Search Marketing Sage

When I was young I made a lot of money on risky high tech stocks in my 401K.  Over the long haul I lost those huge gains, plus nearly everything I’ve invested in them from the start.  The rush of the big gain over the short term was exhilarating, I thought I would be retired in my 50′s…  Obviously, the volatility of the stock market took its toll on my nest egg, but I was young, I at least knew I had time in my life to earn it back.

It was when I saw the impact on the people who were a few years away from retirement that lost almost everything in their 401K and were facing the reality that they likely weren’t going to be able to retire for many years to come, that I realized the need to diversify my investment portfolio.  I realized that big gains in investing were destined to be short term gains (all bubbles must burst).  

It’s National Tell A Story Day tomorrow, April 27th – and as a marketer, I love to tell stories. Ultimately, that is what your content should be doing: telling a story your customers can understand and relate to. But the biggest mistake we as marketers can make in our content is telling a story about our companies and products, and NOT our customers. You must know what challenges they have, how what you’re selling will help them with that challenge, and then create content that shows them this while making them the hero of your story.

I recently participated in a panel of very smart marketers at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, and we talked about how Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates created a fundamental shift in how we view content creation. All of a sudden, we needed to create content that was useful and people liked to read (gasp!), rather than just content to feed the Google monster and get rankings. So, the way we approached SEO also shifted – no more over-optimization practices, just good content that was not only searchable, but shareable.

But that doesn’t mean that SEO goes completely out the window when creating content. You can still optimize, just don’t over-optimize. You want to make sure that Google is still indexing your content correctly and for the proper keywords. Here are some tips to ensure your content is telling Google the right story:

Multi-Channel Attribution is a pretty big topic in our industry, and most of us aren’t as knowledgeable as we would like to be on the subject. Attribution modeling attempts to solve the problem of which channel gets credit when a user touches multiple channels prior to converting. The problem with attribution models historically has been that they segment attributes at the single channel level: paid search, social media, direct traffic, organic search, etc., and often lack the ability to simultaneously compare various models across a multi-channel format.

Continuing with the Semantic SEO Track today at SMX West, the next session I attended today was the session on authorship, featuring Mike Arnesen of SwellPath (@mike_arnesen), Lisa Weinberger of Bankrate, Inc. (@PearlyWrites) and AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old (@ajkohn).

Mike Arnesen

Mike was up first and focused on the journey to quality search results via authorship. Many search results today may seem like a lost cause. Even though there have been many algorithm updates, we often still have to dig through many results to get to the result we want. Search should instead be a tool that connects us with resources that inspire us.

“Great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.” – Othar Hansson, Google

Marketers are increasingly looking to video as a major content marketing priority, making video marketing their top area for investment in 2012. It will continue to be a top priority in 2013, with video considered an effective content marketing tactic by 58% of marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s report 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

With the right strategy in place, video content can be a highly effective content marketing tactic. Whether you’re already creating videos, or want to start creating them, it’s important to make sure they’re properly optimized for search. We’ve created this checklist of video SEO tactics to ensure they get the search engine exposure they deserve.