The SEO industry is (finally) getting the message that making content user-centric rather than focusing so heavily on outdated, over-optimized practices is the path to better rankings, more traffic and more customers. It’s not enough just to focus on onsite optimization anymore, and content marketing (whichever of the competing definitions of that term you use) has rightly moved to the forefront of everyone’s minds.

But in the rush to make content marketing part of everyday internet marketing practice, a lot of marketers are defaulting to the one type of content they’re comfortable with: blog posts. There’s so much focus on this single, narrow form of content-centric link building that professionals are murmuring how guest blogging could be the next bubble for Google to burst.

And while I think you can blog in healthy ways that make your brand more authoritative and get you in front of valuable audiences, it really should be only part of your overall content strategy.

Focusing Narrowly on Blogs is Shortsighted

The blog “bubble” is another discussion entirely, but the very fact that we’re having it indicates that a lot of marketers are relying on guest blogging pretty heavily as a marketing tactic, and it’s preventing them from branching out into more diverse types of content.

It’s time to move beyond blogs and expand the menu of content that you offer to your audience. New content types will expand your reach to new niches, engage your audience in different ways and inspire natural linking activity that is good for SEO and drives qualified traffic to your site, which is what online marketing is really about.

What Kinds of Content can You Focus on?

This is where SEO.com is stepping in to help you. We’ve just published a stellar ebook (which you can download here for free) that outlines the types of content, including blogs, that everyone should be considering, even though they may not have the bandwidth to do all of them right now.

Here’s a preview of what you’ll find when you download 11 Types of Content You Should be Creating for SEO Right Now:

• Images: Discover how to create images that give people an insider’s view of your company, inspire people to share them socially and are accessible to search engines.
• Video: Learn what a search-optimized video looks like and how you can create videos people love without a huge production budget.
• White Papers: Reach sophisticated B2B audiences with long-form, data-rich content at the right point in the research and purchase cycle.
• Case Studies: Harness your success with existing clients for content that showcases your products and services in a substantive way.

There’s a lot more inside the eBook  and I think it lays out a broader view of what a fully-fledged content campaign can look like. You can use many of these new types of content together, re-purpose old content into multiple formats and increase the impact of every great idea that comes out of your marketing department when you’re not limiting yourself to blog posts.

Building Healthy Marketing Campaigns

There are a lot of voices in the online marketing space that are offering tips and tricks, talking about various strategies and pushing services; it’s easy to get information overload, especially while everyone is still debating tactics. A healthy marketing campaign is diverse, but it still needs direction.

When you’re overloaded with info, it’s hard to know where to start. Remember, though, that you’re the owner of your individual content marketing campaign. It needs to fit your company, your products and your customers. And while you may want expert advice on content marketing tactics that deliver, nobody knows better than you what conversations you want that content to be starting. You are the expert on your business, and your input is essential.

Start with the basics. That may be a blog. It might be a few web videos or sharing product photos on Pinterest. Whatever it is, make it natural, and beware getting too comfortable with any one type of content. Try something new. You’ll be surprised by the results.

Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The online marketing world is undergoing a pretty big shift, one that was initiated a few years ago but kicked into high gear in 2012. It’s a content revolution that marketers and writers like me are simultaneously thrilled and scared about. We’re in the middle of a content marketing renaissance (if I can call it that), with more and more emphasis being put on the type and quality of content that companies provide their users. Your content strategy for 2013 will be more important than any year before.

Why Content Marketing is the Elephant in the Room

Google’s rapidly paced algorithm updates over this year have got a lot of marketers worried that once tried-and-true tactics for ranking in search just won’t be as effective anymore. It’s increasingly clear that we’ll be relying on more content-centric strategies to bolster our SEO toolsets, and that means putting more emphasis on holistic strategies for developing that content.

This is where so many online marketers drop the ball when it comes to engaging in online marketing, however. It’s hard to go from mostly left-brained search tactics to more right-brained content planning and creation. Much of the trepidation comes from the resources that content can take up. Sure, big players like Coke have long been in the content marketing game, and they have the resources to make it work, but small and medium-sized businesses sometimes struggle with developing effective campaign strategy that scales with their budgets.

The good news is that it can be done; you can develop a comprehensive strategy for content that scales with your budget and helps you attract traffic to your website. But you have to do your homework in planning it out now, before your 2013 strategy gets lost in the weeds of the day-to-day.

Step 1: Clarify Your Branding Goals

Branding is inexplicably linked to the type of content that you slap that company logo on. Once you determine what your branding goals for your online marketing are, you can start to commission content that showcases your products and services, establishes your industry credibility or builds a community of users around your brand.

Every piece of content you produce should be organized around these goals, and they can act as your weather vane for everything from whitepapers to tweets. Organizing around goals in this way doesn’t just help you stay on message; it helps give a common theme to your entire strategy and establish a vision for you going forward. If you get your goals right from the get-go, the core messages will trickle down to every person who gets their grubby little hands on something that will eventually make it in front of your customers’ eyeballs.

Step 2: Do a Company-wide Content Survey

You can’t waste one precious marketing dollar this year, so make sure you’re making the best use of what you’ve already spent so many man-hours and third-party cash on. There’s likely a lot of marketing content lurking around your company if you take time to look for it.

Find out what type of content you’re currently producing, things you have produced in the past, and what you have planned for the future. All of these content assets are ripe for repurposing, especially your offline content, which should really be coordinated with your online stuff anyway.

