In the early days of online search, there were easy ways to manipulate search results and gain first page rankings for your website. While this worked for quite a few years, eventually Google became interested in rewarding websites for providing an all-around quality user experience to their visitors.
Newer algorithm updates and the continued sophistication of search engine crawlers have made most tactics unsuccessful. Adding a blog extension or Facebook page might help for a short term but can backfire in the long term. One way to avoid the pitfalls of singular tactics is to genuinely invest in an organic marketing strategy focused on quality content. It’s also important to stay within the guidelines of search without being restrained by them.
Content-Centric Search is built around the concept of creating a campaign strategy for your business that will allow you to generate themed content that is search friendly and will make your customers and crawlers equally enthusiastic. There are a number of ways to go about creating such a strategy built on three factors. Those three factors are:
1. Creating Digital Assets that are Content Centric and Search Friendly.
Technically Optimized Search-Aware Digital Assets
Once a visitor has reached your website and has committed to reading your content, the last thing you want to have happen is for them to leave because of slow load times. The speed of your website can impact the engagement level of a person reading and interacting with any of its content. By spending the time ensuring you have a fast and intuitive website, you can guarantee a pleasant user experience for each site visitor. This ensures that your website and all technical assets are optimized for the search engines.
Technical Aspects
Creating quality content does not mean ignoring the technical specs of a website. The technical side of things should work side by side with the original content in order to gain full traction from the campaign. Two technical specs that are still having impact on website search rankings are title tags and rich snippets. Naturally written tags that help the search engines understand the context of the page can positively impact your site.
Rich Snippets are a markup format that can be inserted into your page code to allow the search engines to crawl and index, the author or publisher of content, also reviews, recipes, locations, events etc.
2. Content Production: Creating compelling content that will help grow your business
Theming Your Content
With rankings that are harder to manipulate, it’s crucial to create content that is addressing the needs of your target customer. By concentrating on a genuine and engaging brand that takes search into account and not the other way around, you can be much more laser focusing on who your target demographic is and gear content towards that group.
3. Content Promotion across all Media Channels
Marketing Your Content
Once you have created content for your target audience and made sure your website runs smoothly, you should begin turning your attention to how to promote that content. It’s important to try and span all content channels. There are three promotion channels that can work to promote your content across owned and paid media channels, while working to find influencers, bloggers and journalists to promote your content through earned media.
The grouping and interlinking of similar content is one of the most effective ways to show the search engines the depth and breadth of your website’s content.