CONTENT MARKETING! DO IT! It's the NEW SEO

In fact, it's so awesome you don't need anything else! Just produce awesome content and you will be in SEO nirvana! It's like double rainbows and Matt Cutts got together and had baby NyanCats!

Old SEO is dead. This is the new SEO and it's beautiful!

Sound too good to be true? That's because it is.

Content marketing isn't new. It's just a new buzzword picked up by other industries that suddenly found out they could to "do SEO", but they didn't want to "do SEO", so they tried to make it more special. It isn't.

Content marketing has been around since SEO on Google has been called SEO. To not understand this is to not understand what Google and its algorithms measure and how this might affect your site.

Now with the arrival of Penguin 2.0, you might be just setting yourself up for a fall – right out of the rankings. And yes despite all our talk of rankings not mattering, they do, because if you go from somewhere on Page 1 (with personalization) to nowhere on page 51, you will suddenly say, "Oh no! My rankings!"

Rankings matter. SEO matters. And content marketing is SEO. It always has been, and always will be – well, at least until the search engines don't use algorithms and content, but that's a long way off.

Need more proof of the power of content? Back in 2008, I ranked a website in the top 15 for a one-word term in competitive vertical with no links, a domain that was less than a year old, four weeks from launch, with 1,500 pages of unique, solid, quality content. Every word on the site was original, even the Contact Us.

How do I know content was the reason for getting the site ranked in the top 15? Content! To be fair, I can only be 99 percent sure that content, thanks to a Google engineer at a party at an SES Conference who confirmed it was "most likely the reason".

Like I said, the importance of unique, quality content isn't a new concept.

Just What is "Content Marketing"?



If you want the best literal explanation, this quote from Quora (found via Ann Smarty and Authority Labs) works very well:

"Content marketing is the umbrella of all techniques that are used to generate traffic, leads, online visibility, and brand awareness/fidelity."
If you want the one that really gets it, then this one from Sugar Rae says it best:

"Content marketing isn't a new strategy, it's merely a new word.

Why ... do we as an industry feel the need to invent a new buzzword for the same services every few years? We've been doing "content marketing" forever.

Website = content
Promotion of that website = marketing
Website + promotion of said website = content marketing."

And there you go. It is content that you put on your website and promote. That can be text, video, infographics, images, whatever you think of and put on your site. When you release it as part of your site marketed materials, then it is "content marketing".

It's really that simple. Again, it's not new, it's just a new buzzword.



Now that we have that straightened out, what does content marketing have to do with Penguin, SEO, future penalties, and you?

Content marketing is not the new SEO. It is SEO and so are a lot of other things.

It's All SEO Now

One client's site I recently reviewed was brilliant. The company had never bought a link, was completely legit, and worked feverishly on their content marketing – yet they had 16 warnings and penalties. Why? Because while content is great and certainly a very important part of any SEO strategy, it isn't all or even most of what you need to be concerned about when thinking about the algorithm.

Taking Your Eyes Off The Ball



So while you were spending all that time concentrating on your content marketing, what were you doing about making sure you met the rest of the 200+ points on the algorithm? What about the other things that Penguin was meant to control?

How is your internal linking? Your anchor text either coming in or internally?

How about where your sites are linking externally? Where are you linking to and are you linking to other sites you own? (triangulation - crosslinking)

What about the other changes Google announced are coming this summer (which I will just term, the "no one is home" penalties for lack of a better term)? You know, like spam comment in your forums or blogs? Or your page speed and usability?

How about your page crawls? Sitemaps? Are you showing Google no one is at the helm while you spend all your time focused on cultivating the latest viral video or super infographic?

Starting to see the issue?

Content marketing isn't separate from SEO and isn't the new SEO. It doesn't replace SEO. It is SEO just like all the other items mentioned are SEO.

Penguin 2.0 (#4) — May 22, 2013

The fourth release of Google’s spam-fighting “Penguin Update” is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin 2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of tech that should better stop spam.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during This Week in Google (Episode #199). He referenced the earlier video of himself talking about the next generation Penguin update, and said this is being rolled out “within the next few hours.”

Webmasters and SEOs: expect major changes to the search results. Matt specifically said that 2.3% of English queries will be noticeably impacted by this update.

Cutts later posted more details about this roll out on his blog. He explained that the launch is now complete, including for non-English languages, and that “the scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

Previous Penguin Updates:
Penguin 4? Penguin 2.0? We name each release of Penguin in sequential order, so it’s easy to know when one happened. The list so far:

Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
But after the first release, the second and third still were data refreshes of the same basic Penguin algorithm with only minor changes. This fourth release is a major change, so big that Google has referred to it as Penguin 2.0 internally.

