If you haven't read Ken Krogue's articles on the death of SEO and the rise of real content on Forbes.com, please stop reading this blog and read what Ken has to say first. It's what all of us in Little Media (social, PR, inbound) have been evangelizing about for awhile. Content matters. Google rewards hard work (i.e. production of good content). Personally, I'm ecstatic that Ken is leading the real content charge in Big Media.
It's worth highlighting and expanding on some of Ken's salient points:
- Real Content - Krogue rails against counterfeit content designed to simply point to a landing page. He calls on Google to offer metrics on how much fake content is pointing to real content. Additional questions to ask might be how smart Google has become in identifying real vs. fake content and what 'real content' metrics can they share with us. Of course, it's much easier for a real human to identify fake content. How well Google's software can identify fake content, especially in a variety of languages, remains to be seen.
- Core Content - Strategize and and write your core content once and then radiate it through advanced media modalities like webinars and ebooks. Here at LyntonWeb, we've written a blog series on increasing your blog's value which we are now compiling into a downloadable ebook that we'll also upload to Scribd. The core content is the same but the audience will be expanded as our ebook is shared across multiple platforms.
- Real But Not Great - Content can be great but still fake. I would rather err on the side of real than great any day. If your organization is committed and passionate about creating real content, it should be understood that you won't hit it out of the park every time. Every blog post can't go viral. Every ebook won't be downloaded like crazy. Your content foul balls and strikes, however, will offer data and insight on how to proceed with future content - which will lead to real and great content.
Content is an asset. Once you build it, leads will come. You own the content asset - forever, and that's a mighty long time. True content is much different from links that are built for you in some far off corner of the Internet to supposedly increase your search ranking. True content is also different from PPC campaigns that need continuous budget to keep driving traffic to your website.
Thanks Ken, for leading the charge and not being afraid to discuss what really matters in SEO.
Photo credit: Al_HikesAZ