need more and more technological assistance, including SEO assistance. So CMS companies have
listened when customers demanded a management system that plays well with search engines.Today, most CMS applications are designed to improve your SEO rather than to hinder it. Still, it’s a
factor that you should consider as you’re looking for a CMS. Ask very specific questions, like “How
does your software or application help with my SEO efforts?” and “What specific elements of your
application or software will help to improve my SEO efforts?”In looking at CMS applications, you should also consider the structure with which it will help you
develop your content. Because a CMS is designed to maintain your content in an orderly manner, it
can help to solidify your content strategy and your web-site structure.Understand and Use Viral Content
If you’ve ever heard of viral marketing, you know that it involves marketing materials that are spread
via social networking. For example, you may have an article that’s largely a piece of marketing and
that you post to a blog. The article then gets tagged in a social network, and begins to spread like a
virus. Each time someone tags the article, more people see it. And then more people tag it and more
people see it and so on. It’s like the snowball effect applied to marketing.Viral marketing or any other kind, however, begins with good content — viral content. The content
that’s spread virally by social networking doesn’t have to be your only marketing. And in fact it will
be much more effective if the content isn’t “market-y” at all. Users are much more interested in con-
tent that provides what they need at the time — real information — than in content that tries to sell
them something.And that’s where viral content comes in. Social networking and social media optimization are covered
in depth in Chapter 18, but for now you should know that viral content should be written with the
medium of distribution in mind. If you plan to use blog tagging to distribute your content, then the
proper format for that content should be a blog post, written short and to the point, but including
useful information (that’s more than just a link to another blogger’s web site).You can also include articles and news stories in viral content as long as you use the appropriate
social networking systems to distribute them. If you’ve ever seen an article with a button at the
bottom that says Digg This, you’ve seen the seed of viral content. Digg is a social networking site
that visitors can use to share information of interest.The methods of SEO covered to this point are mostly based on SEO that has worked in the past. The
Internet, in true Internet fashion, is changing all the time. And the most recent shift has been toward
socially networked content systems. SEO for these types of content systems will require different
strategies than the content systems of the past. It’s something that you should start considering now.
Taking advantage of these social networking systems sooner, rather than later, will help you at least
keep up with the pack if not take the lead.191
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