Content curation seems to be all the rage nowadays. In fact, most businesses now use content creation as a standard marketing tool to increase their search and brand visibility online. Like so many folks seem to say; “every online business is now a publisher too”. Whereas most enterprises used to restrict themselves to creating manuals, brochures and perhaps a motivational book (10,000 Secrets to Flaming Corporate Success!) or two, loads of online businesses are now creating entire resource centers in the hope of ranking well on their favorite Google SERP.
Well, this isn’t a bad thing. Content curation actually does a whole lot for your SEO efforts. In this article, I’ll try to explain why.
1. Goldmines Get Noticed
As an increasing numbers of users find that your content adds value to their lives, they link to it and reference it across the web. This is a great way to organically improve your SEO rankings without resorting to mass linking, keyword stuffing and other shady techniques.
2. Broaden Your Horizon
A general rule of thumb is to curate content that includes the keywords you optimize for. The easiest way to do this (outside of black hat) is by creating content about your field of expertise. As you build up appealing content that appeals to a broad user base, you’ll find that people reference you in their content creation efforts, boosting your search rankings.
3. Being Shallow Pays Off
Most curation sites, by dint of the very human need to classify things, are well organized platforms that have a relatively shallow internal linking structure. Google crawlers love that stuff. In Google treated information like a pie, then easy-to-crawl site architecture would most definitely be the filling. Mmmm… Pie filling..
4. Frequent Updating = Frequent Indexing
By producing content on a regular basis, you’ll develop a site that’s being updated fairly frequently. Google gives you brownie points for consistently posting unique content by getting it’s crawlers to index your page more frequently. Create a dynamic page and you can rest assured Google will add dynamism to your rankings.
5. Refine Your Results
Create targeted landing pages that are focus on specific content attributes like optimized keywords or author biographies. This will help your site get indexed faster and will also ensure that you rank well for highly refined searches.
6. Geeks Can Be Cool Too
Jargon is bad, yes. But wait! Are you confusing jargon with trending keywords? Believe me, there’s a massive difference between the two. Don’t be afraid to use them if you see usage patterns emerging during the course of your research or even in user comments and references. Keyword analytics are also a great way to identify trending words and phrases that will help you optimize your suite towards that golden SERP spot.
7. Google Love Your Long Tail
Niche traffic can be your best friend, especially when they flock to you in large numbers. If your content creation is suitably diverse, you’ll find that you can attract lots of long tail traffic, all of which contributes positively to Google’s opinion of your site.
Note the obsequious references to Google. Learn from them.
While Baidu might help you in China, and Bing might give you a run for your money in the wonderful world of long tail, Google is what’s going to drive the most traffic (and business) to your content rich pages.
Sources
http://www.heronacademy.com
http://esalesdata.com
http://www.mmaglobal.com
Linda Mentzer is a published author and senior marketing manager for an information management company that has helped sell thousands of software products on a global scale. With over 11 years of experience in electronic marketing techniques, Linda has authored articles for several leading business journals, worldwide.