Some will tell you that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is spammy, untrustworthy and only for those with enough money to cheat the system.
Others say that SEO is an integral part of getting your content noticed amid the noisy web and that anyone NOT publishing with SEO in mind is at best crazy and at worse irresponsible.
But SEO is not inherently evil. It’s no more than an analysis of current web searching trends coupled with best practices in tagging, categorizing and sharing content.
Fiction Bookstore Shelf BlogPic from WinePress of Words.
Take PostRocket, a new software company claiming to have mastered Facebook EdgeRank. Their product uses Facebook APIs to analyze Facebook Page followers, posting patterns and other assorted data to schedule posts for maximum impact. PostRocket helped PitBull nearly double his followers in three weeks, and if it works for a popular recording artist, why wouldn’t the same process help a planned content marketing campaign?
It would, of course.
Thanks to Google’s latest updates, content marketers producing high-quality content above the fold are seeing noticeable gains in traffic. While many of us have complained for years about content farms ranking higher in search results because of keyword stuffing and link buying, it’s nice to know that properly optimized, widely shared and great content has a fighting chance against black-hat SEO tactics.
EdgeRank, content marketing, tagging, sharing, optimizing, categorizing…it all works together. Perhaps we need a different name for what we’re now doing, as SEO seems to have been interpreted as something far more evil than it really is.
Online sharing? Digital publishing? Publishing?
