The Intersection of SEO and Content Marketing

Although the recent Penguin update wasn’t quite the “game changer” that many SEOs believed it would be, the fact that the entire digital marketing community believed that major changes were on the way is proof enough that old school SEO is out for good.

And if we can’t rely on traditional link building techniques or on-page optimization tactics to secure high search engine rankings any longer, where can we turn to improve natural search performance?
In fact, the answer to this SEO question might come from a separate promotional strategy that’s been receiving plenty of attention in the online marketing world.  That solution is content marketing.

Content marketing is an inbound marketing tactic that relies on producing and distributing high value content in order to bring about a number of different results.  As an example, content marketing is an extremely powerful brand recognition building tool.  At the same time, it’s a great way to drive website traffic through the dissemination of content pieces on popular social websites.

However, it’s also important to note that – when done well – content marketing can play a role in proper website SEO.  The following are just a few of the different ways that SEO and content marketing intersect:

Keyword-optimized blog posts

Blog posts represent the cornerstone of any good content marketing strategy.  While the never garner the social numbers or shares that “flashier” content pieces – like infographics or video clips – can obtain, they tend to be viewed more consistently by your regular website visitors.

Of course, when it comes to both SEO and content marketing, there’s a big difference between good blog posts and bad blog posts!

Good blog posts tend to have all of the following attributes in common:

• They’re meaty, consisting of 1,000 words a piece or more
• They’re authoritative, providing information that hasn’t been rehashed again and again online
• They’re published regularly, giving repeat visitors new content to engage with
• They’re engaging, relying on well-known post formats to attract attention

Writing these types of posts alone is enough to improve your site’s SEO, as the search engines have placed (or at least, claim to have placed) a priority on high quality, unique content that provides valuable information to website visitors.  Even if their algorithms aren’t yet sophisticated enough to put the best content at the top of the SERPs 100% of the time, you can bet that day is coming.

But beyond this SEO benefit, you can take things a step further by optimizing all or some of the blog posts you publish to an individual keyword you’re targeting.  Use the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress sites to ensure that your keyword is placed in all of the following areas:

• Your blog post title
• Your blog post URL
• Your blog post body content
• Your blog post meta description

Don’t over-optimize your posts, and don’t compromise readability to stuff in another instance of your keyword.  But by following these simple steps, you’ll help the search engines to effectively determine what your posts are about, leading to better SERPs performance down the road.

Viral-style “linkbait” content pieces

One of the biggest challenges facing all digital marketers and website owners these days is link building – specifically, how to carry out this vital activity in a post-Penguin world.

Because the search engines have demonstrated their intent to clean up spam links and penalize sites that rely on them to manipulate the rankings, many former popular link building methods are now off the table.  Using automated link building programs or blog networks, for example, are an incredibly bad idea, given Google’s growing knowledge about legitimate link graphs.

The new name of the link building game is “natural” – and there’s almost no better way to do that than with content marketing.

In addition to the regular publication of blog posts, the most successful content marketing campaigns make use of “outreach” content pieces that can be distributed across social sites and shared person-to-person.  These content pieces tend to be larger in scope than individual blog posts and use formats that encourage viral sharing.  A few examples of these types of content include:

• Infographic or instructographic images
• Humorous or educational video clips
• Downloadable guides or reports
• White papers

There’s a reason that these types of content pieces are termed “linkbait.”  When distributed appropriately, they tend to create tons of links naturally, without any effort on the part of their owners.

As an example, suppose you develop a killer infographic image and publish it to your site with the relevant embed code.  You post the infographic to directories like Visual.ly, which creates an initial round of backlinks to your site.  Then, you share your infographic across social properties, which results in dozens of other websites embedding your graphic on their pages.

For very little effort outside of the initial infographic creation, you’ve created tons of the kinds of natural backlinks that the search engines will always value – making this strategy an important part of both SEO and content marketing.

Content marketing social promotions

These days, the general consensus is that social signals do have an impact on SEO – even if the exact mechanisms by which this occurs aren’t yet clear.

