Bruce Clay Blog : 5/112 : SEO
September 17, 2012Content Marketing Comes into Focus in This Month’s Newsletter
Monday’s aren’t so bad, especially when they’re SEO Newsletter flavored. Did you get this month’s industry news report in your inbox today? If not, here’s what you’ll find in the pages of SEO Newsletter: The Content Edition.
- Feature: When Google Rates Your Web Content, Will You Make the Grade?
- Back to Basics: Finding the Right Content Fit
- International: Content Marketing — Focus on the Customer
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September 10, 2012
Quality Rater Handbooks: Another Tool for SEO Evaluation
Google updated its handbook for human raters and the new version, dated June 2012, has a whole new section to instruct raters on quality rating landing pages. The new section is “Page Quality Rating Guidelines”. The updated search quality rater’s handbook was leaked on private forums and first reported last week. These leaked manuals are like windows into how search engines evaluate pages. Google asks raters to assign a rating to a page’s main content, layout and overall website reputation. There’s an opportunity here to evaluate our own sites next to Google and Bing’s explicit quality markers.
Read more of Quality Rater Handbooks: Another Tool for SEO Evaluation.
September 7, 2012
Lessons from the Lingerie Closet: Brand Publishing Exposed
If I told you that underwear held some very interesting lessons in brand publishing, what would you think? Yesterday I went to the mailbox to collect and recycle my normal pile of junk mail. That was, until I saw and opened the latest Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue.
Something was different. It didn’t look like any catalogue I had seen lately. It looked like a real magazine. Frederick’s was dabbling in brand publishing. And the approach was, well, interesting.
Some of it made a lot of sense, some of it was slightly confusing (think more ads), but overall it made me realize just how hot content marketing is becoming. No pun intended.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the things I found in the company’s “Brandzine,” as they call it, and what you can apply to your own business’s content.
September 5, 2012
How to Use Learning Styles to Boost Your Content Strategy
Over the long weekend, I met a woman on the trails of Yosemite National Park. We walked together for a while and talked about all sorts of things. She told me about her 9-year-old grandson who didn’t read and how everyone was making a fuss over it. See, it wasn’t that he couldn’t read, he just didn’t want to spend any time doing it. The schools were afraid he wasn’t at the reading level as the other children. The family wasn’t sure what this meant for his learning abilities. Everyone was sort of searching for answers.
His grandmother, the woman I walked with, thought: he just needed something he could connect with. It wasn’t that he couldn’t read; it wasn’t even that he didn’t like to read. She believed her grandson just hadn’t found anything yet that spoke to him in a way he could relate to.
As an artist herself and a family that had artistic tendencies, she thought maybe her grandson needing something light and creative to spark the love of reading within him. So she decided to buy her grandson the Shel Silverstein book, “Every Thing On It.”
September 4, 2012
SEO and Content Relationship Status Update: “It’s Complicated”?
Social media is often touted as a revolutionary communication channel. The Internet presented the first time conversations became multi-directional, with consumers speaking to brands and to each other with unprecedented ease. But regular users’ tolerance for marketing on social channels quickly clamped down. The answer to consumers’ rising marketing standards: quality content.
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A Curated Look: SEO, Conversational Marketing and Brands as Publishers
Content is the core of communication, as obvious as that sounds. An effective brand strategy first understands its own voice and then the channels where its voice will best be amplified. How, then, is content development not reported to be part of the marketing mix by 100% of the SEO Inudstry survey respondents?!
We’re in the midst of a democratization of media. What this will do to the brand and publishing worlds remains to be seen. Almost certainly, though, if you’re not spending the majority of your resources on creating the best content you’re missing the mark.
Read more of A Curated Look: SEO, Conversational Marketing and Brands as Publishers.
August 29, 2012
Content Marketing: Everything Old is New Again
For the past few weeks, my Twitter stream—and yours too, probably—has lit up with tweets, links, and hashtags about content marketing. It seems to be the hot concept right now. If you’re not doing content marketing, well, you’re just doing everything wrong, then. For so many people to be talking about the same thing, it surely must be a new concept, right? Why would anyone talk about something that’s been going on for more than half a century?
Much like fashion, marketing tactics come and go in cycles, and right now, we’re in a content marketing cycle. Granted it may be slightly different than previous ones in that digital media has evolved to offer brands new ways to market their products and services. But the fact is, content marketing is not new. It’s a well-established marketing method that has been successful for decades upon decades. So yes, if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out. But the question isn’t are you doing it; it’s how are you doing it?
August 24, 2012
Know It All? Want To? SEO Newsletter: The Data Edition
Let me ask, do the following at all match your own goals for your professional growth? Because this is what we believe the SEO Newsletter helps readers do.
1. Stay aware of changes by search engines and social platforms that affect a business’s web presence.
2. Understand the marketing strategies of industry leaders and how you can use the best strategies and practices in your work.
3. Be a well-informed member of the technology industry and marketing community subset. (Not only for your own benefit but for stimulating convos with colleagues and peers!)
4. Always be learning. Always be improving. Always be efficient.
In this month’s articles and news reports, the SEO Newsletter delivers the above, point for point.
Read more of Know It All? Want To? SEO Newsletter: The Data Edition.
August 22, 2012
SEO Evangelist Diaries: Fostering Collaboration in Your Organization
A common challenge in the SEO industry is establishing a cooperative environment via evangelism. We depend on our colleagues across departments to push through our initiatives. We rely on IT to comply with our requests to optimize the server. We talk to sales to ensure our site speaks to the customer and meets their needs. We assume that, no matter the role or department, our colleagues support SEO goals just as you support theirs.
But SEO work can be isolating, and limited resources can lead to push-back from others. The remedy to this is collaboration. Use these tools and incentives in your movement toward company-wide collaboration.
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August 16, 2012
Building a Massive Customer Base through Content-Driven SEO
In this session, you will hear case studies on building businesses using this technique. You will take home a perspective on SEO that is so simple that it feels brand new, and a philosophy that pervades not just marketing but all of business.
Read more of Building a Massive Customer Base through Content-Driven SEO.
