Content is ever-changing and evolving. What started off being random, simple blogs and cat videos has now taken off into a system where users are more and more constantly starving to consume content specific to them.

When blogging first became big, it wasn’t about helping people — it was all about the blogger, how great their lives or their products were and how great you can be if you followed their tips or bought their e-book. It was narcissistic and self-serving, but internet users were “eating it up” anyway, so to speak.

It filled a need that there was a demand for — lots of people were casually browsing the internet for guidance or for a new way of life and the first bloggers provided that for them.

Blogging, content and search enginge standards have changed, but the medium in which they are released has not. Blogging has evolved into what we consider content today with the help of search engines. Search engine bots have gotten better at organizing the internet and providing more accurate, useful information to the user.

Now all we ever hear is content marketing and how it can help your business…but why is content marketing so effective at helping your business?

Content marketing is effective at creating leads and generating revenue because:

• The old way of advertising is dead — loud, in-your-face tactics are dying out. We’re constantly given more control of what we watch and when we watch it. If we want to learn about something all we have to do is start typing into a search enginge bar.
• It empowers us to make our own informed decisions on our own time. We aren’t pushed into something we don’t want to do which means there is less buyers’ remorse and more satisfaction with our buying decisions.
• It creates another opportunity to rank in search engines.

The last point is important — Google is a text based system. While Google and other search engines use hundreds of factors to determine how you get found, you still have to give it clues.

Writing and releasing a piece of content creates another opportunity for you to get found.

When you release an article it gets indexed into Google’s servers, scatttered across the globe. It sits there until a user types a string of words into the search bar, which then pulls out that piece of content in just miliseconds, for someone to interact with it.

Content is an amazing opportunity for SEO but there are certain things that you need to optimize to increase your chances of getting found faster. It also boosts the rank of your website as a whole if you continuously release SEO-optimized content.

1. Subtle keyword targeting.

The old way of repeating the same keyword over and over again will get you a Google penalty.

You can still target keywords, but in a more subtle way. Googles search algorithm  can understand the different variations of one keyword. So if I use, “SEO” and, “Search Engine Optimization” in the same article it will understand what the theme of my article is and index in it in the right place.

If I also talk about the Google algorithm , search ranking, search marketing and other things related to SEO it will better understand what the article is.

So don’t unnaturally write out and repeate the term SEO over and over again.

2.  Name your files accordingly.

Often times when you create a file and save it whether article or video it will save to something default like this:

“article.txt” or, “video.mp4.”

This is a subtle opportunity to rank that people often ignore.

By renaming it something relevant it just adds another layer to SEO. For example, it would be in the best interest of an online flower shop with photos to label each picture individually.

So instead of, “picture.jpg,” rename the file to something more relevant to your content like, “Red Roses” or, “Pink Roses” or whatever color they may be. The more descriptive in four words or less, the better.

No one is searching the internet with ‘.jpg’ and they wouldn’t know the default set of numbers your operating system automatically creates.

Help Google understand you and your website better and you will be rewarded.

3.  Fill out the title, tags or description.

These are key areas that are often ignored. If you work with a content management system of any sort, this is another opportunity to reinforce to Google what your article is. SEO works at multiple levels and the more clues you offer the better. You’re essentially leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that you are a legitimate website.

It also helps other people understand what they are looking at. If someone stumbles upon your article why should they click on it if you don’t make it easy for them to do so? If someone stumbles upon your content and see’s a relevant title, a short description of what it is and also a few tags to back it all up, they can then justify clicking on it.

People are much more cognizant of spam and wasting their time on the internet these days. We have become immune to spam just like we’ve become immune to old-school marketing and advertising tactics.

If users are looking for something specific and your content happens to be what they’re looking for, with the right optimization they’ll find it with the help of search engines. If your article isn’t fully optimized, chances are they and search engines could both miss it and you’ll have worked hard with not much results.

If SEO and content marketing are dragons you haven’t been able to slay, let us help you ‘Get Found Fast.’