Step 3: Identify Your Content Marketing Channels

The obvious place to start is with a company blog, which makes a good home-base for a many types of content you may want to publish (articles, infographics, tutorials, videos, etc.). As long as you sustain a consistent publishing schedule with content that will keep readers coming back, your blog can be a solid foundation for your content strategy.

But depending on your business, and the type of content that seems natural for you, it may be worth identifying the social media platforms that your niche audiences are using. Almost any business can see success on Pinterest if they just start taking pictures of their products. We have one client that is trying to promote their wedding venues, and I’m pushing hard to get them to start snapping pics of the regalia at receptions and ceremonies to use as pinning fodder.

Choosing your marketing channels deserves more thought than it usually receives. You want to place your content where it gets the most bang for your buck, which means identifying the channels that will actually drive valuable traffic back to your website. You want visitors who fit your valued customer profiles, and that means using the relevant customer and market research that you should already be doing.

You also need to do the groundwork to help that content spread as far as possible. That means making it simple to find and share. For instance, if you’re bothering to post things on Pinterest, make sure you’re optimizing those pins with keyword-rich names and write topic-relevant descriptions. You’ll show up in more relevant searches, and people will be more likely to click through to your Pinterest account and home website.

Step 4: Build a Content Roadmap

A lot of marketing campaigns suffer because they don’t have a long view. People are creating and publishing content, but there’s no coordinated promotion going on, which limits the reach and effectiveness of their efforts.

Develop a content calendar for three, six, or 12 months out to help you visualize how your resources are being spent and how your overall strategy is evolving. You can still develop timely content for trending topics and events that arise, but most of your content can and should be planned out ahead of time. We’ve created a free Content Roadmap spreadsheet for you to download here as well:

• SEO.com Free Content Roadmap Calendar 

The content calendar has two different columns, one for the month and one for year. You may want to add additional fields to track your promotion and the online metrics on how each piece of content performs. But a calendar like this is a great way to visualize your upcoming production and visualize in one place how you’re spending your content marketing resources.

You want to have a roadmap that you can use, not just for publishing, but for cross-promotion throughout all your relevant channels, which goes beyond just the marketing department, too. You may want to coordinate with your sales department, for example, on certain targeted content campaign events or initiatives.

Step 5: Scale the Strategy to Your Budget

Would that we were all marketing with a Coca-Cola-size budget, but we aren’t. So it’s up to you to decide what core publishing efforts will be based on. I think a blog, published at least three times a week, is a good place to start. But I’ve seen campaigns that have made Pinterest or Facebook their primary marketing vehicle for a small budget.

Just be sure that your marketing efforts are driving people back to your own site. A lot of activity on your Facebook or Twitter account doesn’t matter if it isn’t translating into more people coming back to where you and your business live online. You don’t own or control those other platforms, but you do control your own site. Make that the central focus for your content marketing strategy.

What type of content is at the core of your current marketing strategy? What publishing channels are you using to put your material out there and promote it?

Post by Paul Sanders, Content Strategist at SEO.com.

Picture credits: Yathin S Krishnappa, Jason Spaceman, Christian Gidlöf, joe goldberg, Creative Commons

5 Step Guide To Set Up Your Content Marketing Strategy in 2013 is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

High-quality content is involved in generating so many of the signals that tell search engines your site is worth paying attention to. And even ugly competitor’s sites might outperform yours if they publish readable, sought-after content and you aren’t taking editorial control of what gets published on your blog.

Accepting guest blog content has its perks: You’ll receive content for free, boosting the frequency and quantity of new content on your site, which has clear benefits for SEO. And by adding other authoritative authors to your site, your blog can become multi-dimensional, thus building your credibility and expanding your audience. Plus, credible bloggers will be promoting their own writing on your blog and driving traffic to your site.

However, if you don’t institute consistent quality standards, you’ll get spun content or just low-quality junk content slipping past your cursory glances at guest posts that come your way. That’s a recipe, not just for your blog to remain in obscurity, but — ever since Panda elevated content quality in importance — for ruining a site that actually has some authority to start with. If you’re not careful, eager guest bloggers can sabotage much of your otherwise worthwhile SEO effort.

The good news is that most of us know good content when we see it. But good writing can sometimes mask flaws that make a piece boring, shallow or simply not good enough to keep the attention of people who do actually land on your content pages. Here are some red flags to watch for that will hurt your SEO efforts, and should have you sending a blog post back for revision, if not just rejecting it flat out.

