Traditionally, businesses have been broken into units, each of which has a particular area of expertise and responsibility. Public relations handled interactions with the media, marketing was responsible for getting the word out, and SEO for bringing in traffic by any means. Then there’s customer service, sales, administration, manufacturing, and so on. Each a little dukedom with feudal responsibility to its C-Level royal court.

SEO is changing;

SEO’s role is changing. Indeed, it’s expanding beyond its old core functions. These traditionally involved bringing in traffic through technical site optimization and link building. Now, people more accurately refer to this broader approach as inbound marketing. Furthermore, in today’s world, a strong web presence is absolutely key for any company’s income. Furthermore, Google strictly targets disapproved tactics. Therefore, content has become the most important element. (more…)

As an industry, SEOs have absorbed the message that ‘short is sweet’. We know that the attention span of surfers is limited. They don’t tend to luxuriate in the written word, enjoying writing for writing’s sake.

Instead they want short, informative, actionable content without the clutter of unnecessary verbosity. We’ve also fully taken on board the idea that content should be pitched at the lowest possible reading level, so as not to alienate potential readers and customers.

When done well, short, simple content is great.

When done badly, it results in poor content. This content is either too thin to be worth reading. Or, it appears to target an audience who has just finished reading a very simple children’s book.

Blogger lore suggests writing content simply. However, several reasons exist to add longer-form content for educated adults. SEO and content marketing both provide these reasons. In fact, including this type of content can noticeably benefit corporate blogs and websites.