SEO Isn’t Dead. Search Engine Optimization Wasn’t Killed By The Content Revolution.

Not. So. Fast.

There are days when you might think that every single website on the planet is focusing on Content, and Content Alone, as its strategy. Social Media Gurus will tell you that you need to be posting on every single platform at all hours of the day and night just to have a chance of being found by the search engines.

Content Farms and Content Creation Engines will tell you that it’s all about fresh, relevant, really good content: and you don’t need  to write for the search engines if your stuff is awesome. Because people share awesome, right?

Right?

In one of our 12 Minute Marketing lessons, we talk about Search Engine Optimization. It’s not a deep study of the science – it’s enough so that you can cover the basics for your business (not so that you can turn yourself into an SEO Ninja). And yes, we’ll admit that we do say “Content, good content, is important.” Relevant content is important. But a couple other takeaways to complete our study here…

Links are just as important as Content.

It’s one thing to say “I’m going to link to a similar website, like that of Spin Sucks, just because it will help me.” But it’s entirely another thing to link somewhere (1) with authority and (2) with relevance to what you are talking about.

For instance: in the photo we use on this post, there’s an article on Read Write Web on SEO and the Google algorithm changes. This is what started us down the path of posting on the value of SEO – the article made it seem as if Content trumps SEO, and SEO is, thus, not important. WRONG.

As you see, we are linking to the article in a post about a similar bit of content. It’s not a trick, it’s not gaming the system. It is an SEO basic: Link to what you’re talking about. Bringing us to our second SEO takeaway:

Try owning long-tail terms of 3 or more words.

Back in September, when we guest posted on the Social Mouths blog, we didn’t plan on owning the term “Social Media.” Too short, too many searches. We DID plan on pwning “Holistic Social Media.” It worked: our SocialMouths Holistic Social Media post is still number one for that term – and our own posts, on Area 224 and 12 Minute Marketing, are in the top 5.

It didn’t hurt that it was a well-written post (IMHO) and had great content in it. But it focused on an actual term that made sense in the post and it was explained well in the post.

This means you’re more likely to own terms that you can actually say something about: Tallahassee Real Estate Trends, for instance, if you are a Realtor in Tallahassee.

What does this all tell you?

SEO isn’t THIS simple. But it isn’t dead, either. You can focus on great content, sure, but you also need to make sure you are linking to other relevant content and not trying to jump into the pool for short keywords.

Go. Search Engine Optimize!