From Link Building to Brand Building

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At one time, search engine optimization was a narrowly defined profession, tinkering under the online hood to up page rankings in search engines, particularly Google. But SEO has made the transition from link building to brand building – from specialty supplier to essential digital marketing partner.

In the past year, I have served as senior writer on a number of projects with Toronto SEO/digital marketing agency Above the Fold Media, run by David Sahly. The work has included content marketing plans, specialized landing pages, pay-per-click campaigns and sales personas for lawyer, bankruptcy trustee, real estate and other clients, as well as site writing and blogging for ATF itself.

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Tail Wags Content Dog

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OK, the case for companies to produce constant streams of online content is something like this:

More and more businesses and organizations depend on the Internet to connect with customers and audiences. This means that getting high page rankings in search engines, particularly Google, is a priority.

Universally organizations turn to search engine optimization (SEO) experts to tinker under the hood and do what they can to improve rankings. As Google changes its algorithms, gets wise to the latest SEO tricks and penalizes those it deems to have used inappropriate methods to get high search rankings, content has become increasingly important.

A steady stream of content is what the SEO experts recommend to get noticed and improve placement. It can’t be any old content, acting as a placeholder for keywords, but it has to be “rich”—i.e., stuff that people actually want to read and repost and link to.

Every blog post, for example, is treated by search engines as a separate web page, and if keyword-optimized can help a site get more weight and reach in its ranking assessment.

The regular blog posts can also be used to drive content to the other increasingly important part of organizations’ online presences: their social media.

So companies are open to having good writing on an ongoing bases to fulfill the requirements set out by their SEO experts. The tail may be wagging the dog, but  the dog is happy and that’s a good thing for content developers who want to scratch his head . . . Sorry, I’m getting lost in this metaphor. Time for bed.