For a start targeting organic search alongside your Pay-Per-Click campaigns is proven to work, with studies showing that appearing twice on the same page in search results can increase click through rates by 20%. Searchers see the organic and paid-for listings together and make the correct assumption that that website is more relevant to their search requirements than others.

Google’s Universal Search is opening up previously hidden (or at least hard to find) sections of the web to new users. By allowing users to search by hour, day and week, as well as making it easier to search specifically on things like blogs, social media, video and news, Google is inviting websites to update their content more regularly and offer users something new. 

Common SEO practises such as buying inbound links can be easily achieved naturally via daily content production for social and search. Regularly updated content is increasingly what Google and other search engines want. Google crawlers give weight to website news sections that are updated continually, with listing in Google News highly likely for those that meet the relevant content and technical criteria. Inclusion in Google News brings with it increased traffic, social media exposure and great branding opportunities, too. 

Social Media Benefits of Publishing Daily Content 

The life blood of social media is daily content. Log on to brand pages on Facebook and follow successful companies on Twitter and you’ll see that they all have one thing in common; good, engaging content. Content is King on social media websites. IAB research published in 2010 shows that 1 in 2 users on Facebook and Youtube think that it’s a good idea for brands to have their own pages and users who visit brand pages looking for product information are 50% more likely to share information with friends & family. 

Little wonder then that the IAB recommendation for success with social media is to create content that gives consumers prestige. Add to this the fact that search engines are increasingly incorporating Facebook Likes, Tweets and Google+ counts to their search algorithms and it’s easy to see why social media is becoming increasingly important.  

SEO Benefits of Publishing Daily Content 

Not only will daily content enhance the look and feel of your website, giving visitors something worthwhile to read, but regular content published to site is a sure fire way to gain Google love. 

Why? At a very basic level simply growing the number of indexable keyword relevant pages on your website will increase the frequency search engine spiders visit your site. Make this content relevant, informative and engaging to your customer base and daily content updates inevitably lead to more inbound links, too:  blogs, relevant websites and social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all love linking to good, engaging content. Not only does this bring more visitors to your website, it also brings with it increased SEO value too. 

Social Media or Search the answer is still the same: consumers are looking for quality content that can aid their sales research, inform their decision making and fill them with confidence when they make an online purchase.

 Please Note: For any SEO benefit all of the content you create needs to be 100% unique. Publishing content that has appeared on other website before will not aid your overall SEO.

What Content Should I Create?

Think about your brand, business or website demographic and try to imagine the type of content format that best works for them. Daily industry news and tip style content works well. With Universal Search becoming increasingly popular and phrases containing the word ‘video’ among the most popular terms searched in Google, you may want to create a daily video – proven to perform well in social media.

Use Social Listening Tools

Now you have your format nailed, try and discover what your target audience is talking about on social media by using social listening tools to gauge trends and conversations. You may want to think about commissioning a dedicated social listening report for your brand, looking at what social media users say and think about you. You can then use this information to develop your social content strategy

How Much Content Should I Write?

The Google Panda update has given considerable weight to content led websites and evidence suggests that content rich pages of 300+ words perform better after the update than pages with less text. As rule of thumb for SEO success with news content you should be writing between 300 and 500 words per news article as anything less is increasingly ineffective for SEO. In addition to publishing news content of 300 to 500 words, publishing longer, more in-depth content pages of around 800+ words on a regular basis will leave search engines with the impression that your website is extremely content rich and highly relevant.

Publishing good, concise, blog titles, teaser introductions and relevant Tweets is also important when it comes to maximizing content exposure on social media, too.

How to Publish:

You may want to think about how you will publish content to your website. Do you have your own website content management system? If not, installing WordPress for free and hosting it on your own server is relatively straightforward (good seo content providers can help with this) and has some excellent SEO tools for increased content optimisation too. There are also numerous social media plugins available that allow the sharing and liking of content for your target audience.