SEO Content Deal-Breakers

• The content is plagiarized. The first thing you should do with any piece of content you receive is check it for originality with a service like Copyscape. Guest writers will often repurpose content, and barely change it at all, if they aren’t scraping someone else’s work altogether. Scraped content is unethical to publish (and puts you at risk of a DMCA notice), and posting duplicate content can actually make your rankings take a hit, too.
• The topic has been beaten to death. Contrary to popular belief, the Internet doesn’t need any more articles like “Top 10 Movies of 2012.” What it does need (and what your blog needs to build authority) is an original, interesting treatment of a topic that is going to intrigue readers enough to click on your search result, let alone link back to, tweet or share it on Facebook.
• The subject doesn’t match the title. Some writers just don’t have discipline; their minds wander, or they get sidetracked while writing. In the end, a blog post that started out being about new features of Android smartphones drifts into a screed about why Apple is evil and Tim Cook is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If the body of the blog post doesn’t deliver what the title promises, people will reach for the “back” button on their browsers and you’ll be contributing to a higher bounce rate. Treat the title like a contract and reject blog posts or articles that don’t honor it.
• The piece isn’t scannable. Most web readers don’t read; they scan over a piece, jumping between headings and paragraph intro sentences to find what they’re looking for out of a piece. If a guest blogger sends you a giant block of text with no headings, bulleted lists or bolded intros, your reader won’t have any visual signposts with which to navigate your content. If you publish stuff like that, I can hear them fleeing your sight in terror already!
• The writing is only skin-deep. Some writers are gifted at looking like they’ve written a deep and interesting post, but really they’re just talking in circles. They have no real deep understanding of a topic and are just mixing some pretty sounding phrases together, and they’ll be spotted as a fraud the minute someone who’s searching those keywords actually reads the thing. Make sure the writing is actually giving the topic the attention it deserves or readers and search engines will penalize you for it.
• Grammar and spelling are beyond saving. Typos and the occasional misplaced comma are to be expected, especially in blog writing, which is less formal. But if the piece requires extensive edits, or it looks suspiciously like it was spit out by some poor translation software, you may be dealing with some spun or translated content that needs to be totally rewritten for you to even consider publishing it.

Content Marketers Need to Take the Long View

My point is that if you’re going to get into the time-intensive and resource-heavy activity of developing and curating content for SEO, don’t make the mistake of cutting corners by accepting horrible, substandard, unreadable content. Sure, not everything you publish needs to be Pulitzer material, but it does need to meet a minimum standard to be of value. Otherwise, the rest of your SEO strategy is going to be fighting against this headwind of bad, duplicate, spammy content.

In the short term, you may have to produce more content yourself and work harder to attract competent writers to your site. Over time, as your work raises your site’s profile and you start to build an active readership, being a little pickier about what you publish will start to pay off with a higher volume of guest blogging requests. Then you can be even choosier, and the quality of writing you get starts to snowball.

Have you had problems attracting high-quality guest blogging content to your site? What are your deal-breakers for writing that you reject?

Quality Guest Blogging: Red Flags that Can Kill Your SEO Efforts is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

All marketing rises and falls on your ability to recognize your audience and speak directly to them. Yet all too many advertising campaigns fail to do one or both of these things, and it’s really easy to miss the mark with SEO if you don’t do your homework about your customer demographics before you start executing your marketing initiatives.

Without knowing who your customers are and where they live online, you can’t do adequate keyword research, you can’t write content that they’ll be interested in and you won’t be able to optimize your site to a specific customer profile. Take a deeper look as to why your bad research is killing your SEO and how to avoid these common mistakes:

Working With Too Broad A Keyword List

Casting too wide a net is not a new problem for marketers, and certainly not for web marketers, who almost by definition are targeting a niche. But if you try to generate content or run a PPC campaign, you’ll quickly discover that you haven’t gone deep enough. And if you try to stay broad, you’ll only be diluting your efforts. Even worse than a broad list is having keywords that target to the wrong niche. Then you’re just marketing to people who will never be your customers.

Using Google Adwords Keyword Tool is not enough on its own; though it will help you discover other valuable long-tail keywords that you might use to target searches and even online discussions you didn’t know where there. Raw market research, understanding the age, gender, socioeconomic and other demographic descriptors are the basis of all the rest of your research. Then you can start researching keywords that target the right customer profiles. You also have to know your competitors, who they’re targeting, and how your customers’ needs are evolving with the market.

Targeting The Wrong Content Subjects

Even if you do have the right keywords, bad research could lead you to generate content on the wrong subjects, too shallow unless you know the deeper topics that are part of the ongoing conversation between your customers and the industry that’s trying to meet their needs.
The bar continues to be raised on content quality, so much so simply including a link in the author bio on a blog post that only tangentially relates to the actual link destination just isn’t going to work any longer.

The essence of content marketing is that you first understand the customers you’re targeting, start living in their online ecosystem, and then start living there. Find the social spaces in which your target demographics spend their time. And I don’t just mean Facebook and Twitter. Seek out a market niche on Pinterest or speciality websites like Untappd where a very narrow slice of very engaged users could just be waiting for you to post relevant content. That’s where you’ll earn the links, shares, traffic etc. that you need to convert customers and spread your influence through the right spheres. It takes knowledge and research to create authentic content for such specific online niches, but the return in high conversion rates is worth it. There are few places where your marketing energy could be better spent.

A Narrow Focus On Blogs

Blogs are not the whole internet, and your potential customers are all over the place. Do you know where to find them? If you haven’t done your research beforehand to find out what types of content they’re consuming. Whitepapers, infographics, videos, tutorials, and downloads can all be effective for drawing in customers as well as links.

There is real opportunity right now for marketers who are willing to invest the time in detailed, data-driven content, websites and blogs and downloads that have real meat on their bones. Info-hungry customers will be drawn in by those marketing efforts that provide them with the data that helps inform them, solves a problem for them or helps them make a purchase. If you target the wrong marketing channels online, you’re likely to reach customers at the wrong step in the purchasing path, if you reach them at all.

Like I said before, proper market research is the basis for everything else we do as marketers. These mistakes aren’t things that people just fall into by mistake; they’re the natural result of trying to execute a marketing campaign based on bad information. If you do your homework, all of your marketing energy will start flowing in the right direction.

