Blogging

Yesterday, Junta 42 announced their latest list of top content marketing focused blogs (Online Marketing Blog came in at #2 in between Copyblogger and PR 2.0) and it reminded me yet again of how important content is for SEO. It used to be when discussing search engine optimization services 5-6 years ago, we’d focus on keyword optimization of content and getting links as independent tactics. Today, it’s a different story.

Of course many of the basics of SEO still apply, such as keyword research, on-page optimization of existing content and solving crawling issues. But attracting links and creating new content are no longer separate tasks. They’re interdependent.

The success formula for content centered link building is simple:

• Establish distribution channels such as blog/RSS, email list, social networks, social content
• Plan content creation with the audience and keywords in mind
• Promote the content socially, via email, RSS or other outbound methods
• Watch the links roll in

It’s also important to monitor interactions with the content being promoted in order to secure additional links either through commenting on blogs or participating in discussions that have been instigated by what you’re promoting.

There’s a lyric from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” that reminds me of the interplay between content and link building. “If you don’t create useful content, you won’t attract any links. How can you attract links if you don’t have content worth linking to?”.

Take the desire for higher search engine rankings and traffic out of the picture and it still makes sense to focus on content that’s good enough to share and to inspire others to link to. Whether you drive traffic to the site from offline marketing programs, paid search advertising or social media promotions, you still have to “deliver the goods” once visitors get to the web site.

At the same time a site is evaluated or “scored” for search engine readiness, the opportunity to create a content promotion program tied into the marketing plan is what gives a web site a competitive advantage for both promotion and link building. Planning, creating and promoting content of particular use and interest to a target audience is a far cry from sprinkling keywords on web pages and submitting to directories.

Companies venturing into the SEO world are in fact, venturing into the content marketing world. It’s the reality of how both search engines and consumers will best respond to web site marketing efforts. Great content is an essential part of effective link building and even more so if you have content distribution channels established.

In other words, creating useful content should be followed by promoting that content to facilitate distribution and awareness. Publishers (MSM, blogs, web site owners, etc) aren’t going to link to content they don’t know about. Seems pretty logical but many online marketers seem to be stuck like a record on “create great content and links will come naturally”. Good luck with that in any competitive category.

Focusing on a success formula that ties new content creation with the advertising/PR/communications that are part of a normal company marketing plan into SEO, social marketing and content distribution channels is a link building win all around: consumers, search engines and the company.

Sponsored By: Learn SEM Secrets - SMX Advanced Seattle, June 3-4, 2008

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Tips on Content Centered Link Building

Right along with Facebook, YouTube and blogging, Twitter is one of the most often written about social media communication tools. (Follow me @leeodden) We’ve run polls about how people use Twitter as well as aggregated tips from the Twitter community on how to get the most productivity out of it. This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.

TweetWheel - You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.

The account I searched on has around 1,400 followers and it looks like Tweet Wheel limits the display to 100 or so. There’s only so much room on the screen.

Who Should i Follow? - Whether you’re new on Twitter or an early adopter, there are likely people you should be following, but aren’t. Which begs the question, “Who should I follow?”. That’s where the tool, whoshouldifollow.com comes in. It looks at who’s following you that you’re not following back and has sliders for filtering by popularity and physical location.

One thing you could do here is find out really popular Twitterers that your competition is NOT following and follow them. This may provide an opportunity to connect with their sphere of influence while they’re not looking.

Twerpscan - Now that you’ve beefed up your list of people to follow, who shouldn’t be following you? If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hopes those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.

The thing about this tool is that you have to login, so you may want to change your password to something temporary before running the tool and then change it back when you’re done. Twerpscan checks the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between them offering each follower’s name, bio, last tweet, a reputation thumbs up or down, followers, following and a link to block the follower if the ratio is over the threshold you set.

Summize - While other tools for searching Twitter have been around a while, they’re often not stable or consistent. Summize is FAST and shows trending topics plus different language searches.

There are also some nifty search operators like the one that helps you look for Tweets where people say “cool” but only Tweets that include links. Of course, there is an RSS feed for any search results page as well.

Twitt(url)y - Where do we find out about many of these tools and news before the rest of the Twittersphere? Friendfeed is first but after that, Twitt(url)y does a nice job of providing a Techmeme style representation of up and coming URLs that are mentioned in individual Tweets.

You can filter out Tweets by language and what’s neat is that the links are kept accurate whether Tweets use a URL shortening service or not by actually visiting each link. Twitt(url)y is a useful site as an early warning on news and trends.

That’s our five tools and here’s a bonus time waster if you haven’t seen it already.

Feeling like a Tweeping Tom? Then check out Twistori:

It’s probably good you can’t see the identity of who is writing because, well, that’s sort of obvious.

The challenge and opportunity with social tools like Twitter is that it can be very easy to fall into wasting a lot of time. But if you can find the right mix of 3rd party tools, Twitter can be a very productive and social tool.

Find some of the top Twitterati at Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop page for Twitter.

Sponsored By: Start a Career in Search Marketing Announcing the best online SEM courses from SEMPO Institute.

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Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know