SEO & Content Marketing: Becoming One

Instead of just pushing press releases as in the past, now publicists have to improve their marketing skills by adding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and journalistic writing to their trade toolbox in order to efficiently grab the attention of online audiences. With the success of the World Wide Web, marketing content in the old fashion manner via printed articles is too difficult and expensive (unless you have a great networking system with all the editors of the world).

The Internet, however, provides so many social sites ripe for taking advertising advantage of. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blog sites (like WordPress and Tumbler), Instagram, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, Ezine Articles, and so many other sites serve as great platforms to publish press releases, articles, videos, photographs, infographics, brand adverts, questions, comments, and whatever content you are marketing. These come with easy access, global transmission and affordable fees (if any). The trick with online content marketing, unfortunately, comes at the price of knowing how Search Engines (like Google and Bing) work. This is where creating SEO-friendly content can help you reach a lot more members of the public.

Making use of keywords and key-phrases is no longer as useful as it was a few years ago. Good writing techniques and linking, however, can help push your content to the top of search results in online browsers. The use of semantics (the study of the relation between denoted meanings and words, signs, symbols, etc.) is even more important as Google and your readers rather want to understand what your content is about that all the Keywords you “stuffed” your content with. Google is clever and knows that a “car” is a “vehicle”, which is “transportation”, which relates to “roads”, and so on.

Both content marketing and SEO are key ingredients to a focused online marketing strategy. A lack of either/both of these ingredients will result in poor online ratings for your brand. However, content marketing is only valuable if the content is of good quality. Without quality content, SEO and content marketing is a useless effort, and vice versa. Face it; without an online image (powered by both content marketing and SEO) your brand will be viewed as less credible.

By: Andy Moller