According to an infographic created by WhiteFire SEO and distributed through Social Media Today, social media performance has all of the following effects on SEO:

• Helps content get indexed faster
• Increases rankings for terms in social shares
• Increases rankings for social connections
• Increases domain’s ability to rank

However, the thing about proper social promotions is that you need good content to back them up!
Yes, you can engage your followers with witty status updates or by sharing content from other peoples’ social profiles, but for the best results, you need to be sharing your own content as well.  Promoting your own content helps your social followers to see you as an authority and increases the amount of referral traffic your website receives from your social promotions (as long as your site’s backlink remains intact).

If you’ve been following along with steps #1 and #2 of this process, you should already have this valuable content ready in the form of high value blog posts and engaging linkbait pieces.  The final key to optimizing your content marketing efforts for SEO success is to share this content on your social profiles.

For best results, do some investigative research using tools like Tweriod to determine when your followers are most active.  Then, use well-established social media marketing techniques to release updates on your optimized schedule in order to capture as much user attention as possible.  Be careful not to be too self-promotional – share your own content alongside other pieces that will provide your followers with the best possible information.


Essentially, think of the intersection of SEO and content marketing as giving you the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.  By implementing an effective content marketing campaign on your website, you’ll be able to meet plenty of important SEO benchmarks without any extra effort on your part.  It’s a win-win scenario for busy webmasters and digital marketers!

Email : naturalseosolution@gmail.com | Mo : 8763723377 | Skype : sunmoon.mohanty

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How to Extend The Shelf Life of Your Content by Repurposing It

Most of us assume that prolific content creators are always creating something new. But that’s far from the truth. As I’ve observed some of the most successful content creators on the web I’ve noticed a pattern.  They think like media producers instead of bloggers or online marketers. If we look to the mainstream media we see this pattern of repurposing content throughout it.

• The news isn’t created, it’s curated.  Somebody creates the content by doing something newsworthy,  and another person repurposes it by reporting on it.  
• Books are turned into movies and TV shows. Friday Night Lights  started as a book. It was made into a movie. Then it was turned into a 5- season TV series. The shelf life of one piece of content was extended because it was repurposed. 

By taking this kind of an approach to your content, you can be more productive and strangely more creative.

Mine Your Blog Archives

If you have been blogging/creating content for any extended period of time, dig through the archives . This is one of the secrets of many published authors. If you read there books closely you’ll even find blog posts that are included in the book.   However this is just a starting point. When you look through the archives you’ll find common threads, themes,and material for extending the shelf life of your content.

One Idea could be The Seed for  Something Bigger

Roughly a year ago I wrote a blog post titled How to Turn a Small Audience into a Small Army. That single post ended up being the seed for my book The Small Army Strategy.  Go back to your old posts and look at which ones you might be able to expand on.  Brainstorm ideas for what else you could say about that particular topic.  You may have plenty more to say about something you wrote a year or two ago. Consider which pieces of content could be turned into a larger body of work  and use them to build a more loyal community.

Look at Your Tweet Stream/Social Media Updates

Maybe you’ve had one liners that could be expanded on.  Rather than let it die as a tweet, turn it into a blog post. Sometimes other people’s content will inspire your best ideas.  Go back and look at what you’ve read, and what you’ve shared in the last few weeks. If you shared it, it clearly struck a chord with you for some reason. Use that as a source of inspiration or create a compilation of things you’ve read (in which case you must give the creators credit).

Consider the Same Message in a Different Form

Another pattern you’ll notice with some of the most prolific people in the world is their ability to take one message and express that message in different forms.

• You could take an existing piece of content and convert it into audio or video.  Obviously you don’t want to just read what you’ve written verbatim. If you want a great example of content turned into audio effectively, listen to the newsletter edition of Chris Brogan’s podcast.
• The seed for this post was a full 22 page guide on repurposing content for fortune and fame.
• A series of blog posts could be turned into a speech or a slideshare presentation.
• A speech could be turned into a book. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch was originally video content, but is now also available as a book on Amazon.

While repurposing content will allow you to extend the shelf life of your existing content, don’t assume that you can just throw things together and reap the benefits. For repurposed and repackaged content to work it must be polished, expanded upon, and treated as your art.  Have you had success with repurposing your content?  Let us know in the comments below.