Why your bad research is killing your SEO is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

At SEO.com, our Holy Grail of content marketing is to get our clients to actually start blogging. See, it’s our clients who are the true experts on their industry, and the content they write themselves is often the most relevant and likely to attract readers, who then convert to customers. But our clients are very introverted about their expertise, at least when it comes to sharing their knowledge online. Our content marketing initiatives include a lot more than just writing blog posts, but having our clients participating in their campaigns by getting their own experts to write is ideal. Today, I want to make the case for really getting serious about having the experts just over your cubicle wall to start becoming blogging extroverts. Here are 3 reasons to get your in-house experts blogging today:

Experts Write Authentic Content Effortlessly

You can’t fake expertise; you either have it or you don’t, and that comes through in your writing. Not only does an expert have a vast reservoir of experience in a broad range of topics within her discipline, but she’s able to dig into the deeper details of the subject. Deep content has a richer keyword-makeup, and it’s information-dense, which makes readers who care about the subject want to share it. And even though some really really smart people in say, the IT field, may have trouble relating their particular expertise to lay people like this humble English major, they still fill blog posts with information-rich, detailed content that appeals to other experts in their field.

Experts that blog naturally do the things to attract people to your blog, the types of things online marketers are constantly trying to reverse-engineer, like tapping relevant social media niches, engaging in industry-specific forums and other communities, and linking to relevant content from key influencers. Writers and marketers like me, even with all our experience, have to work really hard to get into that kind of headspace when writing on new topics because we aren’t swimming in that particular pond 24/7. Experts are in that headspace all the time, and it makes them the ideal content creators for their companies.

It’s that headspace that we try to get into with SEO.com’s clients. By interviewing the subject-matter experts at a company, we get insight and understanding of the industry we are working with. Then we can target our content marketing efforts to the audience that our client’s want to be addressing. Our client’s want to spend their time doing business more than anything, and while their internal blogging efforts are often hyper-relevant and influential, they aren’t able to do the range of content creation and marketing that we can. If we want to write more like their experts do (and we do), we have to do our homework.

Professionals Know What’s Trending

It’s an expert’s job to know what’s happening right now in his field and how it’s changing. Trending topics are terrific for driving traffic to your site, partly because people are interested about them and talking about them right now. But they’re also good traffic drivers because the topic space that they inhabit online hasn’t been oversaturated with derivative copycats yet. Your experts give you a competitive advantage in online content spaces where few other players may be competing yet! You may have a real opportunity to net a big chunk of the audience if you’re getting there first.

If all your experts did was write blog posts on new developments in the industry and how your company is responding with new products and services, you could probably fill a pretty decent blog publishing schedule. The value of having people writing for you that have their finger on the pulse of your customers and competitors is in valuable.

Your Experts Are Already Connected

The more specialized your industry, the smaller the number of competitors, but there’s also a much smaller professional community with which to interact. If your experts are already active, they’ve likely built up professional networks with some of the major influencers (heck, they may be the major influencers) in their field, and likely already have connections with them. They are already steeped in the insider conversation of industry elites, and that can turn into valuable, sharable content if you can get them writing. That conversation is ongoing in social media, and you can even use your expert’s personal networks on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere to help promote their own writing.

Using the influencers you have in your own company (We have people like Greg Shuey.) is a way to harness their reputation and knowledge of the wider community to help spread the content that they create. It’s a mutually beneficial cycle. Your company benefits from the traffic and truly authoritative links these superstars attract, and they benefit from your company’s content marketing and SEO initiatives in promoting them as reputable experts.

How To Get Your Experts Writing

There’s a reason that we often struggle helping our clients building a company culture of blogging from scratch; there are a lot of road-blocks to getting those experts to blog. For one thing, their time is highly valuable, and they may not feel they can fit writing for the company into their busy schedule, even if you try to provide some incentives. That’s why I think that—even more than offering gift cards or other prizes as incentives to blog—you should find ways to build the time to blog into their schedule, possibly even reducing their work-load to make room. And even though a company blog is only one facet of content marketing that we help our clients set up, it can really be a good resource for the reasons I’ve already stated.

Some of them may already be writing on their own. In fact, the experts in your company may already have a following in the online spaces where they participate. Get them to shift some of that energy to your company blog, and use “rel=author” to help connect the content on your blog to the authority they already have. The author tag helps connect content to the expert’s Google+ profile, which can show up beneath search result links to their writing, increasing the credibility of the link and encouraging more people to click through and read.

The best way to inspire others to write is to set a good example. Sing the praises of those who jump on the bandwagon and give them feedback to help them improve. If you start blogging and extolling the virtues of authorship to your colleagues, those already inclined to get themselves out there are more likely to try it. And those who may not be as confident in their writing ability might simply need a little nudge to get started and refine their skills.

Most of all, remember that building up a culture of blogging takes time. You’re not going to reach critical mass overnight, but you will start to build up your company blog over time. It’s definitely worth the time and effort to build such a culture, as you’ll see from the traffic it begins to drive and the outlet that it becomes for your company to participate in conversations with customers, the industry at large, and even competitors.

3 Reasons To Get Your In-House Experts Blogging Right Now is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Once upon a time, before online marketers seized upon them as vehicles for SEO and viral marketing campaigns, infographics were actually data visualization tools (Crazy, right?). It’s time to get back to those roots, as evidenced by the really bad infographics out there that could be fixed by following some simple principles in research and design.

By keeping infographics about information more than marketing, you can ensure that users find content in them worth sharing and that the time and effort invested in your graphics is worthwhile.

