Content Marketing and Social Media

by David Brown

Google started it way back when. They developed sophisticated un-hackable algorhythms to determine which websites have more relevance than others for certain keyword phrases. That has continued to be refined where Google bots most likely look at everything to determine ranking.

That’s what SEO (search engine optimization) developers continue to research, monitor, and deploy in getting the best results for their clients. The most important buzzword these days in the SEO world  is content. Content is what drives the Googlebot scanning the page to absorb the page relevance in milliseconds.Follow @logionwebdesign  The quality of the content, links embedded in the content, and now developing, the social media sharing of the content, can all have the effect of influencing Google’s page ranking of the content. But should content be written just to please Google? It used to be and still is. They even provide guideline and webmaster tools to help us do it. Let’s get back to basics and add something very important – an important goal - to this idea of “pleasing Google”. What should be your primary goal?

Your primary goal should be to provide high quality content that is written out of a commitment to serve your target audience with the most up to date, interesting and useful information that they will want to use and share. Share is the most important keyword in this idea. If your target readers are not engaged in what you have to say, respect your knowledge and authority in your field, and feel that the information is worth reading, then they may not share it. If they love the content, and they have an easy means to share it (social media links), then this may result in your secondary goal. Your secondary goals should be have your content – a blog, tip, tweet, or post shared by one person to others through word-of-mouth, likes, retweets, and/or reviewed and ranked (Yelp, Infopages, Google +1, etc. ).
The recent changes to Facebook Insights for business – the analytics of who responds and acts on your Facebook business page posts, includes seeing the number of friends that this person has, and giving weight to the fact that when they liked your post (link, blog, etc.) it was shared with their entire list of friends.  It can be shared just be the timeline entry of “John just liked ABC Remodeling’s post about new flooring ideas”. It could also be shared with John posting a direct comment to his Facebook wall that he liked the post. John may even add a link to the page that he liked. This is where content quality meets social media marketing. Social media marketing is done by the social networks, not by you directly. Referrals of business by satisfied clients are always from them, not from you, even though it is all about you!