Content Marketing and SEO

What is content marketing?
Simply put, content marketing is the SEO tactic of distributing your own unique content with backlinks to various sources.  Sometimes you are looking to gain links from profiles and other less direct ways, but a lot of the time you are placing inbound links in the text, for specific keywords that will point back to your main domain. Most of the time this will be accomplished manually, visiting various webpages that have free blogs, article directories, press releases, and all sorts of user interactive content.  Write on the topics that are important to your niche and start seeing backlinks and traffic come through these sources.  Contextual inbound links hold a majority of the weight given to a websites SERP rankings from Google currently.  They love seeing strong, unique content mixed with your backlinks.

Why is it so successful post-panda?
After the Panda or “farmers update” from Google, they really started to devalue any duplicate content and give more value to unique/well-written content. The new algorithm focuses on backlinks that are associated with high quality and useful content will be given the most value. If your overall SEO campaign has a lot of non-contextual, low quality backlinks you will see them be devalued over time and you’ll receive very little weight toward your ranking positions.
Panda also gives more value to high content pages that have additional media incorporated.  Images are pretty much mandatory now adays to get the most out of a page or post, but videos are still the stronger player.  Not only do you get the additional credits from Google for a user interactive page, you’ll also see strong backlinks from most video hosting websites like Youtube, Vimeo and others.  There’s nothing wrong with uploading media as much as possible, the search engines love to see them incorporated with contextual links and users like them too.
Keyword Research is the fundamentals of Content Marketing
Content marketing starts at the most basic level of SEO, keyword research.  You’ve got to build a targeted list of keywords for the search engine terms or phrases that you want to rank for.  This will help you understand the competition and quality level of content that already exists in those SERPs.  If their are some big name players in your niche and their posted content is well over 1,500 words, has great images, and some videos, you might struggle to pass them.  Look for SERPs that have very low competition, decent search volumes, and content that is lower in quality.  You’ll be able to pass that competition up quickly and start gaining organic traffic from those keywords.
Once you know the keywords you’ll be writing for, you can start the content creation.  I always recommend at least 500+ words for any content marketing sources.  There are definitely certain types of content marketing where you will want at least 1,000 words AND some images, but for best results make sure all content stays over 500 words.  You will receive the most weight toward your search engine rankings due to high quality content.

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