Email : naturalseosolution@gmail.com | Mo : 8763723377 | Skype : sunmoon.mohanty

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Lessons from fiction that Can be Applied to Your Content Creation Efforts

I recently  had a chance to speak with a fiction writer and a memoir writer that sold the movie rights to her book. The writing advice I got from both of them was different than that I’ve received from professional bloggers and online marketers. They were both writers first and bloggers second and the result was distinct voices that made them both unmistakable. So I thought I’d share some lessons from fiction that can be applied to your content.

1. Shape Scenes

Go so deeply into your imagination  that you feel like you’ve been to the place you’re trying to create. Bring your reader to that place. Create a picture for them. Describe things in vivid detail so that they can imagine themselves in a scene. If you’re trying to sell a product, then your scene becomes somebody’s experience of using that product. The product is secondary to the story you’re trying to tell. When I spoke to a group of travel marketers about the art of digital storytelling I said that “the destination is just the backdrop.” In this case the destination is the product and what matters more is the scene that gets created with every story.

2. Create Characters

In many ways our personal brands, voice, and the way we show up online is a caricature of who we are in real life.  The narrower the gap between who you are in person and what you’re like online, the more real you become. View yourself as a character in all the content you create, and give people a sense for this character. Let them develop an emotional response to the person you are.
Insurance is a pretty boring business. No offense to those of you who sell it. But it’s not the kind of thing that lights people’s eyes up. It may not seem like the kind of business in which you can create a character. But Geico has done exactly that and recently they published a character driven piece called You’re Only Human: Written by the Gecko 

3. Take your Customers/Readers on Journey

Every piece of content should have n arc and narrative. You should take your readers on a journey and an adventure that keeps them on the edge of their seat, anticipating what’s coming next. The goal isn’t necessarily to become the next Steven Spielberg, but rather to think more like a storyteller and less like an online marketer.

4. Let Your Imagination Run Riot

In the world of fiction you get to play in a space where there are no rules. Forget best practices, SEO, and all these things for a while. Worrying about those things will stifle your creativity, and lower the volume of the brilliant voice within you. Create an imaginary world in which anything is possible. Feel free to create a world where cars can fly, animals can talk, and superheroes are on every street corner. If you need some help with this read Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

5. Don’t be so Polished

“I think it’s about shedding ego and going inwards” – Torre De Roche, The Fearful Adventurer 
The irony of polishing our work too much is that it loses the thing makes it shine.  It becomes manufactured instead of hand crafted.  Readers tend not to trust this nearly as much as things that are rough around the edges.  That could mean leaving in the parts of your content that make you vulnerable, showcase your flaws, and amplify your imperfections.  In a world where everybody has a microphone, being imperfect and honest are essential to standing out.
Does fiction have an influence on your content? Let me know in the comments below if you’ve leveraged any other ideas from great fiction.

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10 Steps For Building A Content Marketing Strategy in SEO

As we look back on 2012, I think the award for biggest buzzword for the year should go to Content Marketing. Not that it is not useful or powerful, on the contrary. However, I think the term has been overused and misunderstood. Plus, content marketing has been around for a long time, especially in B2B high-tech marketing.

In this post I’ll cover why content marketing is so important today and I will provide some practical advice about how to be good at content marketing.

The new buying process

The way customers buy today is very different from how they made purchase decisions 15 years ago, of course. The most important difference is that today customers do most of their buying research on their own, with many sources of information, often in real time. By the time a customer reaches out so a sales person their purchase decision is almost 60% complete, often having already made their mind about what they will buy.

If you were interested in buying a car 15 years ago, you most probably walked into a dealership to learn about the car from the sales person, get a few brochures and take a test drive. Today you probably visit a few car review sites, like Edmunds.com or MSN Autos, check safety and reliability ratings, look at resale value in KBB.com, and then ask a few friends on Facebook. B2B customers today use an average of 7.6 sources through the purchase funnel according to Peter Burris from Forrester. (how’s that for an attribution challenge)

In short, customers are more informed, they find information on their own and they mainly use the internet for research. By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, customers hate marketing, they don’t trust the emails we send or the marketingspeak we write on brochures and other materials.

