+++ refreshing this post, enjoy your summer +++

Content is still king. These days, when you think about SEO (search engine optimization) you need to think about a lot more than keywords and keyword density. Today SEARCH and SOCIAL go together. And Google uses something called "social signals" to influence your page rank and thus how high you appear on the SERP (search engine results page).

Get your content in order and you will increase your visibility. Learn more about your visibility and you can craft better content.

As search becomes smarter, the context of your social content and even your level of participation, can influence your performance.

Google PPC/Adwords

1. Use adwords dollars to understand your market and what terms have power
2. Adwords can inform your SEO work in a matter of days, rather than weeks

Search Engine Marketing

1. Content is king, but if you dilute the content to become search bait, keywords don’t read all that well.
2. Create good content that people will forward.
3. A forward/share/digg all serve to up your backlinks or linklove in the eyes of Google search
4. Do your homework about SEO structures. (Did you know META is almost worthless? Google ignores 90% of META descriptions anyway. They do use META: "title" and META: summary. But your keywords in META only make it easier for your competition to scoop your SEO work.
5. Read your competitors code. If they use META KEYWORDS the are showing you their word matrix. Compare notes. Find the best 20 terms.
6. Make your content easy to index, easy to find, and refresh your pages requently.
7. Produce a lot of good content.
8. Aggregate the heck out of your content, make sure you are sharing it with as wide an audience as possible. (Note: if your content is SEO bait, your forwards, retweets and favorites will be low.)
9. Give away the secrets. If you provide insights and value to your readers they will read your content. They will forward and link to the good stuff. (Nobody forward boring content, unless they are paid to.)
10. Be social. Keep your comments open. When someone else comments, respond. Join other communities and join the conversation.
11. Don’t push your content down the wrong channels. Or better yet don’t push your content at all.
12. Make your site and content juicy for spiders.
13. Keep it clean and simple. Too many keywords, content that is written solely for the purpose of generating traffic is very unlikely to go viral.
14. Go viral. If what you have written is good, controversial, over the top, informative, really good, or funny, you have a chance of getting noticed. If it’s boring, or marketing-speak, you don’t. Simple as that.
15. If you’re so smart, share your toolkit with the rest of us. We are all in this together. Everyone is trying to do it better, faster, cheaper. But we have to focus on the BETTER first and foremost. If you define a better way to do something share it. If you have a GTD secret that is kicking ass, share it. If you know something we don’t share it.
16. Good content wants to be free. And by setting it free you enable the traffic and links to build without your efforts.

If you put your content behind a firewall, or plan to charge for it, be ready to a serious drop in traffic. Maybe you can make up for that by charging and entrance fee… But maybe not.  I’m putting up a New York Times case study shortly where we can benchmark their performance as they go to a PPV 3.0 model again. PPV 3.0 (Pay-per-view 3.0 = social media, search and seo, how can we make social media PAY!?

Check out our newest offering Fluent Search. Years of SEO Marketing and AdWords Management, now with ZERO OVERHEAD.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2013/08/seo-search/

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