We obviously talk a lot about SEO content at The Ocean Agency – making sure we’ve got keyword-inclusive <h2> tags, bolding the right keywords, linking the right way. It’s all part of the effort to increase page rank and drive site traffic. Lately, I’ve seen a shift in SEO strategy from doing the right technical things to creating plain good content, and that’s really what it should be. Junta42 wrote a cool blog called 100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010 with folks like Seth Godin and Jason Falls chiming in. The biggest takeaway that I saw: quality content trumps frequent crappy content. Enter editorial calendars.
SEO Editorial Calendars = Quality Content
Editorial Calendars Organize SEO Content
This brings me to something that magazines have been doing for ages: creating editorial calendars. To me, they make total SEO sense. Google’s all about sites that have a clear hierarchy of information, and that’s exactly what editorial calendars do. They organize content in a way that tells the reader exactly what to expect. Open up a magazine’s table of contents and you’ll know what I mean. You’ll find Departments, Columns, Feature Stories, etc., and they’re all ways of helping the reader what they’re looking for. Guess what? That’s what SEO is all about.
Editorial Calendars Make Sure SEO Content is Relevant
Without them, you’re shooting in the dark with keywords, and it’s really, really easy to lose track of what you’ve been targeting without a plan of action. Editorial calendars take the long-view, which is actually much more helpful for the user. When I was working on www.discoverlosangeles.com, the site saw SEO gains because we were creating content in a systematic way, so someone would come to the site for “los angeles shopping” and find a chunk of resourceful content about shopping in LA. Without a plan, we would have done one-off stories that didn’t really relate to each other. And keywording would have been out the window.
That’s called relevance, and it’s something Google likes…a lot. They like it because users like it. I know because having relevant content on the same site is awesome, and it’s much easier to find what you’re looking for when you know a site has ten organized articles about it. As a user, you know someone has put effort into the subject if there are that many articles about a single subject, and that means the user is thinking all the great buzz words about content you’ll start hearing about more and more in 2010: resourceful, helpful, well-researched, professional. Plus, think of the deep-linking possibilities.
What to include in a good SEO Calendar
- Type of content (feature article, roundup, blog post)
- Date/month to launch
- Title of article
- Description of story
- Keywords to target
- Misc. notes
What do you think? This is obviously much harder to do on a blog, since it serves a different purpose than a news site would. Still, any magazine worth its salt is going to have an editorial calendar. Shouldn’t the same apply to a website?