Distribution Channels:

Publishing content is just the start of the process. In order to succeed think about making your content as ‘shareable’ as possible. Add social bookmark links to websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit to your news pages, as well as Facebook and Twitter links so that anyone who likes your content can share your content easily.

Additionally, add an RSS feed to your news pages so that users can subscribe to your content feeds. Another way to engage with customers and use the content you’ve created is to begin publishing weekly or monthly content led newsletters.

How to Write Killer Content for Social and SEO Benefit

When creating content you need to bear in mind the following:

Be engaging: Content should be interesting, informative and ultimately engaging to your target audience. Your daily content update is not another opportunity to deliver your business sales pitch.

Offer Something New: Whether you are the first to tell website and social media followers about a new product or service launch, or you are publishing informative advice and opinions on industry trends, always try to offer users something new.

Don’t Give Up: Coming up with ideas for daily blog posts and video content can be demanding and many companies make a good start, before time constraints and other priorities take their toll and what was a daily content production cycle becomes an every so-often occurrence. Publishing daily is key to success in both Social and SEO, so don’t give up, over time you will reap the benefits.

Online content marketing and branded content are set to be big in 2012. As head of a content department in a busy online content agency you would of course expect me to say that, but don’t just take my word for it: figures published in December from the Content Marketing Institute shows that 60% of marketers plan to increase content marketing budgets in 2012.

The same research also shows that content marketing is now responsible for 26% of total B2B marketing spending.

Why is this happening? Below I will show you how creative content and strong editorial – no matter what your industry, product or service, or the demographic you are targeting – can and does work in improving your online presence and, ultimately, winning you new business.

Here’s why Content Marketing is right for you in 2012:

Social Media: You would have read all about social media growth last year. Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin all continued to grow at a phenomenal pace in 2011 and Google+ is just the latest addition.

So what’s this got to do with content? If you want people to visit your website, engage with your brand and be informed of what you actually do via social media you can’t continually send people to your home page, expecting them to miraculously get in touch – you need to inform and educate them with interesting, relevant content.

Think about it: you are reading this article because you found it interesting – you are interacting with Search News Media and our brand – but only because what you are reading is useful and of interest to you. This is what content marketing can do for you and your brand in 2012. Social likes and views are increasingly part of search engine algorithm results too, so content will boost your overall SEO objectives too.

The SEO Connection

Lets be honest, would you really care if you had the best journalism in the world on your website if it didn’t help your ultimate aim of bringing in more website traffic and more business? Probably not.

At Search News Media we know this and while we continually strive to create the best daily news and social content there is, the good news for all marketers is that good quality content can help your overall goals when it comes to SEO.

Why? Thanks to Google’s Panda update and additional algorithm tweaks good quality content, published on your website, preferably daily, is key for keeping your website looking fresh in search engines’ eyes.

Perhaps one of the best things about creating regular content to publish on your website is that it will naturally increase links to your site, too. Organic links are highly valued for SEO.

The creation of regular daily content will see your content linked to from various other blogs, social bookmarking websites, websites and social media accounts – all of which translates into improved SEO.

Google News

If you create regular daily news content for your website that is of good quality and of interest to your customers and other web users then after a few months you should be able to be listed in Google News and other news aggregators. If this happens and you write timely, news trending content on relevant topics you can increase visitor numbers to your website by as much as 300% – all through the value of your content.

So, what are you waiting for in 2012? Get started today.

 Why do I need a social media content calendar?

 If you are running your brand’s social networks – Facebook and Twitter – you will need a content plan. Why? Because you can’t simply send people through to your home page everyday, can you? Users of social networks need content in order to engage.  Online content is the way to go for SEO too. The days of simply buying up links and anchor text urls are numbered.

An editorial calendar will connect content and themes for social media and your website – it will help you plan ahead and will help you develop a coherent content marketing strategy.

Your calendar can bridge together blogs, online newsrooms, web pages, offers, events and campaigns, and can then be linked to places such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Therefore it is crucial for successful publishing and should be at the heart of any content marketing strategy that you work on.