We have evolved from living in an information economy where knowledge is power to time where information is a commodity. Arguably, Starbucks and the iPhone started the experience economy where UX and UI is power. But that even is giving way to a relationship economy where trust is power. Trust in your values, your ethics, your skills and experience, your ability to deliver, your track record.

10 Steps to a Building a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

1. Become an Expert. You want customers to listen to you? You want to be a thought leader? Then be an expert at something. You can’t just hire a writer and task him with writing 20 pieces of content. (You can, but it will not work in the long run.). This is not easy or fast, but is a crucial element of content marketing. Be the best at something, then write about it.
2. Be Helpful – In this age of commodities, people buy from who they trust. Writing educational, helpful content can be useful in building trust. It can also be used to prove your expertise – or ‘thought leadership’ in content marketing lingo.
3. Step in your customer’s shoes. To help customers, you can’t write about your products. You must write from the customer’s point of view. They don’t care about your products or your features. Make it about the customer, not about you. If you write about your company and your products, then it’s a brochure, not content marketing. Start with the customer’s context, explore their problems and how they can solve them.
4. Express your values – As Simon Sinek explains brilliantly in this video, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Your content should reflect your values and should express your point of view, what you and your company stand for. You don’t always have to be right. Sometimes it is more important to be different and to embrace values that your customers share.
5. Make it interesting – Be controversial, explore ways to fascinate customers, be entertaining, provide practical advice. Use graphics, charts and video. Infographics are easy to consume, but customers will read long articles and white papers as long as they are interesting and helpful.
6. Be personal. People don’t connect with brand, they connect with other people. A content strategy and a social strategy can work together make personal connections between the people that make your company and your customers. Social media can be used to turn a B2B transaction into a P2P relationship.
7. Think like a publisher. This means you probably have to start a content calendar, hire an editor-in-chief, build an editorial process and set up an editorial board. This is the new marketing: it’s more about educating than broadcasting.
8. Go multi-format. Maximize your content: Create good content and turn it into a white paper, then take chunks and make them blog posts. Why not then create a few slides and create a slideshare presentation or a slidecast. A YouTube video and a podcast is not to far out. Tweet about all of it. All content is cross linked and posted on your website. But also on social sites, as long as you do it the right way.
9. Optimize for SEO Juice. A smart marketer knows his customers and knows what problems they are trying to solve, and what keywords they use in search engines to find the answers. Take advantage of this knowledge when writing content. You don’t have to be an SEO expert, just find someone who is an SEO expert and get some advice.
10. Make it a priority. Content marketing, like social media, are important marketing activities. They can’t be relegated to ‘whenever you have time’ because we never have extra time. It must be part of the job description or the full time job for someone. If it is important it should be a priority.

Making it all work together

In 2009 most companies where trying to figure out where to start with social media. At the time I was working for the leading content management platform which also sold social media tools. We took this customer need for guidance as an opportunity.

We had good ideas, smart people and a point of view. But we needed credible, interesting data to back it up. So I approached the Marketing Leadership Roundtable and offered them a partnership: we would work together researching marketing members and then I will do a webinar explaining the results.

I wrote a questionnaire, MLR sent it to their members, we got a couple hundred responses. We had now interesting, statistically-valid insights coming from marketing leaders at large companies.

The webinar was the most successful MLR had ever had in terms of attendance and feedback. I posted the slides on slideshare, where they have been seen over 8,000 times. Derivative presentations have been viewed thousands of times as well. Some of the slides where the basis for my Web 2.0 presentation that same year which was packed.

At the end of the presentation I offered a link to a white paper and a link to register for a free copy of the book Citizen Marketers by Jackie Huba. The marketing team was nervous about posting content online without registration, I had some convincing to do. Some of the stats we produced were later used by Erik Qualman in his super-popular Socialnomics video.

At the end, we were able to reach tens of thousands of customers in a way that positioned us as experts in our field, we helped customers understand social media and get started, and they appreciated. The company had more leads than it can deal with.

