The following are my personal notes from the SES Conference 2013 in New York, #sesny
Content Marketing – Earn Visibility and Links Through Killer Content Strategy – @lauralippay
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Content marketing is marketing, link building is manipulation.
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SEO nowadays means you want to be popular
- How do you get the attention of… Vancouver
- House Trip
- Audience: Hip folks
- Airbnb of canada
- learned through research that vancouver likes being “green”
- search results for “green” cities show lists of greenest cities
- find out where hip folks are reading online
- http://seogadget.com/really-targeted-outreach/
- Don’t spam publishers, collaborate with publishers
- Seek out publishers
- Give them some ideas
- Use their feedback
- Get creative with content and photos
- Publish: Created infographic of the world’s greenest cities
- went viral in vancouver
- tweeted by mayor of vancouver, bands, etc
- serious links were built using creative ideas and info
- Good Content Marketing
- Know target and biz goals
- Where are they online? What evokes emotion?
- Craft Ideas
- Get Creative
- Optional Pre promote (audience voting, pr, entice)
- Collaborate w publishers on ideas
- publish
- Optional post promote storeis on the pieces, make it annual
- Optional follow up citations as work spreads
Good content marketing weeds out manipulation.
Content must contain words and phrases that users./ searchers type into search queries – Searcher mental models
Ideally someone searches for something and wants to see the information they’re looking for FIRST.
Expectancy test: what do you expect to see when you click on this link. Imitate google search results and test users and ask what they expect to see.
“information scent” – whoa
Information architecture is part of the user experience
Facets of user experience – Useful – usable – findable – valuable – credible – desirable – accessible – understandable
What is the user experience, it is a person’s perceptions and responses. – What people say and what people do are usually totally different things
Link development – Link popularity – Click popularity – Social Signals: social is a signal, not a directive. not a huge part of the algorithm – Link building is going to adapt – Scholars cite eachother because someone had something really important to say – Authorship is becoming more important and looking at authorship as the new pagerank
Searcher goals and behaviors – Informational: what can I learn – Navigational: where can I go – Means GO – Transactional: what can I do
If you have accurate sitelinks, your click rate goes up 30%. Test your navigational queries, most important pages need to be in your sitelinks. This is your information architecture
What you should see in your link profile, stuff should show more and more for navigational queries
Answers to questions: FAQ, Reference, How to – put these in your website naturally – interlinking super important – e-commerce, guides and wayfinders. total link juice – lists lead to transactional intent – if someone types “best” then they are looking for a list – slideshows can be important for visual related content
ROI Matters, quality ALWAYS trumps quantity – quality of keywords – quality of content
Never put prompt text into a search box, if you want people to search, you want an empty field (Usablity tested)
People tend to view map of all locations before searching by zip code, etc.
Clean URLs are super important, easy access to transactional pages
All websites should contain linkable assets – reference – faqs – articles – checklists – see more in download
Infographics – pie charts, put most important data between 1 and 3 o clock, most people look there
Tough pills to swallow – link dev begins at info architecture stage – not siloed content – not pagerank sculpting – informationa and transactional linkable assets should be a natural part of a sites information architecture – every website should have a unique link profile that accommodates searcher behaviors – reach influencers in your industry to encourage social mentiouns
Keep big data in context: How + Why = ROI
- Create author pages on site
- model after huffington post, clickz