Follow these tips on how best to structure your Content Calendar:

• Recognition – Write your content down in an accessible place for everyone to see
• Organise – Set dates for when your content should be finished by
• Inspiration – Set yourself subjects or titles and then brain storm each title for creative thoughts.
• SEO – Link in your subjects or titles with keywords to enhance the SEO strategy
• Review- Assess the growth, and review what it is that popular, which will prove to be valuable to future editorial ideas

Tips for constructing your Social Media Editorial Calendar:

1. Set Goals – Plan your goals to ensure growth is met in phases
2. Timing – Break your calendar down month-by-month, then week-by-week to day-by-day. This will increase structure and regularity to your work
3. Topics – For each month pick strong themes that can break down into sub-categories. Think about events that take place in any given month that you could write about.
4. Publicise – Share your calendar and collaborate across a team of writers and editors. If you do not have the staff in-house, think about outsourcing to a relevant company of content specialists to help – they could even help with creating the editorial calendar. [Editor’s Note: Insert gratuitous plug for Search News Media services here. Done.] .
5. Adjust- Adjust to the forever evolving social media network and landscape to accommodate for new communication strategies.

An organised social media editorial calendar will save you time by having a structured time frame to stick to which eliminates time wasting activities. Most importantly a calendar will help your content marketing achieve results.

Kevin Walsh, News Editor, Search News Media.

When Google initiated its link building algorithm in the late 1990s, it was rightly seen as something of a revolution in terms of SEO. For the first time search engines had a unique method for identifying the most important web pages for different keywords and topics. 

As anyone even slightly familiar with SEO will be able to tell you – the link building algorithm has been abused in recent years. There are numerous strategies out there being used to manipulate the link building process and some are worse than others. 

For many SEOs it is currently all about links and link-building. But while many SEOs are concentrating heavily on generating links – Google and other search engines are changing the rules. 

Links are no longer going to be as important and, as Eric Enge recently highlighted in Search Engine Watch, here’s why:

Links have been abused so much that they are no longer a valid marker for authority and trust. Before Google, links were added for relevancy – not link-juice – and they therefore were an obvious marker of good quality for search engines to identify. Can we honestly say that links are a sign of good authority anymore? 

With social media results increasingly playing a part in search algorithms and search engines increasingly looking at areas such as content updates onsite and time on site, the days of simply buying up a load of links and seeing yourself go to the top of Google are numbered.

 One of the most valuable methods to get your site noticed is to generate great content. 

Good content will help generate social likes, inbound links and increase crucial website markers such as time onsite. Link building as SEO is destined to end – it has to: content marketing is the future. Why? If you create content people want to read and link to, there is no way that Google or any social/search engine is going to penalise you.

Over the course of a week towards the end of 2010 I analysed what I naturally clicked on when using Facebook. What were the results?

Well, I followed links to a news item about Harry Potter becoming a BA at an English University; a podcast about new show The Walking Dead; a post it note showing all of Chewbacaca’s dialogue on Star Wars; a web video clip on youTube by a travel journalist at Ho Chi Ming City, a news item about the number of Brits falling into bankruptcy and a link to the latest Travelzoo sale.

Was I looking for any of these things when I logged onto Facebook? No. Did I remember to watch The Walking Dead when it aired on FX? Yes, I did.

Has it made me visit Travelzoo when I am next looking for a cheap holiday, or to visit The Guardian over the Telegraph for money news? Quite possibly.

I even sometimes add the websites I visit via social media to my favourites tabs because they offer interesting content, typically that I don’t find when I do a Google search.

Social Media is word of mouth marketing at its best, and, because it delivers significant numbers of website visitors and real inbound links, it also helps your SEO objectives too.

But at the heart of your social media success lies content – without content you have no referrals, no recommendations and no inbound links.

The challenge for companies is ‘how to create linkable, relevant content’ that will aid the sales pipeline and generate more and more recommendations and visitors. That’s where we come in.

Posted by: D Lovell.

Source: Gigya, 2010

Source: Gigya, 2010

Source: Gigya, 2010

Source: Marketing Content Spending Survey by Junta 42