I've been away from my "headsmacking" series (see the first 11 here) a bit too long, and despite an early morning flight to Reykjavik tomorrow for the RIMC, this subject is certainly deserving of attention. Besides, Mystery Guest always says I can sleep when I'm dead :-)
Oftentimes, SEOs and webmasters create great content, only to apply it in sub-optimal ways. Ideally, if you create a great piece of content - a guide, a post, a photo/graphic/video, even a few short sentences on an important topic that provides value - that work should bolster your site's strategic traffic initiatives. Acquisition of new users through discoverable content is no small task and creating good content no trivial feat, which is why it's so important to consider what you're doing with that content you produce.
I'll illustrate the problem:
Every day, I see smart people who run great sites doing this same thing:
- Posting their brilliant ideas and great links they've found on Twitter (Seth Godin can earn 140 links to 140 characters posted on his blog!)
- Writing terrific content and submitting it to article aggregators, guest blogging platforms & forums (Wouldn't you rather have the links point to your site, even if there are fewer of them?)
- Authoring insightful comments and reviews on social sites like Newsvine, Yelp, DeviantArt & hundreds more (If you have a serious business, why not use that time, energy and content on your own platform?)
- Using services like Flickr, YouTube & Slideshare to launch their multimedia works
When you post on your own site, you control that content forever after. Visitors who see it and like it will attribute that positive feeling to your brand. When they share that content, you'll get the mindshare and the visits. When they link, those links will help your SEO and your content to rank better in the search engines. If you post it somewhere else, you may derive some secondary branding and traffic benefits, but you're certainly not capturing 100% of the value.
Let me be clear, because I worry that this post might be misinterpreted.
- I AM NOT suggesting that posting to social media accounts is always a bad idea
- I AM NOT suggesting that this conundrum applies to most individuals - it frequently doesn't
- I AM suggesting that if you're a business or an entrepreneur with your own site on the web, it pays to think strategically about how & why you're posting that content somewhere else, instead of your own site
In an ideal world, something more like this is a smart way to go:
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If you're going to use a social, interactive platform of any kind, it's important to think about the strategy - are you doing it because it's convenient and fun, or because you recognize that the larger audience reach and participatory environment will actually bring more value back to your brand and site than you could get by launching it on your own domain?
Remember that on your site, you control 100% of the experience - the branding, the messaging, the calls to action and the optimization. On a social platform, they're out of your control, and even those levers you can pull today may not be available in the future.
When I think about this process for our content or our clients, I like to use this pattern of thinking:
- If you launch on your site, does it have an opportunity to spread virally?
- If you launch on a social platform, does that probability increase dramatically?
- Does the platform you're posting to give credit in links or recognition for your brand/site?
- If the social site ranks for the keywords in your content, can you still earn value from that?
With some social media platforms (mainly the social news and social sharing sites - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc.), you don't have to make this choice; you get all the benefits and none of the downside. With others, from LinkedIn Answers to Knol to Scribd, there's a balancing act and a choice. My least favorite are the article submission aggregators, which do provide a link (generally not of terrificly high quality), but tend to pass very little branding or traffic value to the author. The only thing worse is Wikipedia (and similar sites), which provide virtually no benefit in return. I'll never understand why big Wikipedia contributors don't start their own niche sites and get the recognition they deserve instead of a political battle on the discussion pages.
Just make sure you think before you give someone else control of your content.
p.s. Since I'm heading to Iceland tomorrow, posting (and email) will likely be light until I return Tuesday of next week.
One thing that guest-posting has taught me is that it really helps to have a unified content strategy. Especially when I was getting started on my own blog, guest posting was (and still is) a great way to reach a new audience and build branding, but it wasn't drawing links or visitors. So, I made a change: when I posted a guest article I thought was solid, I tried to post an article on my blog that would interest that audience at the same time (or just before it) and, of course, take advantage of any cross-linking opportunities, within reason.
I absolutely agree. If you have a site on a new domain, abdicating control of your content brings way more new visitors than posting something brilliant where no one will see it.
When I have something on my site that complements the freely-given content, then I get even more benefit.
I agree. Link bait should almost always appear on your own site.
