Page 128 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

surely is a sharing benefit to search.
The days of competitive link building, the hallmark of SEO best practices for

years, is over. Google doesn’t want anyone building links through wacky
schemes. But they do want people creating extremely relevant content that the
company can serve to its search customers (and eventually monetize through
ads). So Google is looking for signals that we’re earning those valuable links. Of
course great content can’t assure links … but if you could ignite that content, it
just might tip the odds a little bit in your favor by getting your work in the hands
of more people who can link to you naturally.

An example of this idea in action is the very creative content ignition strategy
pioneered by Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing. To promote various marketing
conference clients, his team has created a series of eBooks featuring ideas from
well-known speakers presented in creative themes like detectives, rock-n-roll,
and Alice in Wonderland. If Odden tried to rank against very crowded terms like
“content marketing secrets,” his content would never be found. But by igniting
the content through paid, earned, and owned media strategies, people hear about
the content and begin searching for something like “content wonderland.” In
essence, awareness through content sharing is creating a built-in SEO benefit.

“I know that’s not what a buyer would normally search on, but when you see
the buzz about the e books we’ve created, a lot of people will become interested
in those ideas and then they will validate them by searching on them,” Odden
said.

“We’re literally creating our own unique search demand with projects like
this, and believe me, something that seems silly like Content Wonderland will
become searched on a heck of a lot with just a few weeks of promotion. Of
course, we’re optimizing any assets that are being created for anticipated search
terms. But, we’re also looking to create demand by getting people to talk about
and share what we have produced. We want to generate buzz.”

So although Google states that tweets and Facebook Likes don’t directly
affect search results, there is an indirect connection if those actions somehow
lead to a new audience connecting with legitimately great content and valuable
backlinks result.

What do you need to know about SEO to be effective in moving your
content?

For the third and final SEO-related question, let’s turn again to Lee Odden,
author of Optimize, a leading book on this concept.

A short time ago, optimizing content for search was fairly straightforward.