The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER SEVEN

Content Marketing

In today’s search environment, the main driving factors are now what we generally refer to as social proof signals, such as inbound links (e.g., within a blog post) and user engagement with your content (e.g., time spent watching your video). As you will see in Chapter 8, social signals such as retweets, likes, and pins don’t appear to have a direct ranking impact, and Google+ appears to have an impact, but only from a personalized search perspective.

For many years, links to a website were the single largest factor in determining its search engine rankings, because links generally (before they became a tool for SEO manipulation) existed to provide a pathway for a site’s users to find additional, relevant content on a third party’s website—a “signal” that the owner of the linking site deemed the third party’s linked content valuable.

Because of the power of this signal, many SEO professionals pursued obtaining links to their sites or their client’s sites without worrying about the quality of the site where those links resided. Unfortunately, many link-building efforts and services spawned by this behavior had little integration with the rest of the publisher’s content development and marketing strategies.

Clearly, this violated the spirit of what the search engines were measuring and placing value on—links that act as valid endorsements for third-party content. As a result, the search engines, and Google in particular, have taken many steps to force ...