You can see how infographics are done right by looking at how print media use them (and have been for a long time, page 43). After all, magazines and newspapers have limited real estate, and they won’t waste it on mediocre visuals. But online, we have seemingly unlimited visual space to fill. That combined with the fact that infographics are resource- and time-intensive marketing properties to generate, has made poorly researched, lazily designed graphics the norm in online marketing. It ends up being a waste of time and resources for everyone involved.

What An Infographic Is (and Is Not)

Here’s something ironic: a crappy infographic trying to warn you against crappy infographics. It’s hard to tell what exactly the joke is, the punch-lines or the design. But this example gets to the heart of a big source of bad design: Infographics are meant to portray data visually, not just display images with text (those are called web pages). Without getting too sarcastic about it, let’s look at the way that the infographic format gets abused.

• Infographics aren’t replacements for blog posts. You’ll see a lot of top-10 lists and such turned into infographics, but that’s just text and images; there’s no data present, and it certainly isn’t visualized in a compelling way.

• Timelines that don’t really illustrate anything. As that Spy Magazine infographic linked to in the introduction shows, timelines can be extremely information-dense when done correctly. They can also be just a jumble of barely connected facts from a certain historical category. Infographic timelines should be more than just snapshots of different eras; they need to dig deeper into a subject and show an interesting progression on a certain subject over time.
• Graphs are not infographics. If all you have is some bar graphs, pie charts and scatter-plot data, you don’t have an infographic. This is mostly a failure to visualize the data, a vital infographic design principle which we’ll go over later.
• Maps that don’t add anything to the data. Another failure of visualization, here. If you want to map something out, it should show how geography affects, or is affected by, the data you’re presenting. But many graphics use it as a crutch to simply compare data from different locations. There’s often a better way to display that information.

A lot of these problems stem either from the fact that the designers were trying to create an infographic without any information, or they chose a design that was entirely divorced from the data they were presenting. Compare those with infographics that are information-dense, designed around the data and just surprisingly creative (like the one below), and you’ll realize that the bad examples fall way short of what an infographic can and should be.

Battling Research Laziness

The root of most bad content, whether it’s infographics, blog posts or drunken wedding speeches is lack of preparation. Research can be tedious and time-consuming; it’s always more satisfying to start collecting some vector graphics, slap them into Photoshop and hope for the best. But that’s not a good recipe for any good finished product, whether you’re talking web pages or car engines. You have to take more time in choosing your topic, collecting the data and making sure you have enough to support a full infographic in the first place.

Smart Topic Selection: The topic really can be anything. I don’t buy the argument that you can’t turn a survey or any other statistical data into a compelling graphic, as long as you have enough information to make it worth the reader’s time and a smart design that does justice to the underlying questions that the data raises.

Getting Enough Material: Sometimes, though, a particular data point will make a great section for an infographic, but the idea couldn’t support an entire graphic on its own. You have to know whether you have enough data to make it visually interesting, and if you can’t find it during the research phase, it may be that you just have to mothball the subject and pick something else.

A Shareable Payoff: Nobody wants to share an anemic graphic, and readers will actually resent you wasting their time if they clicked on a link and didn’t get what they bargained for. Spreading the information out to make it seem like there’s more of it is like trying to spread your peas out on the plate so you can get dessert. Everybody knows what’s going on here. But with enough material, smartly designed, you’ll be more likely to hit the mark with readers and get them to share.

Tell Me A Story

Theme is everything for infographics; the raw data has to be put into context in an appealing way that surprises, entertains or inspires the viewer. We’re talking about creating a visual narrative that “tells a story” about the information you’re representing. Without a unifying theme, all you have is a large image with a collage of graphs and vector graphics plastered onto it. The theme unites the data in a smart way that’s more than just matching colors and playing with fonts.

The flow of a graphic is part of the theme. Too many graphics don’t seem to have any overall organization to them; the different sections could be completely rearranged without any effect, and that’s a bad thing. Think of this concept as a visual story arch; you have a beginning, a middle, and an end to your graphic, and the reader is intuitively guided from one section to the next. And the flow doesn’t have to be linear. A lot of beautifully arranged graphics aren’t funneled into the 600-pixel wide, blog-friendly format.

Bringing Back Data Visualization

There is a reason that there are sites like Information is Beautiful curate and award well-designed infographics; it’s because some designs definitely stand out, and these curators are sifting the wheat from the chaff. Good design can make insightful connections in even the most (seemingly) mundane statistical data. Bad design (see below) can make even interesting topics seem unimpressive and boring.

There are clichés in data visualization, and you learn them in elementary school: bar and pie graphs. A creative infographic design will have few (preferably none) of them. If your client’s want graphs and charts, they can use Excel; they don’t need a designer. A designer’s job is to find creative ways to make the data come to life and make connections between the data and real life that people otherwise wouldn’t see. On the other hand, playing with fonts and typography is not a substitute for actually visualizing the data in some way.

We also want to see as little text on an infographic as possible; words are meant to be labels, and the images should speak for themselves. A good infographic design makes it easier to quickly digest and share complex or interesting information in a visual way, not through reading. If the information could be more easily described in words, you shouldn’t be using an infographic. You should always show, not tell, whenever possible.

Better Infographics Through Better Planning

Not everyone who is developing infographics for clients needs to be a designer. But by understanding how these graphics can go wrong, we can make sure that we do the groundwork (research, planning, etc.) so that whoever does design it will hit the mark more often, make readers take notice, and you’re your infographic shared by people who curate and spread data that’s displayed elegantly.

