If you have heard that content marketing is dead, you need to think twice about getting any other information from the source that is telling you that. In my opinion, there has never been a better time to focus on quality content marketing – written text or even songs or video. Today, we’re going to take a look at why marketing with content is far from dead as a long term strategy. I’m feeling generous, so maybe I’ll drop a few tactics as well.

Content Marketing Defined

Basically, content marketing is defined as using content to attract visitors, customers and others to a brand or website. The quality of the content and the frequency at which it is released as well as the channels used to get it out to people are all important.

Content marketing is not something that appeared with the Internet, but the world wide web makes it easier for more people to benefit from marketing with content because it can be easier to create online – without expensive print costs.

The trick is using all that saved money to buy or produce better content, but this is usually not what happens unfortunately. Below we are going to take a look at quality content marketing, including some specific tactics and tips that you should keep in mind when employing these proven methods to help your website.

Quality Content Marketing

One of the important things to remember when using content for marketing is that you want to make sure you use high quality content. If you use inferior content (like spun-stories for example), what are the real chances you are going to engage someone and want to get them to come to your website? Not very good.

On the other hand, if you are using great content that is not only unique but also entertaining and full of useful information, there is a good chance you are not only going to attract new visitors to your website, you are also going to be able to keep them there. If they really like the content, there’s a good chance they will bookmark the site and return or even recommend it to all their friends – which is the real payoff for content marketing that is done right.

Here are some tips to think about.

• Quality over Quantity – It may seem like you are hearing this everywhere these days – especially post-Panda – but there’s a reason for this! It makes sense and it can really help your SEO efforts if you put it into practice.  In the past brute force SEO methods that relied on quantity worked, but more and more it has become easy for Google, Bing and others to simply devalue mass web spam littering useless links all over the Internet. (Ever wonder why there are so many services to backlink your backlinks?!)
• Practice Makes Perfect – Whatever niche you are in, it is going to take a while to figure out exactly what your audience wants from you when it comes to content. Making it easy for visitors to get in touch with you and let you know what they want is the easiest way to get this information and use it to create great new content. Putting content up is practice in a way, allowing you to

Tactics for Marketing with Content

Here is a look at some short term tactics you can use to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

•  Avoid Spinning - If you think blanketing the Internet with thousands or hundreds of thousands of spam pages that are simple spun copies of an original text is a good idea, you must be trapped in 2005. While the technique worked to varying degrees after 2005, that was the beginning of the end for a lot of duplicate content as the search engines really began to crack down on web spam.
• Avoid Spamming - In addition to not spinning stories, you should also avoid spamming or polluting the Internet in any way possible. While it is easy to justify it in your mind – for some people – you need to think long term and the effects that polluting the Internet can have on your brand or website.
• Do This Instead – If you stop buying link packages and SENuke blasts on Fiverr for a while, you should have enough money to pay a content professional enough money to come up with quality content that can really turbocharge your content marketing.

There are many other tactics and techniques that you should be using, but the main point is that focusing on content and not just getting links is one of the best long term SEO moves you can use to succeed. With good content marketing, the links are going to come as a side effect (and look more natural, which is important.) If the links do NOT come, you need to increase the quality of your content.

While you can buy more content from Asians and others at a penny a word or less, do you really want your visitors to see that and think of you or your brand? And beyond that – even if you are using them on Web 2.0 properties – will it be too long before they’re found out and devalued as links and end up just being another dead page on the Internet taking up space and using up bandwidth?

Whether you think content marketing is dead or not, we would love to hear what you think. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. Additionally, if you have some tips that we missed or something you do that you would like to share, please leave a comment below and let us know!

Speaking of SEO predictions for 2012 and a roundup of search engine optimization in 2011, what about the long term future of the SERPs and how we interact with them? Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the way out there predictions for search engine optimizers…

The Information Age

As the Industrial Age came to a close and the Information Age started up in the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of people were excited about the prospects for a brave new world – hopefully not too much like 1984 (the book not the actual year…)

The Y2k fears came and went as the Internet continued to gain dominance in everyday life. Now, it is hard to imagine getting through the day without being able to “search the Internet” for a quick and easy answer. From how to prepare the best coffee cake to self-diagnosis of health problems to learning how to shoe a horse, the knowledge suddenly available to everyone was overwhelming.

Amongst all the information that was actually helpful, a trend of creating pages (filling space) on the Internet for a solely financial purpose began to dilute the effectiveness of the Internet as a useful and safe place. The Internet has come a long, long way since the early days in the 1990s, but even today there is a lot of changes still happening.

Beyond Basic Search

From auto-correcting spelling mistakes to offering definitions or other information besides just listings of and links to websites, Google and Yahoo / Bing  have come a long way, whatever you call them. (YaBing or BingHoo, dear reader? Leave your thoughts below!) Still, there is a good chance that the first page of the SERPs (especially above the fold) will continue to change and evolve. While some say the search engines are just out to make money, to make the money they know they need to make a good / useful product – which doesn’t always align with letting other people make money on their platform.

As the web progresses, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see “search engines” evolve as well. The search engines today are a far cry from what was available even five or ten years ago. In another five or ten years, it is a little difficult to imagine what may be possible. Take intent, for example. Even today, it is possible for Google and others to try to piece together the intent of a searcher – be it information gathering or to make a purchase or something else. The ability to read the mind (in a way) of a searcher is only going to increase as time goes on. Some day soon there may be something known as pre-search. Okay, maybe that is taking it a bit far, but a science fiction writer should jump on writing a tale about a search engine AI program running wild. Imagine the damage that could be done.

