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In the previous years, the focus of SEO was in the optimization of websites that ranks well on search engines. Different techniques for on-page and off-page optimization, like white hat and black hat SEO, were used just to be on top of search results.

But in 2011 and 2012, search engines (particularly Google) made major changes with their algorithms. They removed those websites with low-quality and ‘spammy’ content from top positions. Their goal is to make search results more relevant to human searches. Only those websites with high-quality content were left at the top. These moves made by major search engines, as well as the popularity of social media, have affected the way professionals play search engine optimization today.

According to mediawhiz.com, SEO in 2013 is predicted to be as the “year of the consumer,” which means that “SEO will shift from optimizing websites for search engines to optimizing content for users.” In other words, content optimization for the users must be the first priority of SEO experts, and optimizing content for search engines will only come next. Thus, success in organic search relies on the quality and relevance of the content.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the trends of SEM for 2013. It is also a one of the crucial factors that will define one’s survival in SEO this year. It is not a new thing; however, it is starting to become a ‘big hit’ now. Content marketing is defined as “a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action” (kingcontent.com). It is the “type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you” (coppyblogger.com).

Content Marketing Optimization

Guest posting/blogging, webinars, journal publication are examples of content marketing. However, content marketing will only work with great content. It is not about bragging your company’s greatness over your competitors or boasting how superb your products/services are. It is about sharing your expertise and other valuable information that your target audience can relate. However, it is only after you have created a high-quality content for the human users, you can optimize it for search engines. Hence, it is also important to follow some rules about content marketing optimization.

1. Use semantically related keywords within the content- Latent Semantics Indexing (LSI) is “an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text” (Wikipedia). In other words, search engines will know where to categorize a certain content based on the highly-related terms (which are synonymous to main keywords) used in the text. So next time that you are writing your masterpiece, don’t stuff it with repeated search terms, instead use synonyms to substitute the overused keywords.
2. Google Authorship- It is a feature which allows Google to associate content to an individual person, and display a related headshot and name next to it in Search (Grimes-Viort). Aside that this feature can protect your work from content thieves (as Google would know who the original one is), it can also boost your online presence in Google search result and page ranking.
3. Social Signals- Social media has the ability to improve brand awareness and overall online visibility, which could be converted into new inbound links. And as the number of social media users keeps on growing, social signals such as shares, retweets, mentions and +1s, can also improve one’s ranking. So make it sure that you do not forget to integrate social media in your great content.

Tags: se, search engine marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO article marketing, SEO Copywriting, SEO localization, SEO Philippines, SEO press release, Web Services