2013 – the year of the writer
We’ve heard the phrase “content is king” for a while now. And although it supported the blogging efforts of many, it was more of a cliché than anything else. As long as blogs were written (be it low-quality or not), SEO tactics had to be employed to rise in the online rankings.
In 2013, however, the cliché is becoming reality. Gone are the days of hack bloggers that are just writing to write and just relying on backlinks and keywords to get the job done. For content to truly be king, there ultimately will be a few SEO casualties left in the professional writer’s wake.
In an article published by Duct Tape Marketing, guest blogger Chris Warden explores the changing content-creation environment and declares 2013 as the year of the writer.
“Maybe content was king all along, and Google just found the right algorithm change to weed out most of the bad content by sending it to the depths of the search results,” Warden poses. “Or maybe Google held on to the idea for far too long that links were absolutely the most important tool in SEO; even though what they really wanted was good and relevant content, even though they didn’t have a quantitative way to measure what good content and bad content looked like (other than human review).”
To embrace this new writer-friendly landscape, Warden suggests that companies make a shift in terms of their strategies. He explains how backlinks are losing ground to metrics such as social indicators, citations and instances of co-occurrence. And he stresses the importance of a full-bodied approach to content creation.
“Content is writing,” he says. “Content is also video, podcasting, design (infographics, presentations, etc.), and social media posting. There are quite literally dozens of ways to produce content and writing it in a blog is certainly not the only way. Depending on your business, it might not even be the most effective way.”
Warden doesn’t necessarily discount SEO, however. He actually likens SEO to an “art form that needs micro managing and near constant supervision.” He says that it’s a combination of research, optimization, data mining, and link and citation building.
Above all else, he says that now might be the time to hire a professional writer – and not the $25-a-blog kind. To prove that your business is the expert it claims to be, you have to have the expert content to back it up.
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