From SEO to Content Marketing
Search Engine Optimization has changed a lot over the last few years. In the old days, SEO was a 100% technical game. You had to worry about understanding and implementing no less than all of the following: On-page sculpting, Meta titles -descriptions, keywords; Backlink building, SEO programming, Competitor audits, SEO architecture now made easy by SEO services St. Paul, breadcrumb trails and Creating content for the sake of content. And then to make matters more complicated, there was the gamesmanship that you often had to participate in – things like article spinning, article posting, video blasting and content blasting. As we move from the past into the future, some of this is still valid – when executed correctly, and some of this is not.
The Transition Into Modern SEO and Content Marketing
We are rapidly moving away from a technical game to a high quality content game where the quality of your content is judged with a higher bar. In just the last few years, we’ve seen a number of updates from Google, each one created to serve up higher quality results for users of their search engine. Google Panda focused on user experience. No longer was “light content” or article spinning allowed. There were some high profile victims of this update who were knocked down significantly in their search traffic, including: JC Penney, Overstock.com, EZineArticles.com, and EHow.com. The takeaway: Your content should be of high quality and relevance in order to be ranked. Google Penguin focused on back link spamming and overaggressive back linking.
There used to be a time, not too long ago, where services would setup backlinks all over the Internet, for the purposes of making your content look more relevant than it actually was. It was quite easy for a period of time to simply game the system by flooding the Internet with low quality backlinks. No more. This same activity, which was very easy, and very abused, now often gets people BANNED from Google. They become invisible to the folks who are searching for them. The takeaway: Avoid article blasting and content blasting.
Avoid having too many “money keywords” in the back link profile, it looks spammy. It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are – during a recent Penguin update the Salvation Army saw a drop of 31% in their organic search traffic. Google Hummingbird, instead of penalizing sites for things that Google felt was unsavory, introduced some improvements.
The biggest one is the advanced “Knowledge Graph”, as well as searches starting to show results with very helpful, informative SERPS. Rather than keyword search, Hummingbird was an advancement in “semantic search” – using language much closer to “human language”, and creating an experience where it almost seems as if Google is “reading your mind”.
In addition to Google Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates, Google has been embracing more and more of what used to be called “user generated content”, and what we now call social media. As such, there is a ranking component to how your content is shared and commented on in web properties such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and whatever is coming next.
As we move from SEO to Content Marketing – earned visibility – through creating quality content from a quality writer creates writer authority and content authority. It’s a big circle. Ultimately, doing all of this correctly, and continuously, earns you increased visibility. Don’t get caught in this mess, SEO Minneapolis has all you need to avoid google bans and stay in the regulation zone.
Now that you can see where the trend is headed, the question becomes, “what is working now?”
