An Email Excerpt

Here is a portion of an email I sent out this morning detailing the importance of quality when it comes to building and deploying SEO campaigns. The larger part of the email offered our existing clients an insider offer on having us create some fancy schmancy link bait viral assets, though for you, the casual blog reader, I think just getting an idea of how we view SEO progressing might be helpful.

Inbound marketing, link bait, white hat SEO, the technique of putting something of value out in order to get priceless link value in return has many names, not the least of which is the title good strategy. While many online business owners pay thousands, and in many cases, tens of thousands of dollars to have SEO’s buy links for them, or create massive troves of content for link building article submissions, a few smart-thinking CEO’s are testing the waters with a strategy that’s a bit more focused.

If you have 100 articles in search that all read like they were written by a defected robot, what happens when people actually read said articles? Are Google’s spiders savvy enough to detect the lack of literature in such articles? At best the articles help gain you a link or two, at worst they create a negative content situation (NCS) which can profoundly affect your search campaign. Just look at Google’s now infamous Panda update, and the tens of millions of dollars it cost sites like Demand Media. Quality content matters.

It is our theory that one really good link is worth more than 100 crappy links. One link on Mashable, or TechCrunch, or if your industry is outside digital, on Martha Stewart Living, or Rachel Ray Home, is worth an infinite amount more than any collection of contrived links could ever be. But how do you get there? How do you, time-crunched owner of a business just fighting to survive, get to a place of high linkage with the residual PageRank and organic traffic that follow? With a creative asset that offers VALUE to the outlet.

After taking a few paragraphs off, the buzz words are back. Inbound marketing, social media marketing, viral marketing, all these tricky phrases point to a sort of exposure built upon something of value to the end user. At a loss for what that might be? Here are a few of them-

• Infographics
• Targeted Surveys
• Video Workshops
• Video Focus Groups
• Interactive White Papers

This is just the tip of the high value content creation glacier, and as you might be thinking right about now, many of the above can work in concert with one and other, and aren’t all that hard to create.

Given the speed at which search engine algorithms are evolving, it is safe to say that concepts like the above play towards an evergreen, old-as-paper-itself concept of appealing to influential media in hopes of bottling some of their thunder when it comes to eyeballs, links, and most importantly traffic.