Infographics vs. Infocrapics: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Who was it that said the only true sin was to be boring? I think they were right, but there’s an awful lot of ways to be uninteresting. And when it comes to writing, a whole lot of lesser sins contribute to such cardinal boredom. And no matter what your website looks like—no matter how slick your web design or intuitive your UI—boring content will send visitors running like you were a leper offering a lollipop. You can’t get visitors to stay on the page without something of substance to keep them there.

Every writer knows the sins of bad writing because at some point in our writing careers we have committed them. But most of us get better, repent of our foolish ways and learn to leave these literary vices behind. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting for a lot of people to get religion about writing. If you’re one of them, settle in for a bit of fire and brimstone preaching. If you’re not, you can just envision the many writers out there, like an army of demonic monkeys hammering away at their cursed keyboards as they churn out blog post after blog post filled with the following sins:

Sin #1: Writing In The Passive Voice

This is a hard one for non-grammar-geeks to grasp sometimes. Basically, passive writing takes the doer of an action out of the sentence, making the receiver of action the subject. Passive sentences are wishy-washy and weak, and often the same thought could be expressed with fewer words. Politicians talk this way when they’re trying to give a kind of non-apology (e.g., “Mistakes were made.” instead of “I made a mistake.”) without even apologizing. In the case of politicians, passive voice is a result of being dishonest, but in the case of bad outsourced writing, it’s just an effect of not revising sentences to be more active.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, in a statement to the US House Finance Committee during the aftermath of the financial meltdown, “Finally, it must be said that today’s economic crisis is the result of a lot of mistakes made by a lot of people.” The way he phrases it, “economic crisis” is the subject of the sentence. The people actually responsible for those “mistakes” are hidden away in a prepositional phrase, “by a lot of people.” This type of phrasing helps draw attention away from the idea you want to avoid; in this case, it’s the fact that Dimon and other executives were largely responsible for the financial moves that lead to the implosion of our economy. The magic of passive voice helps him sleep better at night, I guess.

This grammatical hocus pocus is not bad all the time; passive voice can be used to elegant effect. Mark Twain famously used the passive voice in a telegram from Europe when the press was circulating reports that he had died. He wrote, “REPORTS OF MY DEATH HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGERATED.” A bit better than simply “I’m not dead,” don’t you think? But more often than not, passive voice just the result of a writer not knowing what he wants to say before she starts typing the sentence out. They fall into passive when they don’t know how to express an idea or are just trying to hit word-count on a piece (the outsourced writer’s prime directive) and don’t want to think of something interesting to say. This kind of writing tends to be keyword-stuffed (if it contains rich keywords at all) and painful to read:

“Both the bride and the groom will be liking some place in common and conducting the wedding in this place would enable them to cherish the happy moments for several years to come.”

Yep! That was their final draft. I think I’ve made my point several times over: Don’t put up with passive writing; it’s driving away your site visitors.

Sin #2: Writing Without Fact-Checking

You’ve probably felt the horrendous effects of this sin while reading a blog post or news story. The writer references something (a study, a fact, an outlandish claim) that you’d like to fact-check or learn more about, but he doesn’t back it up with a link or a follow-up sentence or anything. You’re left hanging because the writer didn’t back up his writing with other sources. (This is what your high school English teacher was griping about!)

Sadly, this happens often because of lack of communication between writers and those who requested a custom piece, being too narrow with blog publishing guidelines. (Like most good sins, it takes two to tango.) Often, writers learn to avoid saying anything of substance just to avoid this kind of conflict with provided guidelines when they write content. They avoid any points that do require citation because they’re not going to be able to include any links other than those they were told to. This leads to link-anemic content that misses opportunities to be authentic and natural, which is your entire goal with SEO content to begin with. You reap what you sow, I guess.

Sin #3: Swimming In The Shallow End

Here is where the sin of writing sloth rears its ugly head most often. You can recognize shallow writing because you keep reading, but you’re not getting anywhere; the whole thing is ankle-deep from start to finish.
Concise, information-dense writing is a pleasure to read because you feel like you’re getting somewhere when you read it; you’re provided with information to consume instead of the shallow content bait and switch. A writer who doesn’t do any research can’t provide their readers with that type of traction on a topic. And for expert audiences, the author’s lack of industry knowledge is clear within the first few sentences. Not only are you building up a nauseating bounce-rate by not delivering on what your content titles promise, you’re developing a reputation for shallowness which is hard to overcome.The writer isn’t taking you deeper into the subject, and only superficial, vague statements are made about the topic, usually because the writer has no knowledge of it. Reading content like this is like pulling teeth without the novacane. Readers get frustrated reading the thing and leave your site in a hurry.

Sin #4: “Repurposing” And Flat Out Plagiarism

“Repurposing” is really just a euphemism for stealing someone else’s ideas without actually plagiarizing the material. This happens a lot because the easiest way to write an article on a topic is to just rehash someone else’s; that’s why so many “Top 5” and Top “10” lists sound so boringly alike.

They’re just saying the same stuff over and over, and that’s no way to stand out and attract people to your site. It certainly won’t make you seem unique and relevant enough to rise in search rankings.

Plagiarism is still a huge deal, too. Not only are you at risk for getting a DMCA takedown, you’re at risk of being penalized by Google for duplicate content at best or stripped from the SERPs at worst. Unscrupulous writers either simply cut-and-paste article sections into a different order or they reword each sentence sufficiently to fool a simple Copyscape or Google screening. I’d say this is one of the few unforgivable sins a writer can commit. If you catch someone doing it, wash your hands of them. I’d never let a writer who’d plagiarized once write for me again. There’s no purgatory for someone who steals someone else’s work in my book.