Anything posted to social portals (such as video sites, social bookmarking, or social networking) should simply be enticing people to visit the content on your website.
Certainly. I can't think of one good SEO reason for using social platforms without a strong strategy that involves link baiting and redirecting traffic to your website.
Clear thinking - the methodology of deciding where to post content is very important. It relates to my comments about the difference between the explosion of use of twitter vs. the explosion of blogging a few years ago - you could control the blogging platform, but not twitter. I'd like to see a self-hosted twitter-type service take off.
It's also interesting because at Distilled, we have two options for where to put great content - our blog and SEOmoz... It can be difficult writing good stuff for two places, two audiences, and I have no doubt that we'd be doing better SEO-wise on distilled.co.uk if we had written all our 'moz posts for our blog, but the associate thing has easily brought us enough benefit to compensate for that - not to mention the exposure of writing on a platform with many more subscribers. We are, however, planning to start pushing our site a little more, alongside our blogging here.
Self-hosted Twitter is an excellent idea.
Twitter can't handle the traffic it currently gets and wouldn't an SEO Twitter work better for SEOs, and a UX Twitter work better for usability types, and... whatever but without the bandwidth problems.
Don't take my @DrPete away from me by putting him in the UX box and putting me in the SEO box.
We don't have time to use different apps for different subjects. Honestly, Twitter is set up so you can choose who and what you listen to and TweetDeck enhances this capability, that's the beauty of it.
Edit: It's a shame they are attracting so many links to this domain, however: https://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ . . . gonna throw away a bunch of juice if they ever get out of Beta.
It's amazing how many (so-called) search marketing professionals can be found using hosted blog services such as blogger.com, wordpress.com etc.
When you tweet, comment and guest post, the idea should be to further establish your brand and authority to drive people back to your own site.
There's nothing wrong with sharing great stuff, just make sure you don't waste all your good content on everyone elses sites.
On that note, I'm running-out of valuable things to say... so if you are interested in more of my thoughts (or just have a passion for mediocre content)... check-out my site :)
This is absolutely true. One of the best things you can do is simply post abridged and slightly modified versions to 3rd party sites that link back to yours for the "complete, original version". Best of both worlds.
"I'll never understand why big Wikipedia contributors don't start their own niche sites and get the recognition they deserve instead of a political battle on the discussion pages." This really is mystifying, isn't it?
If you do decide to place your content elsewhere, and there's a link back to your own site involved, it may also be worth thinking about timing. If you have, say, an origami blog, and you contribute a piece on choosing shades of red paper to another site, it can be handy to have some recent posts on choosing shades of green paper, or things to fold with red paper, on your own blog. That way, visitors from the guest post may be more likely to stick to your site. Essentially this is an landing page issue, I suppose.
Hey there,
Good point. I consider that using few social networks but really concentrating on them will help you get some exposer. Fo example I have a new website and I try to spread the word as much as possible. I don't use to many social networks because I consider they take to much of my time (Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, YouTube). Once there is a decent amount of daily organic traffic I think I'll concentrate only on my blog. But until then I'll continue to try and get the word out.
Thank you for the article@TomaBonciu on Twitter
Great Post. Another thing to love about the content being on your own site, you can see the impact and reach it has much easier by checking to see who links to the page containg the added content.
This is a great article. I think I have a tendency to write my articles and want to post them somewhere else linking to some page on my site that doesn't have as rich of content as where the link came from.
Rand -
Interesting post. While I definitely agree with you, I was wondering if you had any hesitation writing this entry when you have a property like YouMoz. It would seem you are indirectly devaluing YouMoz. Get a great idea for a SEO related post -> post it on YouMoz -> SeoMoz gets all the link juice. Now, I would definitely post any interesting articles (if I wasn't so lazy) on my own site before YouMoz so I agree with the premise of the post, but it struck me slightly odd. It is 8am though and I have been up for 7 hours so that could be it too. :)
In the thought process above, I asked a series of questions, and the answers to these for YOUmoz is pretty positive:
Assuming you write a short introductory or closing piece about yourself/your site, you earn not only a link, but the credit for writing i, and the link/description from your profile. I'd say YOUmoz is a very generous system as far as social sites go, but even still, yes - it pays to think about it strategically. Are you reaching a bigger audience that way? Are you branding yourself? I think Will addresses this well in his note about Distilled's contributions here on SEOmoz - it's worthwhile because of the exposure and branding (and links), but it's still a decision that's made, and not a casual one. That's really the point of the post.
