How Content on Its Own Brings Traffic, Links, and Leads.

I have been publishing Websites since August 1996. Although I have worked at improving visibility for sites through all those years, I have never seen content fail to bring traffic, links, and leads. I have even watched spam blogs drive traffic, links, and leads.

When Web marketers smugly tell you that just publishing content does not achieve anything, I know they have never done it (right). I’d like to say it’s easy to publish content that fails to attract traffic but when even spam blogs can bring in traffic, links, and leads you have to ask what these marketers are doing that they cannot even match the performance of spam blogs.

It doesn’t take miraculously viral content to earn links. You don’t even need very good content to earn links. People link to Wikipedia all the time, and yet most of their articles are anything but “very good content” because on a site with millions of articles the vast majority are going to be of mediocre quality or below. It is statistically impossible for anything else to happen.

The “quality” of your content has nothing to do with whether someone else links to it. People will link to anything that they believe is useful. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of really bad SEO articles earn links just because they were written by someone whom the linkers know, follow, or trust. That’s a terrible reason to link to any SEO article, but the majority of link-earning SEO articles earn links for those reasons more than any others.

There is no such thing as a universal or objective standard of quality. Google certainly doesn’t apply any standards of quality consistently. By their own admission they make sure consumers can find well-known brands in their search results even if the brands are caught violating search engine guidelines (although in a few egregious cases some severe penalties were handed out until some corrections were made).

You’re just not going to win any argument based on the assumption that merely publishing content cannot accomplish anything on the Web. The data is against you. The search results are against you. The Web marketing mantra of you MUST promote your content represents a badly distorted version of a simple truth: active promotion speeds up the acquisition of traffic, links, and leads.

Why Merely Publishing Content Is Enough

We live in a world of RSS feeds, hyperactive crawlers, and DNS-aware Websites. It’s a rare Website that fails to get indexed within a few weeks, unless the publisher takes steps to prevent that indexing.

Publishing an RSS feed attracts crawl especially if your Website PINGs. If you are just publishing a blog on a platform like WordPress you don’t have to do anything other than publish posts. Let the blog’s default behavior of sending out PING notifications work for you. Your content will be indexed, sometimes within a matter of days, in the worst cases I have tracked within a few weeks.

That is passive promotion. You do nothing but publish the content.

Of course, you can now feed RSS data to all sorts of social media autoposting tools but I consider that to be active promotion. Any plugin or module you use to autopost your content to social media is also active promotion.

Hyperactive crawlers are those busy little bots that are looking for RSS feeds and new content. Bing and Google run hyperactive crawlers but so do many RSS feed directories.

Those crawlers index your content so that it can start earning traffic from search sites (including feed reader and blog search services).

Don’t assume that all hyperactive crawlers are rogue crawlers. Rogue crawlers don’t honor “robots” meta directives or “robots.txt”. Rogue crawlers may use fake user agents. Rogue crawlers take your full content, ignoring your RSS feed.

DNS-aware Websites are often disavowed by Web marketers who don’t understand that these sites are not only harmless, they actually help you. A DNS-aware Website monitors the activation of domain names. It may send out a crawler to scan the site or it may just publish “whois” information about the site.

These Websites exist for a few reasons. Most of them carry some advertising. Some of them are tied to Web marketing competitive intelligence tools. A very small number of them appear to be working with or subsidiary to business profile sites.

There is nothing wrong with these kinds of links, many of which drive crawl to your newly published Websites. Web marketers have a tendency to assume the search engines will punish them for having these kinds of links but the search engines know you did not create the links. They either ignore these links or give them very little weight. But they do drive crawl.

Random Queries Create Real Visibility for Your Content

Ask a group of Web marketers what they consider to be “long-tail” queries and they rarely provide a definition that matches those used by Bing and Google. Google sometimes defines a long-tail query as any query that drives 10 or fewer visitors within a 28/30-day period.

There is no length requirement for a long-tail query. They can be 1-word queries or 20-word queries. The “long tail of search” consists of rarely used queries. There are a LOT of these kinds of queries.

More importantly, these long-tail queries often reflect specific user needs. When your content is a clear match for a long-tail query you have a very good chance of making a conversion. I have seen these kinds of conversions on both high-traffic and low-traffic Websites.

In fact, I once ran a detailed analysis of where the money was coming from on several large lead-generation Websites with millions of monthly visits. On every site a minimum of 65% of the revenue was coming from queries with 4-to-8 terms. Those all-important 1-word and 2-word generic queries that were so vital to the marketing goals drove far less revenue than was projected by models built on click-through rate analysis.

If you can only publish 1,000 pages on your site that each earn no more than 1 visitor per month you can count on 1,000 highly interested visitors every month. Your conversion rate doesn’t depend on how popular the queries you rank for may be; conversions depend on how well you meet the visitor’s expectations and how well you earn their trust.

Better yet, if you’re earning 1,000+ visitors per month through true long-tail query traffic, you’ll earn natural links and build brand recognition, which means those people will remember and search for your site again.