Exorcizing the Sinful Content Demons

So, how can you avoid the immoral taint of subpar, shallow and even plagiarized content? (Well, for one: don’t plagiarize!) Avoiding these four deadly writing sins is only the bare minimum. The life of a righteous writer is one of discipline and constant self-improvement.

If you’re a writer, it’s time to start getting technical about the way you research and write. Start reading more, and really study good writers whom you want to emulate; get to know their structure and style from the inside out. If you’re an editor managing a content marketing campaign and screening writing from a team, formalize your editorial process. Set some clear blogging guidelines for content and quality to help guide the writing. By further defining your process, you can help keep yourself and other content creators on the straight and narrow path of relevant, readable and sharable content.

4 Sins of Bad Writing to Avoid is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Mindless zombies are wandering the Internet, writing blog posts. (I know, I know! “Boo! Zombies are everyone’s metaphor for everything now!” Don’t care. Zombies rule.). They’re clumsily marching out hordes of Top 5 articles, an avalanche of How-to posts and a veritable sea of bulleted lists. No one will read these zombie blogs, and they wouldn’t get anything out of them if they did. Are you one of these zombie writers?

We’ve all read bad writing. And even as spun articles and content farms have begun to stumble under the onslaught of Google updates, we keep running into it everywhere. All of this content has one thing in common: there’s no life in it. In the rush to create as much content and spread it as far as possible, on as many blogs as will swallow it, marketers all too often fall into the trap of skipping the most important part of writing, the thinking part. Here’s a look at how not to be a zombie writer:

The Time Crunch Problem

What we’re bumping up against here is the age-old problem of quantity over quality, but it’s not as simple as you think. While there are good arguments for investing in long-form content, the majority of writing for blog posts and articles (which make up a huge portion of the content online) doesn’t crack 1,000 words. A lot of organizations are just having trouble justifying having their writers spend an entire day, or even half a day, researching and writing amazing blog posts. As a result, the writing that does get done only scratches the surface of a topic (if it has any substance at all), and the paragraphs miss out on keyword-rich sentences that result from deeper discussions on the subject. In effect, these shallow articles have no brains!

That reluctance to cultivate better content sends writers to the other extreme of on this sliding scale of quality and depth, toward the copycat article black hole that so many content creators keep slipping into, despite the punishing updates that Google keeps throwing out to stem the spammy tide (And even though they’re not perfect, these changes are starting to help a bit, rewarding people who earn links through natural, high-quality content.).

Sure, some prolific bloggers can crank out a near-thousand-word, free-form blog post with some useful links if it’s on a subject that they know well. It takes time to build up the knowledge base you need to be relevant when writing about any topic, and probably even longer to develop a voice of your own that people will want to read. So, we’re being squeezed by the traditional resource problem on the one hand and Google’s crusade to be the world’s relevancy filter on the other.

We’re running out of places to hide, and the hordes of zombie writers just keep stalking the online landscape, unwilling or unable to produce the smart, living content that it takes to live in a post-apocalyptic landscape of Pandas and Penguins out to get them. What’s warm-blooded keyboard jockey to do?

A Zombie Article Case Study

Here’s an example. I found this article on a prominent site (which I won’t name) that is known for having a mixture of content, but whose links I avoid in search results due to the shallow nature of many of their articles—I just don’t usually find what I’m looking for in them. The following is from a paragraph in a how-to article on buying a cell phone:

Once you have narrowed down your list of phones, read some reviews on the phones. Find out if each phone has any common manufacture’s defects. This is especially important on phones that are newer versions.”

A few things (aside from the obvious spelling error):

• First, these types of “How to buy X” articles are notoriously broad, so it’s not uncommon to see them make vague statements in an article that’s less than 400 words.
• The only other step before this one in the numbered list of the article was one telling the reader to pick a wireless carrier. And now, less than 100 words into an article supposedly about narrowing down your cell phone choices, the reader is told that they should read some reviews after they’ve already “narrowed down your list of phones”. Why are we reading this article if not to get some basis for doing that in the first place?
• Also, the reader should find out (how, we don’t know) if the phone’s their considering have any known problems. The writer apparently couldn’t be bothered to read a few cell phone reviews and tell us what common problems to watch out for.
• The only connection these sentences have to cell phones is that they contain the word “phones”; there are not real concepts about cell phones, how they operate, or ideas for helping you find good ones, in either of these sentences or the article as a whole, really.

This is a failing strategy for content going forward; users don’t want articles like this, so they’re on the relevancy hit-list. Reading something like this, I would have hit the back button on my browser in a hurry. Google is looking for ways to wash this thoughtless garbage out of their search results, and they already have some of the signals (like Author Rank) to do an even better job of filtering that stuff out. And what’s really sad about this kind of content, lacking deep ideas for the reader to chew on, is that it’s painful and exhausting to write. The author could write something better in almost the same amount of time with just a little more effort. I’d like to be less blunt about it, but it’s hard for me. As a writer who is frustrated at being outranked by such shoddy writing, I can’t wait for Google to put a bullet in zombie content like this.

