Content marketing has changed drastically in the past few years. Gone are the days of writing hundreds of very short articles just to attract search engine traffic for as many keywords as possible.
That used to work. 250-300 word articles were all you needed, because the whole point was just to get as much search engine traffic as quickly as possible and send i off to some sort of offer or get them to opt in to you email list.
But these days, content marketing has to be a lot more sophisticated. Those old tactics no longer work. Search engines realized their users were complaining about al the low quality content they indexed, so they made a lot of changes that made those tactics nearly impossible.
Let’s say you wanted information on how to knit a baby blanket. You visited several links from the first two pages of Google that claimed to teach you “how to knit a baby blanket,” but everything you found was just basic information that said to get yarn, knitting needles, and pattern and follow the pattern.
You could have done that on your own, right?
But you wanted specific information that would teach you exactly how to knit a baby blanket.
That’s the kind of thing search engines were battling, and it was making people not want to visit sites like Google and Bing because they weren’t finding quality information.
Google responded especially strongly, coming down on site so hard that many lost their rankings overnight and some were even banned. Even major sites like HubPages, Squidoo and most of the article directories lost nearly all their search engine traffic overnight
Google’s algorithm now looks for things like word count the age of the site, and many other factors to determine ranking, and content must be higher quality than eve in order to have a chance of ranking.
Of course, you don’t have to get any traffic from search engines to do well with content marketing, but since search engine traffic is widely known to be some of the highest quality given the fact that users searched for something specific when they land on your site, it’s obviously a good idea to try to get all of it you can.
Over the next few days, we’re going to talk about some o the best ways to structure your content marketing plan i order to get traffic from as many sources as possible.
Since it’s no longer a good idea to focus mainly on search engine traffic, we’ll take a look at ways to create content that can get you traffic not only from search engines, but also viral/social traffic and other sources.
Tomorrow, we’re going to cover the three main types of content, and how you can use the three types together to form the perfect content marketing plan.
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