search algorithms: “share your content though social networks, preferably through social influencers, find the way to get keyword-rich links from authority sites, and tastefully cross-link the content on your own site or blog, but don’t overdo it”.

The Problem of Frequent Content Updates

The recipe takes care of the linking component. Yet, as mentioned earlier, linking is now secondary to high quality content. And it’s strongly preferable that this content is updated frequently. Otherwise it’ll be difficult to rank high, especially for competitive keywords.

And here lies a problem.

First, you might not be a good writer. Second, you might not be an expert on the topics covered on your website (after all, smart marketers identify money making opportunities but they are not necessarily subject experts in the targeted niche markets). And third, you might not have enough time for frequent updates.
Sure, you can hire article writers or find guest writers or purchase PLR content and publish it with minor revisions. All those solutions have pros and cons.

If you ran dozens of blogs in different niches, it’s hard to find a writer who will be proficient even in a few topics. Writer who is good in reviewing apps and mobile marketing might know nothing about fashion, for example. So you have to hire a lot of different writers.

Guest writers are a great content source, but not very reliable – you don’t know when an expert would decide to write for you and when you’ll have a blank spot in the publishing schedule.

And PLR content… Well, it’s not unique. And if the majority of your site will consist of the duplicate content, you will be penalized by search engines.

The Difference Between Duplicate Content and Curated Content

However, let’s not confuse duplicate content with curated content. While search engines frown upon duplicate content, they love curated content. So what is the difference between the two types of content?

When you curate content, you take different pieces of highly relevant content from different authority sources and you put them together in one readable and informative piece.

If you take time to research the content and combine 5-6 pieces of information from different sources in easy-to read and logical order, there is a good chance that the resulted piece of content will be considered original.

Of course to increase the probability even further you should add your thoughts about the pieces you curate at the beginning, end and possibly somewhere in the middle of the article. Make it media-rich, add images and videos, and you’ll truly create a unique content.

So content curation is a possible answer to the frequent content update request from search engines. It takes less time to creating a content curated post than writing your own article yet it provides value to your readers and is welcomed by search engines.
The only problem is you have to go through different sources, analyze the material, try to find relevant videos and images… Though less time-consuming than writing your own content, it’s still a rather long process.

The Excellent Solution for Content Marketing

Though there are many content curation and video publishing plugins that can help you to speed up the process of publishing and turn it into an easily accomplished daily routine (instead of agonizing necessity to come up with your own content on a regular basis), they all fell short in one way or another.

Content sources are usually limited to Google news and Google Blog Search. For video curation you often have to buy a separate software or plugin. More often than not your license is limited to one site and for a multi-site license you’ll be charged arm and leg… And usually you have to pay a monthly or yearly fee for using the software…

I feel your pain. Here is a great news. Today the Ultimate Content Curation Solution was released. It’s not new, it’s been around for over a year now, and it’s been utilized by 6500+ members to discover, review, and publish curated content.

It’s called CurationSoft 2.0 and it curates content from multiple sources:

-  Google Blog Search (popular blogs)
-  Blekko Blog Search
-  Blekko News
-  Twitter (status updates)
-  YouTube (video)
-  Google News (mainstream news)
-  Flickr (images)
-  Wikipedia (wiki content)

and it also helps with link building from authority sources…

However, it’s never been available at such a low price (50% discount for 7 days) and probably will never be again. Plus, they usually charge users a yearly fee (as everybody else in the content curation industry). The yearly fee is dropped for 7 days. So you can get this software free and clear and use it forever. The team behind this Content Marketing and Curation Software is really good with updates too.

Go grab it now and then post your thank you comments below.

Google made a lot of mistakes while launching its previous social networks- Google Wave and Google Buzz. Google Wave was not easy to use and Google Buzz… well, suffice to say that it’s not really buzzing.

Google tried to quickly grow Google Buzz by automatically enrolling everyone who has gmail account into this program. It backfired. People don’t want to be included in any group without giving prior consent. Just look at Facebook Groups. It’s one of the least popular features on Facebook so far.

As a result, there were a lot of negative reactions throughout blogosphere and social space about privacy invasion, the freedom of choice, etc. And though Google tried to rectify the situation, damage was already done. Some mistakes you could recover from, others are fatal. It looks like for Google Buzz quick non-volunteer enrollment was the latter.

It’s safe to say that Google learned its lessons. Its newest social network, Google+ is on a roll. There are many reasons why it’s growing so fast.
But in my opinion the most important are:

• Exclusivity
• Influence on SERPs rankings
• Google Circles

Let’s take a closer look at each factor that helped to skyrocket Google+ growth.

Google+ Exclusivity
Learning from Google Buzz mistake, when launching Google + Google decided to go an opposite direction –instead of inviting everyone, give this newest social network a sense of exclusivity, make sure people want to join.

You can become the member of Google+ only through private invitation. In other words, one of your friends should already be a part of this network, and should send you an invitation, otherwise you can’t get in. (Yes, sure, you can go to Google+ and ask for the invitation directly, but I am not sure how long will it take to actually receive this invitation. My guess is you would have to wait at least several months).

I applaud to whoever came up with this brilliant social media strategy, my hat is off to bright Google minds.
People were fighting to get an invitation, Google+ was featured everywhere, in every even slightly important blog or social network.

Not surprisingly, Google + grew to 20 million members in a record time.

Google+ Influences Google SERPs results
Though Google introduced its equivalent of Facebook “like” button (which is called “+1” button) a while ago it was not really that popular. Then Google made it abundantly clear that the number of “+1” you get for your posts actually affects your Google rankings. Google provided a channel to harvest those “+1” from your social buddies. Do you want to guess what is this channel called? Good guess. Yes, it’s a Google+.

The more posts (your own and from people you respect) you share and “+1”, the better would be your rankings on Google SERPs. There is only one little problem (or actually, it is a big one).

You have to manually go to Google+ in order to share your posts or the posts of your friends. There is no way to post from some other social network and get it automatically distributed to Google+ (or at least I haven’t found one). I don’t see any option to embed custom RSS feeds in the Google + either, hence no luck with distributing content directly from your blogs through RSS.

In comparison, I can post to blogs and get the content automatically distributed to Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other social networks in a matter of seconds but Google+ demands a lot of extra time. And if you jump to Google+, you probably won’t have as much time to stay on Facebook either.

I seriously doubt that inability to embed custom RSS feeds in G+ sream is just Google’s oversight. More likely it’s a crucial part of Google strategy to get most tech-savvy social networkers from Facebook into G+. Which brings us to the last significant element of initial success for Google+:

Google Circles
Google recognized that Facebook’s friends structure is very rigid. Yes, you can add them to lists but this doesn’t give you the ability to effectively sort your social friends. In Google Circles, you can easily sort people based on any criteria – you can put friends in one circle, family members in another one, and your social friends in a third one. You can then be as granular as you want sorting those friends by their interests. And you can add them to more than 1 circle. For example, your social friend could also be your client – then place him in both circles.

And when sharing a post or image, you now can share it not with a whole group of your social friends, but with ones that you know for sure are interested in this topic. So you can send message to a very refined group who will be glad to receive it. Of course the ability to provide video conferences between the members of the circle doesn’t hurt either.
So do you choose Google+ and the ability to influence Google rankings through increased “+1” or Facebook, its 700 million members and the ability of mass-distribution through other social networks?

The decision is yours but obviously it will depend on your audience and your goals.
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Opening image from pvantees on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.