Developing Great Content at SES New York

6 tips from Byron White, Chief Idea Officer at ideaLaunch

In a world where online publishers are looking to Google for larger audiences, it’s important to understand how the search engine giant defines great content.

Over the past few years, Google’s concept of great concept has changed three major times.

In May 2007, Google was focusing on “universal search” and was paying attention to video, news, books and magazines as sources of great content.

In December 2009, the focus shifted to Google’s “realtime search”. During this time, blog posts and live updates from Twitter became examples of valuable, up-to-date content.

Most recently, Google unveiled its latest algorithm changed in February 2011. The change known as Panda, or Farmer, was designed to help high-quality content experience better search results while harming low-quality content farms.

So what is great content?

Byron White, Chief Idea Officer at ideaLaunch, describes quality content as “an essentially contested concept.”

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However, he has seen some trends within the industry that have helped lead to a content marketing revolution. For starters, forward thinking companies are beginning to act like publishers by creating content that matters to their audience while listening to the wants and needs of their customers.

Beyond delivering information consumers want and need, companies are delivering content in creative ways to a diverse pool of onlookers. For many publishers, this is the concept of multiplatform publishing that has brought content to consumers in whichever manner they prefer it.

White continued his presentation by referring to content marketing as a team sport and listed six steps to a complete content marketing process. These included:

1. Content Curation – You will need to focus on content quality and publishing frequency to hold market share.
2. Content Plan – Your content shouldn’t be just about articles. Include a search box, FAQs and surveys, among other components, to properly serve your audience.
3. Content Creation – Here is where you should shine. Enhance your content by letting your emotions on the subject stand out. Develop a mantra by letting your audience know who you are and what defines your company.
4. Content Optimization – Find what keywords your competition is using. Spyfu.com was a suggested tool for doing so.
5. Content Distribution – Testing variation of content pages will help you prove content marketing is effective for your company.
6. Content Performance – Track your content marketing efforts by deciphering how articles affected keyword positioning after an article or SEO campaign is deployed.

Above all of this tips, remember that content creation is an art requiring relevant information. If you are passionate about a subject, readers will take notice if they share your passion. This in itself will lead to links, “likes” or retweets through social media. Links are an organic byproduct of passionate, well thought out and relevant content.