Intermediate/ Digest...

Now the conversation is shifting to long form content. Business Insider used 21,000 words on an in-depth profile of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.  Huffington Post has won a Pulitzer prize and even BuzzFeed has added political coverage.

There are some obvious and proven SEO benefits of long form content.

[The author’s] guidance would be that all content production should invest some percentage of time and effort in long form content. The percentage should be big enough that you can generate enough pieces to gain some real insights into what works and also to move the needle on SEO.

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Think you’ve tried every search engine optimization tool in the book? Think again. Press releases are an easy, inexpensive way to boost your SEO, especially when used in conjunction with other marketing tools.

Condensed...

Think you’ve tried every search engine optimization tool in the book? Think again. I’m willing to bet there’s one you haven’t included in your overall marketing mix. Press releases.

- A press release isn’t only a way to announce information — it’s also a great little ball of SEO, for many reasons:

- You can include keywords that people are searching to find your website.

- You can hyperlink to specific pages on your site in the release.

- You can publish each press release on dozens of quality websites. Google likes this, and will move you up in search results accordingly.

1. Start with a piece of solid news, like the award your company recently won, the major contract you’ve just secured, or a great new piece of content you want to promote.

2. Find a press release template so you know what goes where. Some websites won’t post your press release unless it’s correctly formatted, so stick to the template.

3. Incorporate keywords (more on that in the next section).

4. Find an image to enhance the visual appeal. This could simply be your company logo.

5. Finally, plug in your info and distribute online.

Brands recognize content marketing is key for web success and find it's effective for driving leads from social networks to company websites.

Key excerpt...

Content marketing is reaching the tipping point where approximately half of brands have now created a formal content strategy, according to IMN‘s 2013 Content Marketing Survey. This marks an impressive buy-in leap since 2012, when only 28 percent had established an explicit plan for their branded content. Publishing collateral to company web pages provides SEO value, but marketers see social media as the most effective channel for distribution.

More than half of respondents (51 percent) list social networks as the content marketing vehicle that fuels the strongest results. Websites were close behind (44 percent), followed by newsletters (42 percent) and email blasts (42 percent).

By reposting off-site publications on your website using either of those three methods, you are able to repurpose awesome articles and put your content in front of more readers without worrying about a duplicate content penalty from Google.

Condensed...

Want to get more out of the amazing content you publish online? Of course you do! Writing guest blogs takes a lot of time to research the topic, write engaging content, provide images, and pitch to quality websites. My SEO team and I utilize a few different methods to repurpose our content creation efforts by reposting our external publications on our own blog.

Normally, posting duplicate content on your website is a bad idea. However, the following three strategies address the duplicate content issues and enhance your website’s user experience, RSS feeds, and email marketing.

3 Strategies for Reposting on Your Website

Method 1: Reference with a summary

Method 2: rel=canonical

Method 3: 301 redirect

Marketers can increase their content writing's viral potential by including certain verbs, perspectives and details in their headlines.

Summarized...

According to a recent Startup Moon study, after reading through more than 100 blogs and reviewing content analytics data, [it was] determined a number of common traits found in widely shared blog content headlines.

1. Powerful (and dark) verbs

Surprisingly, websites’ most successful news content often feature somewhat morbid headlines that use words like ‘kill,’ ‘fear,’ ‘dark,’ ‘war’ and ‘bleeding.’ For instance, the title “Big data is dead. What’s next?” was the most shared post in VentureBeat’s Data/Cloud section, the study found.

2. Say what’s missing

Online content is more likely to go viral when titles use words such as “not” and “without,” the study revealed. The top shared post on GigaOm’s Cloud page was called “Cloud adoption: it’s not about the price, stupid.” Therefore, marketers are advised to position stories about what’s not happening – rather than what is – when appropriate.

3. Specificity

Online articles might have more viral potential when they use powerful language, but marketers shouldn’t include buzzworthy terms at the risk of losing accuracy. Headlines are shared more often when they include specific qualifiers, like the number of examples coming. According to Startup Moon’s analysis – titles with higher numbers perform even better, so marketers shouldn’t be afraid to go all out with their lists.

Key excerpts...

I'll start this post off with my point: Dismissing search is ignoring demand from buyers & the media.

I understand the value of creating great content relevant to the context of a particular buying experience. But how can you “look good” if no one involved in the buying cycle (or the media for that matter) can find you?

The article did have some good advice on building thought leadership for niche B2B markets, but why invest in thought leadership content and then dismiss making that content easy to find?

Condensed...

When looking for help with content marketing and content creation, there’s a difference between what one gets from a SEO agency and a content marketing agency. That difference is not so much about one being better than the other, but more about sizing up which is most appropriate for your situation.

SEO is accountable to metrics like search visibility, organic search traffic and any measurable actions that lead to and result in conversions. The more content that can serve as a “hook in the water” of search results, the more the SEO can show an impact on the investment.

SEO anticipates demand through an understanding of keyword popularity and content marketing creates demand driven by producing content based on the customer journey. Optimization is an effort to improve search visibility of existing content and digital assets as well as the creation of new content according to a target list of keywords.

Content Marketing is an approach that emphasizes the thoughtful creation of content for a particular audience designed to influence an action or outcome. Rather than keyword popularity driving content creation, an effort is made to understand the customer buying journey and to architect a content plan that provides the right kind of information and experiences along the buying cycle.

Summarized...