The Root of Good Content

What’s the key to writing deep, informative content that people will want to read and share, even in a short amount of time? Ideas. That might sound abstract and wishy-washy, but the truth is that I see writing every day in which the writer is trying very hard to appear as if they’ve said something, when they’ve said almost nothing at all. This is the epitome of bad content, something created just to exist, not necessarily having a reason to exists, other than for linking purposes, that is.

When you’re surrounded by zombie writers like those, you might feel yourself want to give up the fight, put down your copywriting machete and just join the ranks of the undead content creators. But you have to resist to survive, and the only real tool you have to fight back anymore is to think. Simply brushing the surface of a topic is not enough. The fundamental concepts at the root of the topic are what the reader wants you to bring to them.  Digest those concepts, and then think of something relevant to say about them. That’s what writers do. All other writing tips, recommendations and techniques flow from the principle that you are going to think (hard) about the topic, and that you have something to say about it.

Only politicians like writing stuff that says nothing of substance whatsoever. And you’re not running for office; you’re struggling to be relevant to people and the search engines they use to find the information they want. Have an opinion! Write like you care, like you have some life in you when it comes to the topic you’re writing on, no matter how much time you have to spend on it.

Do you ever catch yourself writing a zombie blog post or article? What are you doing to make sure you don’t fall into that trap?

Craving Brains: How Not To Be a Zombie Writer is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

You might think that the most important part of writing a good blog post is the writing (it is essential), but there are actually some hurdles that readers need to clear before they even read the first word. Blog structure is about keeping up appearances, both for individual posts and across your entire website, so that people don’t abandon your site when they see a poorly structured post. No matter how much blog promotion you’ve done, bad structure could ruin the user experience.

Readers usually want to scan things they read online; it’s just the reality of how people consume information. People do read badly structured writing, but usually only if they have to. And online, there are too many other choices available for you to neglect the structure of your own writing or guest writers’.

Hurdles Between Readers And Your Content:

Often, how you present your content is just as important as what the actual content is. When someone arrives at your website or blog, they’re taking in the whole website first, and then digesting the individual sections. So you have a few seconds where your web design and post structure can turn them off and make them leave your site without reading word one.

So, even if you get someone to your page with good content and SEO best practices, your lack of structure might be driving them away. When readers see writing that is sectioned, well organized and easy to skim (like, for instance, this keyword research post by Preston Van Dyke), they’ll stay on the page longer and be more likely to click internal and external links.

Blog Post Structure That Engages Readers:

Even if you don’t choose a specific blog post format, you should know the general topic you want to address, with at least one specific question or idea to focus on. People fall back on top-10 lists or FAQ formats because they’re easy, ready-made structures to build upon. But without flow and overall story-arc, aside from the format, all you have is a skeleton of a post with no meat on the bones.

When people read something you’ve written, they almost subconsciously feel that you’re building up to something, and that the arc of the piece you’re writing is drawing toward some conclusion. And when they sense that underlying structure, they want to stick with you until the end. You don’t need a pre-set framework when you have an idea around which to build a flowing structure. Let’s look at how to do that.

The basic three elements of a post seem simple, but you’d be surprised how often introduction, body and conclusion are ignored:

Intro:

This is your setup. You want to lay out the general idea that you’ll be addressing throughout the rest of your post. Intros can be hard to do when you’re not exactly sure where you’re going. It’s always smart to rewrite your introduction after you’ve finished the wrapping things up. You don’t have to give away your conclusion, but you should at least point the reader in the direction where you’re heading.

Body:

Here, you’ll really start to dig into the meat of your topic. There’s no set structure, here, but you have to make it scannable. Large blocks of unbroken text are like Brussels sprouts; nobody really wants to eat them.

Scannable blog posts break up the body with keyword rich subheadings, illustrative lists, bolded intro phrases or numbered steps that guide the reader through the content. These are the visual anchors that people use to navigate your post and which hook people into staying on the page.

A short note about images: Think about the difference between pictures you’ll see in newspapers and magazines that are associated with a story, and then think about what commercial pages and advertisements look like. Real, relevant photos might not look as polished as stock photos, but they’re always a sign that the blog owner cares more about crafting a relevant experience for their audience, and I’m more inclined to read their stuff if I think I’m getting good content instead of an ad.

Conclusion:

The conclusion to just about any type of writing too often gets abused or neglected. It’s not a recap of what you just wrote — forget that high school essay junk. And too many posts just end when the writer ran out of things to say. They (maybe) slap a question on the end, meant to solicit comments, and pretend they’ve actually come to some type of resolution.

Conclusions should be just that, a conclusion you reach based on the thoughts you’ve been mulling over in the body of the post. There are several strategies for writing conclusions, each working for different ideas. Stop and think about what you wrote, give some closure to the topic by giving your considered opinion on the questions you’ve raised. Anyone who has read that far clearly considers you worth reading, and they’re waiting to hear your judgment on things.

Maintain Blog Structure Consistently:

The form and structure that content takes on your site or blog needs to be consistent in order to look professional. Regular readers are going to keep coming back because they like what you do. If you change it up too often, they’ll stop getting what they liked about your writing and your site in the first place. Find structures that work for the types of posts you like to write, and require guest writers to conform to that style, if only generally. It’ll do wonders for your bounce rates, and help you develop a loyal readership more quickly.

I hope you found these tips on how to write a scannable blog post useful. I’m curious to know what blog formats do you use? Are you a slave to structure, or do you keep things more free form for yourself and for guest bloggers?

How To Write A Scannable Blog Post That Will Keep Visitors On Your Page is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.