2012 Demands More Branding – Does this mean less SEO?

by Geno Thampi - 3/7/2012 11303 Views

How would you achieve online branding?

Google personalized search, panda update, caffeine update and ever changing search engine trends – There’s a lot to consider when it comes to promoting a website today. Some of the experts say, it is not just SEO anymore but you have to adopt several strategies out of the box to brand your website online to take over the competition.

Ranking or Branding
When promoting a website, the main motive of any promotional campaign would be better search engine ranking which is achieved only by applying search engine optimization strategies. However, reliable sources such as a post from Searchenginewatch imply that, gone are the days when you have to concentrate on SEO to rank your website. Instead, you have to dedicate more time in branding your website or business online through other channels. They have quoted “Now, some SEOs may begin to think that “standard SEO” is dead. It’s not.” But sadly branding and SEO are viewed as entirely different entities. This is where everyone are wrong!

Everyone needs branding, how do you do it without SEO?
It is true that the days when one builds a website and constantly tries to rank the website higher in the search engines. The competition is fierce and search engines getting the so called “Automatic Intelligence” to display personalized results that change every day, your website cannot achieve a steady ranking as before. This is where branding comes into play. The most important point that every marketer has to know is that branding is also a part of SEO and SMO. Let’s take an example. How do you spread the word about your brand online? This is mostly done with content marketing strategies such as press release promotion, content marketing in blogs, content spread in the social media sites etc. It’s content marketing everywhere. Content marketing in turn is conventional SEO and nothing else. Are you beginning to get the picture?

If you say “yes” to branding, you are saying “yes” to conventional SEO with a different approach
Branding online uses all the support of conventional SEO strategies. It is just the approach that has changed. Earlier, SEO experts where keen in getting anchor text links, do-follow links and the page rank of the website where the links are gotten from. The sole purpose is to get the website ranked high. In fact no one used SEO strategies that gains visibility to the brand if a link back is not possible with that strategy. When it comes to branding the approach is lot different. You don’t care about links; all that matters is the information about your brand being spread with the help of top quality content. Simply said, your brand should be present everywhere in the form of updated articles, press releases, blog posts, social sharing etc. For that you would need to make use of all the conventional SEO strategies such as article marketing and press release promotion.

Branding means SEO which mainly includes content marketing with the following parameters met:

The main motive of the content has to be spreading information about the brand

All the content that you create must be human likable and worth sharing into the social media. Remember that branding with SEO is done for humans and not for the search engine bots

Don’t say no to content marketing spots that do not allow links back to your website from the anchor text. In fact our main motive should be to spread the word and not to gather anchor text links

Research for the current trends related to your niche and create content based on that. You should do it regularly and publish it online to dominate the web. The content should be complying with the needs of personalized search (current trends), Panda update (freshness) and Caffeine (topics on demand)

Well, all I had to say was branding is all about content marketing which in turn is SEO. So more branding doesn’t mean less SEO, instead, it means more SEO the right way!

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

SEO services, press release promotion, branding

About Geno Thampi

Not a born Shakespeare! But I still write articles and blogs to share my ideas and thoughts on SEO and SMO. Being a part of SEO research team of SubmitINme, I keep my ears and eyes open, and the pen ready to grab, write and share trending topics in search engine .... more info about the author