Even back here in reality, the search engines (especially Google) are making great strides in being able to offer searches more of what they want – or more of what Google thinks they want. It will be interesting to see if human powered search engines like ChaCha (to name one) eventually end up doing better than Google at searching for particular answers. For example, now you can text ChaCha a question directly and get an answer for free. While you can search Google for free on most phones these days, there is no human person on the other end making sure there is one definitive answer to the question asked. On the other hand, it is hard for a company like ChaCha to scale well.

Computer, do you hear me?

Remember that scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Scotty is about the Enterprise on modern day earth and he tries to talk into the mouse when giving out a design for stronger glass? While the new iPhone 4S allows for a basic talk to the computer and get an answer, this technology is going to grow by leaps and bounds in the years ahead, imho.

How does this affect SEO efforts? In a big way actually. When you stop and think about it, you can easily see how having quality content – answers not just facts – is going to be important, even crucial. The search engines are going to have to go a lot further than they are today, but with so many smart people working on the problem, it’s only a matter of time before the artificial intelligence used to index the Internet is also able to give us answers to our questions and maybe make life a little easier – at least for consumers.

For those of us who publish websites online, it is going to become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. While black hat methods are always likely to exist, the rate at which the holes will be caught and filled will increase as time goes on, making black hat – short term – methods less and less worth the money. On the other hand, those who put efforts into their website(s) and provide quality information in a fun and entertaining way will be on top – with or without the search engines.

If you have any thoughts about the long term future of SEO, leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts on the topic. We’d love to hear from you!

You heard it here first, folks. Ok, maybe you didn’t hear these here first, but you’re going to hear them here! Seriously, though, I want to take a look at some predictions for SEO in 2012 … and beyond!

SEO 2011 Roundup

Before beginning predictions, I want to take a look at SOME of the highlights for SEO in 2011. If I miss anything, leave a comment and take me to task! (Although I’d love to hear from you, dear reader, anytime…)

• Panda – From being pandalyzed to bearing the brunt of the “Farmer Update,” one of the bigger SEO events this year was the rollout and continued use of the Panda algorithm that helps Google determine “quality websites” to display in their SERPs. (I should note that my grandmother asked who decided what quality was when I was talking to her about it the other day. Also, please call your grandparents or parents if they’re around. You don’t have to talk SEO topics with them if your grandparents aren’t as hip as mine, but it’s still a good thing! Okay, that’s done…) Panda was big news for SEO in 2011 and will continue to wreak havoc (or clean up the web) in 2012 and beyond.
• Definition of Quality – For some, 2011 will be the year that an “official” definition of quality content was formed. Well, maybe it’s not an exact science – yet – but as the Internet unfolds, it is going to be harder and harder to fool the bots and rank with garbage content. This is a side-effect of the Panda update in a way, but it’s also a natural part of the evolution of the web.
• Backlinks – Yahoo Site Explorer closed down recently, leaving Majestic as the #1 source for information on backlinks behind Google. There is an article (or three) out there explaining how much it costs to actually run an operation that crawls and categorizes all the links on the Internet.
• (Not Provided) – Google taking away referrer data from signed in SSL users is going to make it more difficult for webmasters as more and more people begin to use Google based products and are signed in when they search (or “Google”) the web. 
• EMD – Exact match domains lost a LOT of strength over the course of 2011. Whether or not the balance will be restored in 2012 remains to be seen, but many exact match domains are not performing as they did in the past.
• Above the Fold – Google has begun to try to take a look at what is “above the fold” on a webpage so they can better gauge whether it is spam or valuable content. Not a lot is known about the “Above the Fold” Algorithm from Google, but it has a lot of people interested in the technology.
• Author Reputation – As Google+ grows and more and more people sign-up, Google has been testing using Google+ profiles tied to a piece of content to help gauge its value. As the future progresses, I believe this is going to be more and more important for SEO – brand and name of writer will be important.
• Google+ – The appearance of a new social network was perhaps missed by some, but almost overnight Google was able to sign-up millions and millions of users to Google+. While they had some snafus, they are still coming out with changes to the network at an astounding rate.

SEO Predictions for 2012

Here are some of my predictions for SEO in 2012.

• Backlinks – New tools will be built and released to help track backlinks across the Internet. Whether it will be the folks at SEOMoz or someone else, I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen.
• Google – Dominance by Google will continue, with Yahoo and Bing (YaBing) unable to catch up to the current market leader. At the same time, I expect more governmental involvement when it comes to everything Google does.
• Links – The backbone of the Google system for ranking – links – are still going to be important in 2012. In fact, they may be even more important – not masses of them but the quality of the links rather than the quantity. This will affect sales of some of the automated tools out there, but so many buy those not knowing if they ever work or not. The value of certain types of links is going to be looked at more closely as well as things like link velocity (the speed at which you gain or lose links over time.)
• Social Signals – Whether it is the Facebook like button or the Google+ plus one button or Twitter tweets, social signals are going to be used more and more to separate the good content from the less than good content. Gaming the social networks will still be a part of SEO, but as with other automated methods, it is going to become more and more difficult.

Their SEO Predictions

Because it’s that time of the year, here’s a round-up of some other SEO predictions for 2012 and beyond.

• Content Marketing Institute News – This is a simple infographic, but it has some interesting numbers on what some companies are going to be doing for SEO in 2012 and beyond. It’s one way to think about what may be coming.
• Serps.com – At the SERPs blog, they have a look at some of their predictions for SEO in 2012. One of their interesting predictions is that Twitter search is going to become mainstream in 2012 and beyond.

Your SEO Predictions?

And, as always, we would love to hear from you. If you have any predictions about SEO in the future, leave a comment below and let us know. Even if you just want to take us to task for something, we welcome the challenge to win you over.