You know what? It’s fun and rewarding. So get started with your content strategy. I hope you find this advice helpful.

Mail Us : naturalseosolution@gmail.com | Ph : 8763723377 | Skype : sunmoon.mohanty

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5 Ways to Turn Existing Content into High Touch Visuals

As the pace of content creation increases, our attention spans seem to be decreasing. This is requiring creators to adapt and consider ways in which people can consume content in a timely manner.  The result is a movement towards highly visual content.  While you may not have the resources to hire a designer or visual artist for your content, there are several things you can do to create high touch visuals with your existing content.

1. Comic/Illustrated Books

While comic books have been around for quite some time, a new trend is illustrated versions of business books.

Michael Port who had already published The New York Times Best Seller Book Yourself Solid teamed up with a visual strategist to create a 3rd edition of his book.   This new edition translates all of the core concepts in the book into easy to understand visuals. The reason for the illustrations was simple. Plenty of people loved the content of his book, but many people never finished reading it. Illustrating the content not only enables readers to finish the book quickly, but also review and retain core concepts. According to the synopsis on Amazon

You won’t find business school graphs or mind maps. Instead, you’ll find compelling, visual stories that reinvent old and tired business concepts, making Book Yourself Solid Illustrated a fun and playful book that you will revisit year after year as you get more clients than you can handle.

Maybe you can’t afford to hire an illustrator or a visual strategist to work with you. Fortunately there are several free sites where you can create your own comics

For your next blog post, try creating a comic as opposed to writing it.

 2. Animation of Existing Content

Another interesting way to create high-touch visuals is to animate existing content. That’s exactly what RSA animate does with TED talks and other speeches. You might be thinking that you need to hire a talented cartoonist and spend a small fortune to do this. But tools are popping up all over the web to make this possible for somebody who has a bit of creativity.

XtraNormal:  This animation tool allows you to write a script, choose characters, and even a backdrop. Some of the following viral videos were done with XtraNormal

• So You Want to go to Law School
• iPhone4 vs HTC Evo

Wideo:  Wideo is a recently launched animation startup that enables you to overlay soundtracks and create all sorts of videos ranging from book trailers to tutorials. If  an infographic tool and an animation tool were to blend you’d have Wideo.

Find a topic you want to cover, write a script, and unleash your inner Walt Disney.

3. Slideshare Presos/Slide Decks

One of the fastest ways to turn existing content into a high touch visual is to convert it into a presentation. Let’s take a look at a concrete example.

Ever year on my birthday I write a blog post for all the lessons I’ve learned from my time on the planet. This year I decided to do something a bit different. I wrote the content and teamed up with my business partner David Crandall to turn it into something that combined my writing with his illustration skills.  The result was a piece of content that went viral on slideshare:

35 Lessons Learned in 35 Years from David Crandall

Here’s a simple way to take a blog post and create a slide deck from it.

• Pick a blog post
• Find the 10 key points
• Create a logical flow
• Assemble them into a slide deck

While you don’t need any illustration talent, you want to put some effort into the design of your slides. Read the book Presentation Zen by Garr Reynold’s and implement his advice.

4. Infographics 

Whether you love them or hate them, infographics are a fantastic way to take existing content and create a high touch visual.  The key to an effective infoographic is to have one major takeaway for the reader.  After that it comes down to organization of the information in some sort of logical flow. While hiring a designer to create something amazing is optimal,it’s not the only option.

• Easel.ly is an incredibly easy to use infographic creation tool. The drag and drop interface makes it a breeze to work with. Decided what information you want to include and hammer out your infographic.

5. Pinterest Quotes/Facebook Timeline Images

If you’ve been on the search engine journal Facebook page you’ll notice that all the posts are shared with an image with a quote from the post.  This is a great way not only to stand out in the timeline but to highlight a particularl portion of a post. You could even use multiple images with  different quotes to drive traffic to the same post.  These same images can also be used to create boards for Pinterest.

Mail Us : naturalseosolution@gmail.com | Ph : 8763723377 | Skype : sunmoon.mohanty

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