Excellent reply Rand - I appreciate the response. I definitely see the distinction and it just shows that end users need to make value choices where they spend their limited online time and where to make their content contributions.
Wow! That was a great explanation Rand.
Yeah, my first thought was "I wonder if Rebecca [I think that's the YOUmoz editor] has read this one ...".
If you release it on your own blog first you're going to have duplicate content problems aren't you? My modus would be to distill one of my longer posts and present that abstract as a YOUmoz in the hope folks would want to read the full post.
Edit:typo
This is confusing, are you saying that guest blogging and article marketing aren't so good? We craft great posts for other sites but in return we earn a relevant link.
He's saying there's a time and place for them. If the article is so great that it's going to attract lots of links for some domain other than your own, you should reconsider posting it elsewhere.
Hey thanks Tim :)
There is something to be said about being an overall marketer with a specialty in SEO, PPC, SMO/SMM, etc. The fact that you can cross market or utilize the logical progression of gaining momentum for your website content effort and using outside sources that are popular to drive interest back to the originating content - is what alot of folks skimp on.
While I pride myself in being an SEO, the fact remains that I study other marketing disciplines and understand many cases where success stories derive, which often times leads to a more comprehensive program offering. Despite that, things happen and this mistake can occur whereby good planning can often disrupt this detrimental pattern.
I found this information quite interesting and thought provoking..
I will surely try this method on my site...
Can you tell me where that I can get someone to write content articles for my website. I would like to know some reputable people that I can trust. Take a look at my website to see what you think.
I like to keep major keywords content on my domain and promote other keywords contents on social platforms. By this way, they don't compete each other.
One strategy we employ is posting "teasers" to third party sites. But you have to be really careful. It works well when you have a lot of content. The teaser is a summary of the content with most of the major point taken. It has some details but the full details is on your site.
This doesn't work well if you have little content. People generally don't like clicking through to little content, spammy content and they don't like underdelivering or disappointing content.
Hi Rand,
That is a nice contribution again. I have always thought of these before. I think why people prefer posting valuable articles on social media sites rather than posting in their own sites. Everyone are fond of getting links from those sites and thinks they add greater value to the site in that way. Thanks and nice to know some interesting information here.
Because content is a penny if you give it away, give it away...
Sorry, it's been a long week already...
Rand,
Considering that the Domain of a biz site is the identifying record in google.. this is very good advice.
Rand,
Great post! I have a few clients who are looking to evolve their "ways" regarding their content IP. Controlling the distribution is key, not only in traffic and monetization, but more importantly version control of the unique content provided to the masses. We all want to understand how our words and ideas interact with our world and your post is a good client ice breaker for discussing "new ways" of communication control.
Thanks and enjoy Iceland!
What my say is there is no fixed strategy .For a very new website may be social networking sites may help a lot in creating brand awareness and also article directories may help as initially getting visitors is difficult.In the long turn one can have more articles and content on our blog to get direct links and more visitors.I guess there is no fixed rule for it and we need to be our judge.
So I have a question on this.
We are working on an SEO project to get more value from our substantial but scattered video assets. We have a PR7 content site (www.bplans.com) with high rankings, but our matching video content does only so-so in searches on YouTube.
My thought is that we should post everything we have to YouTube, use the embeds on our site, and thus quickly drive up the number of views for the YouTube videos, presumably increasing their prominence.
Alternatively, we could keep it all in custom Flash on our site, but it seems like the search traffic on YT is a lot higher than potential blended search results we might get.
Anyone agree or disagree with that strategy? Got a better theory? Video SEO seems pretty underdeveloped at this point.
Thanks,
Josh
Rand
Obviously posting to SEOmoz is the exception to this rule. Righ?
:-) See my response to Hagrin above.
I think the diagram #2 applies in that case ;-)
Great point about Wikipedia. I, too, never understood why people spend so much time contributing to anything other than their own blog filled with their own content - but would rather fight over why their content was heavily moderated.