Shane Snow | Mashable
Five years ago, it seemed nothing was as buzzy and mysterious as SEO. Today, “content marketing” has taken over as reigning buzzphrase in marketing circles, with many SEO practitioners shifting their sales pitches to match the trend.
The difference, essentially, is content marketing aims to create content humans want to read, whereas SEO aims to create content that pleases search engines. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but not long ago creating cheap, machine-friendly garbage for SEO was as effective as putting time and money into quality content.
Not anymore.
Many bloggers and publishers today are seeing traffic from social exceed that from search engines; social sites like Pinterest, for example, are now top traffic sources for some retailers.
Yet, Google still gets 100 billion searches every month, according to Search Engine Watch. Publishers angling for social media traffic would be foolish to ignore search entirely.
How can content marketing organizations remain search-friendly while adhering to best practices in social media?
The New Rules of SEO for Content Marketing
Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, outlines five best practices for content marketers hoping to maximize SEO value in an ethical way.
- Create content that people will have an incentive to share.
- Do keyword research, so you don’t waste effort writing about things people don’t care about.
- Put all your content on the same domain/subdomain. (e.g. don’t use blog.mysite.com, use mysite.com/blog)
- Stand for something, and write about it. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
- Don’t separate your brand from your content. For instance, casino sites that make fascinating infographics about animal rights aren’t going to last long.