Here are a few tips for optimizing your presence on top social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

1. Create a vanity URL
2. Take advantage of the "about" section
3. Include geotargeted keywords
4. Craft content that gets shared
5. Regularly post new content

What is content marketing? It's whatever you make of it, but new studies remind marketers to keep content for SEO in mind to increase visibility.

Excerpt...

The BusinessBolts.com 2013 SEO study examined backlinks, content metrics and social signals to understand the trends behind search engine ranking systems. The source evaluated more than 100 random key phrases, and put together a sample of approximately 500 web pages. BusinessBolts.com also looked at on-site factors like full URL, title tag, headline, body copy word count, images, video content and subhead characteristics in published articles. Some key findings are listed below:

• Backlinks increased five times per position in Google SERPs.
• High-ranking pages had body copy that averaged 900 words.
• Only one out of every 10 pages included video content.
• The most prominent web pages used few keywords.
• Internal web pages comprised the top ranked listings in SERPs.
• BusinessBolts.com noted a correlation between social signals and pages with the highest visibility in search results.

Successful content marketing campaigns are built through experience. It is unreasonable to expect to be “hitting the home run” the first time a program is executed but the focus on quality over quantity cannot be understated.

Summary...

1. A Method for Aggregating Information

In the midst of a sea of information, B2B search engine marketers need to streamline their focus in order to capture the best resources possible. And it is not just setting up a series of “subscriptions” (email lists, social media lists, etc) but immersingyourself in the information, in order to establish patterns of success.

2. The Ability to Perform SEO / Content Marketing Competitive Research

B2B SEOs need to understand the competitive landscape, from a content marketing and search perspective. The usual suspects related to SEO are important.

A lot of competitive data can be realized simply through manual site auditing and review. For search engine marketers with a greater financial budget for commercial software, Searchmetrics and SEOmoz (Open Site Explorer and FollowerWonk in particular) are good tools for evaluating competition.

Screaming Frog is a good application for crawling competitive domains for to review overall website structure. Spyfu is a lower cost alternative for keyword-specific competitive data and Compete and/or Quantcast can also be effective for free traffic estimates and demographic overviews as well.

3. A Repository for Developing Content Marketing Ideas

Note taking and content curation play an important role in building out the content development process. If you can get in the habit of keeping a repository of ideas as they come to mind, it becomes easier to generate the content needed when deadlines arise. B2B search engine marketers need ways to organize ideas and keep track of information, in order to maintain the build out process.

4. A Link / Social Media Prospecting & Management Solution

The question is how does the B2B search engine marketer organize the process and keep track of contact details and the communication activity?

• RavenTools CRM and Link Manager tools and Buzzstream offer easy to use methods for aggregating contact information and connecting the success rates in link acquisition in particular.
• Traditional CRM solutions like HighRise or Google Contacts could be considered. The challenge in these types of options is the lack of direct connectivity to link outreach and social media activity however.

5. A Method for Evaluating Performance

It seems obvious but often times B2B marketers don’t have clearly defined benchmarks and goals for evaluating the performance of their content marketing campaigns. Even if benchmarks have to be established over time, a starting point should be agreed upon, recognizing criteria might change as a result of further analysis.

Excerpt...

The SEO world continues to shift its collective focus to all things content: content strategy, content generation, content marketing, etc.  It should come as no surprise that this seismic shift in content attitude among marketers is in lock step with Google’s aggressive crusade (verging on Draconian) to purge the SERPs of low value rank spam, and bubble up content of value.

If you really want to dominate your niche and distance yourself from your competitors, you have to take the wheel of the “awesome content” bus, be a leader and set precedent for your industry. And by implementing the following 27 tactics (which range from keyword targeting to link analysis to content usability tips), you will dramatically improve the value of your content for readers, users, customers and engines as well and absolutely own your vertical.

Another excerpt from the BusinessBolts report (see the earlier scoop/post) that points to the SEO benefit derived from a continuous content marketing strategy...

According to a survey from BusinessBolts.com, 74% of small businesses are using content marketing to grow and promote their business. The majority of small businesses are reportedly attempting to develop content that will boost SEO and social media initiatives without any additional advertising costs. The survey revealed that marketers have seen significant benefits through content creation, even with minimal effort; 45% of survey respondents also claimed using content marketing has helped lower advertising expenditures. Small businesses reported that the most widely used forms of content marketing include articles (74%), blog posts (64%), and social media (49%). Content creation formats like articles and blogs engage potential prospects and drive traffic without a high expense, reported BusinessBolts.com.

This deck covers the basics, and although long, you can click through quickly. Nice job here presenting content marketing's impact on SEO.

Summary of the 5 trends...

1. Quality Content Rules: Clients are shifting not only to higher-end writers, but to subject matter experts. In 2013, demand will increase not just for good writers, but for good writers who know their stuff, to increase in 2013.

2. Content Needs a Voice, Personality, or Branding: Panda’s push for meatier content has led to many players covering the same low-hanging fruit. Add in Google’s preference for big brands, and companies face the challenge of separating themselves from similar vendors. Marketers face the challenge of separating themselves from competitors not by price but by brand or personality.

3. Longer, More In-Depth Articles: The easy stuff has already been done, often to death. Longer articles tend to get more interaction according to SEOmoz, which helps with link building efforts.

4. Social Media Grows in a Link Building Role (Especially With Bing): The multiplicity of platforms means adapting or prefacing content for each social media platform. While this doesn’t necessarily fall in an SEO’s traditional bailiwick, agencies can help their customers out by preparing social-ready content.

5. More Multimedia: Recent studies have shown that photos boost post interaction. Videos have a similar but smaller effect.