All you have to do is publish useful content.

Search Referral Optimization Ignores Arbitrary Goals

An arbitrary goal is anything like “we need to rank for [2-word term]” or “we need 1,000 visitors per month”. You cannot optimize through arbitrary goals. In fact, setting arbitrary goals for a site degrades optimization.

You can build traffic that is not optimal. You can build traffic outside the search optimization channel. People do this all the time but they label it as “SEO” because they don’t know what else to call it.

Search referral optimization simply creates the best possible relationship between a search engine and a website. A new Website does not optimally earn traffic from high-volume queries unless its content spikes into virality (and you cannot force that no matter how many “viral marketing” articles you read).

Virality is random, inspecific, unpredictable, and genuine enough to happen completely on its own. If you are nudging your content into some sharing funnel it is not true viral content even if you garner hundreds of thousands of shares or links.

Optimization is all about improving how the system performs according to its maximum realistic potential. What you are doing is not SEO if you push your performance metrics beyond the limit of what natural search optimization can produce.

The Length of Your Content Does Not Matter

Long content has become the new Web spam. Two years ago I published a definition for content spam that, while still valid today, is relatively inadequate for the Long-form Content Spam that has emerged from the Web marketing community. My original definition was:

On the Web it’s easy enough to identify content spam because:

• It’s only there to provide context for advertising (or a lead gen form) — OR
• It’s only there to provide context for 1 or more promotional links — OR
• It’s there to serve as a place holder and still try to get some traffic

Long-form content spam adds to this list by pretending to be thorough, complete, and authoritative. A few examples of Long-form content spam include:

• Articles consisting of many quotations with little or no transitional context
• Articles that contain many images (especially screen captures)
• Articles that contain many unrelated facts with little or no transitional context
• Articles that are written to cover as many “long tail” queries as possible
• Articles that are hard to read because of incessant popups and calls to action

Long-form spam sometimes earns a lot of links and draws a lot of commentary but it tends to fall into the class of content that is just there to get you to buy something, sign up for some training course, or register for a Webinar. And, frankly, the people most likely to rely on Long-form Content Spam are the marketers who have built up large followings. They are milking their audiences for all they can get in terms of sales and referrals. The user experience is of no importance to them.

If the content were really important it wouldn’t be obscured by popup registration forms and checkered with frequent calls to action (sometimes 2 dozen or more) or long sequences of page-wide images. You’re just using long articles to draw people in to your popup forms and calls-to-action. You’re not actually trying to create a valuable, useful Website experience.

Someone who is completely unknown might be able to build up a successful Website with Long-form Content Spam but I have yet to see it happen. Every example of a successful Long-form Content Spam site that other people have brought to my attention has benefited from other factors, most often very aggressive promotional practices. The content would never succeed by itself because random visitors would be turned off by the terrible user experience. One advantage of aggressive promotion is that people are more likely to tolerate aggressive on-page promotion if they come in through an off-site aggressive promotion channel. They are already in a tolerant frame of mind.

The fact the search engines currently reward Long-form Spam doesn’t mean it’s not spammy. It just means the search engines’ guidelines have not yet caught up to the latest spammy practice. Long-form Spam is about where guest posting was in 2012.

While it’s true that nagging your visitors gets them to sign up for whatever you are selling (we run ads for our newsletter and SEO services), aggressive nagging that obscures the user experience has always been a hallmark of many of the kinds of Websites that search engines have long-since dumped in the trashbin of bad user experiences.

You may be content to milk Long-form Spam for all it’s worth now, but don’t lie to yourself about what you are doing. It’s spam, plain and simple, and nothing more.

Short content articles are still perfectly fine. What matters is whether they deliver the goods to the visitor. Artists, cartoonists, humorists, and even major news Websites still publish a lot of articles that run to fewer than 500 words and they continue to top the search results for many high-volume queries.

If length really mattered my own 1,000-2,000 word articles would have been buried by now. I sometimes write 3,000 word articles but I never count the words and I stop when I can’t add anything of value. I expect people to read my articles. I expect a small percentage of people to click on the ads. I’m a “content first” marketer. I’m not afraid to lose your attention because I know you’ll be back.

I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years. It never fails to work. Sometimes it takes a little longer than we want.

Yes, Search Engine Optimization Does Include Active Promotion

Lest I leave you with the impression that I am saying you’re not optimizing for search if you actively promote your content, that is not the point I want to make. You can build links, target queries, and do all that SEO stuff and it can make a contribution toward optimizing your site’s relationship with the search engines.

What is important to remember is that SEO must always support the business decision. If the business decision is to do absolutely no active promotion then the worst thing you can do is conclude that your hands are tied and the project is doomed to failure. I publish Websites that succeed on content alone. Any social media sharing came long after the fact and remains a secondary consideration.

It’s the content that matters most, not how you promote it. Make content that you yourself will want to read in a few years and it WILL last that long (and it will do well). Just be consistent.

Author: Michael Martinez
Courtesy: www.seo-theory.com/