Penguin 2.0 Goes Deeper, Impacting More Webmasters
As we covered earlier, Matt said in a recent video that this Penguin update is a major update that goes go deeper than the original Penguin update and will impact many more SEOs and webmasters than the first generation version. Here is that video again:

SEOmoz: Combine SEO with other marketing

SEO was, very nearly, a strategic marketing practice in its own right. That’s becoming less and less true for a number of reasons. Search engines are no longer the only source of organic traffic on the Web. Social networks, blogs, email, RSS subscriptions, and word-of-mouth all compete to drive substantial visits. Also, while search is very often one of the paths people use to discover and research a purchase or engagement, it’s almost never the only one.

Success in SEO today necessitates appealing to the emerging signals search engines are using — content analysis, brand metrics, user and usage data, social networks, new forms of markup, etc. SEO is a powerful tactic, but one that needs to fit into a broader set of inbound marketing channels. The combination of these channels into an inbound strategy can be very powerful, as visitors from these sources tend to be high-loyalty and have a lower cost-to-acquire.

What Are  Benefits Of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the top three link building strategies. You will be able to improve your website’s Google ranking by improving your link popularity through social bookmarking. Social bookmarking brings about numerous benefits to your website and this article will benefits all the primary and secondary benefits of social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking tools and platforms were originally developed to help the internet users to organize their bookmarks online rather than saving them to their computers. This was found to be highly helpful because these social bookmarks were stored online and as a result they could be easily accessed from any computer from any part of the world as long as you are connected to the internet. Later it was noted that these social bookmarks were considered as back links by the search engines and this has changed the entire way how social bookmarking sites were used. The original use of social bookmarking sites is almost forgotten because these websites are now plagued by webmasters that like to build back links for their websites. As a result many social bookmarking sites started using no follow attribute which prevented websites getting any back link benefit. So if you are planning to build back links for your websites through social bookmarking you need to make sure to submit your website to social bookmarking sites with do follow attribute.

As social bookmarking sites are known to feature fresh content search engines visit the social bookmarking sites frequently and this is one of the advantages of getting your back links from social bookmarking sites. Your links will be indexed fast by the search engines.

The next benefit that you can expect from making social bookmarking effort is improved online visibility. For this however you should make hundreds of submissions to the social bookmarking sites. It is not enough to submit your website just to handful sites. If you want to improve your online visibility in the social bookmarking sites it is best that you hire an SEO company to take care of your social bookmarking needs so that they can make the bookmarks professionally. Daily hundreds of visitors come to social bookmarking sites and your brand will become popular online. This will also increase the traffic rate to your website as a considerable portion of the website visitors will click on your website’s link and come to your website.

The social bookmarks that you submit online can also get listed in the search results based on how well you make the bookmarks. If the descriptions and the titles you create are keyword rich your bookmarks will be listed in the search results. This is yet another source of traffic to your website. You will be able to enjoy all the benefits of social bookmarking by hiring an experienced SEO service provider. So don’t waste your time in making the submissions yourself as you can easily delegate this task to your SEO service provider.

social media optimization

What Is SMO,
Social media optimization (SMO) involves making your content easily shareable over social networking sites. Since there are many options for where people can see your content, the aim for the web has shifted from, “driving as much traffic to a website ” ensuring as many people view the content”. 
See this blog. I found this blog informative as well as simple to understand. it has everything you wanted to know about social media optimization. It may also help to implement for your website.
How SMO WORK

please add www since i am new to this forum and cant post links.

techwyse.com/blog/social-media-marketing/social-media-tips-tricks/

techwyse.com/blog/social-media-marketing/3-ways-to-make-more-visibility-in-google-search-through-social-networks/In short, SMO is becoming a mainstream part of SEO. 

The days of search engine optimization (SEO) as a critical audience-driving strategy for digital publishers are numbered. Forward-looking marketers need to educate themselves about a far more meaningful and effective way of bringing audiences to media destinations -- social media optimization (SMO.)

 web sites such as Digg that become popular and generate traffic for those sites. These people aren’t in it for the money – but even then, the article noted that some were trying to cash in on the trend with services that offered to generate traffic for web sites by paying people to “vote up” posts.
You shouldn’t resort to those kinds of practices. They’re generally frowned on – or worse – in online social communities. But you do need to know what you’re dealing with. Start by getting the target audience for your offering firmly in mind; if you’re on the top of your game, you should know who these people are anyway. Knowing who your audience is will help give you some idea of where to go to find them.

