What To Do With Content From SEO Perspective

[TomKing]

With all the SEO focus now on creating and sharing unique and high quality content I ensure that is exactly what we do, however...

All we seem to do is add this content to our blog with some good quality images to break up the text.

Our articles are at least 800 words in length and they are always informative...

Once added to our blog we share the content across the 'big 3' social platforms (Facebook, Twitter & Google+)

I also do a little bit of 'internal linking' from the blog post to a relevant page on the main website - the blog is actually part of the website!

So, my question is... in light of the recent 'guest post' scaremongering and the fact that every blog owner I seem to 'reach out' wants payment should I look at Web2.0 platforms such as;

• Squidoo
• Hubpages
• Quora
• Triberr
• ...and the many other similar sites that exist

to add some of our content to?

Also what about Article Directories?

• Ezinearticles
• GoArticles

I know this seems like a 'throwback' to 2-3 years ago but I just wondered whether the above still have any credence?

Obviously I would be very selective with regard to 'back linking' and would ensure that I vary the anchor text - to be honest, as much as a link would be useful, it's more about brand exposure ...

Any advice \ recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Andy

[simon_realbuzz]

Personally, I'd focus on your own site and keeping your content quality and unique. In the past we have had our fingers burned by syndicating content to other sites and finding that they end up outranking us for our own content. While the referral traffic can of course be useful, you have to weigh up whether the benefits of referral traffic outweigh the negative impact on the ability of your own site to rank well.

If you decide that referral traffic would still be an avenue you wish to pursue then perhaps you could consider providing content that is considerably different from the version that you keep on your own site or at least making it just an abridged version. Also make sure you publish the content first on your own site before allowing it to be published elsewhere.

[danatanseo]

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site.

This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure.

The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!