08 Dec The Importance of Optimized Content

Success in online marketing can be reduced to having compelling and optimized content.

Which is why having an optimized content strategy is crucial for successful social media and organic search strategies.

What is an Optimized Content Marketing Strategy?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, the definition of ‘optimized content’ is as follows:

“Optimized Content Marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your prospects and customers need to know and deliberately producing optimized content based on keyword phrases that are driving organic search traffic and conversions. Then delivering that optimized content to them in a relevant and compelling way to grow your business by socializing the content through your organization’s social networks.”

Why an Optimized Content Strategy is Necessary?

Google is constantly refining their search algorithms which means that it is imperative for content to reflect Google’s search results requirements. Over the past two years, there has been five major changes:

1. Social Signals

5 years ago this month (December 2010), both Google and Bing announced that they factor social signals into their organic search algorithms. This is because social relationships and relevance are signals that are at the core of organic search.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, said in 2011, “The social signal, the people you ‘hang with’ is actually a ranking signal.”

Once your content is written, the next step in an effective marketing strategy is to distribute your content via social media networks:

• Twitter
• Google +
• Facebook Likes and Shares
• YouTube views
• LinkedIn shares

2. The Panda Updates

In February 2011, Google introduced their infamous Panda update: fake backlinks were effectively banned. Before panda, some sites used artificial means to scale the rankings (like backlink farms and web spam), after panda, many of these sites disappeared.

If you were building organic content naturally, however, your search results were not affected.

For long-term SEO success with your SEO and social media strategies, build out your backlinks by creating high-quality content such as optimized press releases and blog posts.

3. Google +1 Button id Introduced

In March 2011, Google launched the +1 button allowing Google searchers to specify content they recommend. Clicking the +1 button on a piece of content is shorthand for, “this is interesting – check it out,” which has a positive effect on search rankings.

4. The Freshness Update.

In November 2011, Google launched a major algorithm change called the Freshness Update that prioritizes fresh content over dated information.

5. Search Plus Your World

In January 2012, Google launched Search Plus Your World. Now your published content in Google+ (Google’s social network) can be found by other people in your circle.

Because Google’s social network is optimized to index directly with Google, content shows up quicker in the search results than other platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.