There are several different kinds of social sites. Not all of them will be conducive to your purposes. Even the ones that are will be structured in a number of different ways, which means you’ll need to approach them differently. I have seen people claim that there are only two types of social sites, but I think there are at least three and maybe more. Feel free to disagree!

The first kind of social site I think of as a social networking site. These are the kinds of sites where users usually have profiles (such as LinkedIn) and sometimes have blogs as part of those profiles (such as Zude, MySpace, and other sites). You could become known on such a site by building a profile for yourself and/or your company, writing a blog, commenting on the blogs of other users, and so forth. Becoming part of such a site means becoming part of a community.

The second kind of social site is also community-based. You become noticed mainly by posting links, voting on links, and making comments on links other people have posted. Typically these are sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Fark, and many others. You need to spend some time reading these sites to get a feel for their quirks and what interests their readers. You wouldn’t post a story on home decorating to Digg, except possibly if the home decorating article talked about someone who made their apartment over into a reproduction of the U.S.S. Enterprise (and even then you’re likely to get a yawn and an “it’s been done.”). These communities are usually hypersensitive to spam, so you want to be really careful about what you post. As you would with an online forum, you want to get a feel for how they work before you put up your first link. It’s usually a good idea to lurk for a while with these sites before posting.

SEO vs SEM: Two Names for the Same Thing

By most people's standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.

I worked for three years as a webmaster. Ask a dozen people to define that term, and you'll get a lot of different answers. A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.

The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM -- search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.


Search Engine Marketing

I see SEM as a rather broad term. It's everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a web site and increasing its traffic, its "stickiness," and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.

Aspects of search engine marketing which I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:

Seo Specialist & Web Pramoter , Web Designer

1: What Is SEO
Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique calledSearch Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.
This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

2: How Search Engines Work
The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results –crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.
What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines
Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.
There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.
9 Essential SEO Tips for Small Business in 2011

1. Keyword Phrases. One word phrases are a thing of the past time. Yes, it is important to have fixed or specific keywords targeted as they relate to your brand and overall business industry however we have to keep an eye on what phrases people are querying to find us. Delving into your analytics and analyzing how people are finding you and comparing that to what you wish to be found for will help to secure your ranking in the SERP's.

2. Content. The content play most important roll that you are creating. It is not only built around keywords, it is built from what people are going to find useful, has a high propensity to be shared and also to be created from what people would want to link to. The content when we think in the different ways it will be viewed enhances how it is created.

3. Mobile Friendly. As per SEO point of view if a site that is not mobile friendly is losing visitors. We have become a mobile dependent society and adapting your site to mobile devices is not only increasing your chances of searchers having the ability to view your site, it is also securing the trust with them as ultimately when we are searching, we want results. The results via a mobile device need to be more immediate and valuable.

4. Local Search. Local search is still a warm topic. Google Places becoming the default for many industry specific searches has changed the way that people are accepting the search results. This is where the major change has taken place. Users have had to embrace this search result change. They want results that they feel that they faith. Appearing in the results starts the faith.

5. Link Building. A link building tactic that encompasses internal and external linking through directories, reciprocal links as well as engaging in social media through commenting on blogs, creating content that is linked to as well as web pages that are a resource to be linked to is going to point to your site through the search engines as a point of reference and increase your rankings.

6. Canonical Pathway. Creating a clear and precise canonical pathway domain sets to avoid multiple page variations The search engine spiders crawl and are unable to determine which the preferred pathway for your site is. Establish one pathway.

7. Crawl Frequency. How often are your pages being crawled? Blogs are crawled and ranked very rapidly. Internal web pages that are not linked to or updated and have high visit volume are not crawled as regularly. Monitor through your cache how often your pages are being crawled to determine which pages need to be crawled more regularly and this also can give some insight as to when a new page or blog (for those that are not blogging every day) should be posted to ensure that the page is being crawled and indexed when the crawlers are crawling.

8. Photo Alt Tags. Alt tagging photos seems sometimes to be forgotten. The spiders cannot see the photo, but they can see the text that is associated with the photo. Creating alt tags that contain keywords are not only preventing the stop gap for the spiders, it is allowing an extra source for keyword density.

9. Site Speed. The speed in which your site downloads matters. Visitors will click off a site is taking too long to load. The faster the site loads the more time is spent on the site. This not only is beautiful to the user, but the speed of a site matters to the search engines. Of course, the content will outweigh the speed but if you have great content that is slow and people will not wait for it, the search engines will not rank it.

These tips are necessary to be ready for 2011. Search is only growing as we see users engage online for longer periods and having an ability to do so on the run. Mobile usage, desktop/laptop usage while at work and at home will continue to increase. People are online and trust the search engines to give them results. Can the search engines faith you to give them what they need to rank you?