image(Flickr/Peter Rosbjerg)

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; its role is blurring and stretching beyond the areas that used to be its core competencies: bringing in traffic by technical optimization of a site and link building. Now more properly referred to as inbound marketing, in an age where a web presence is central to any company’s revenue stream, and Google are cracking down hard on tactics they disapprove of, content has moved center stage. Continue reading →

image(Flickr/JessyeAnne)

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 either content that is so thin it isn’t worth reading at all, or content that appears to be aimed at an audience who have just put aside their copy of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.

It’s become blogger lore that content should be written in this way; however, there are quite a few reasons, both from the perspective of SEO, and from the perspective of content marketing, that adding longer form content written for educated adults into the mix can actually bring some noticeable benefits to corporate blogs and websites. Continue reading →