SEO Content Marketing Roundup, Week Ending March 30th, 2011

Content, unique content, quality content, valuable content, and optimized content:  this week’s latest and greatest web writing news is all about content, as content is the steadfast theme and common thread running throughout the SEO and search, social media and content marketing spheres.  Optimizing social content for search, how social content influences SEO, post-Panda content strategies, name it…almost every configuration comes down to content in some way.  So here are this week’s picks from each corner of the web-writing world – enjoy the (unique, valuable, quality, optimized) content!

Content Marketing:

Top Rank shares its own roundup of strategies and tools culled from SES New York, including some valuable post-Panda advice (and pssst, guess what: unique, quality content should come first, as always…).

Seth Godin’s advice for creating remarkable content is posted via video interview at HubSpot.  And by the way, why video interview content often falls short (and how to fix it) is addressed at Content Marketing Institute.

Copyblogger shares its simple five-step formula for successful online content, and Joe Pulizzi shares how Content Marketing Institute still uses the tried-and-true three-legged stool strategy for its content marketing today.

HubSpot posts seven reasons why businesses are the future of publishing, as well as 16 Google tools to improve marketing effectiveness, and marketing lessons from The Oatmeal.

Five questions to help you choose your target market are at Businesses Grow {grow}, and Vertical Measures addresses why creating local onsite content has never been more important, post-Panda.

Speaking of things local, iMedia Connection discusses missed opportunities in location-based marketing.

Optimizing a webscreen for mobile use is the subject of this Alertbox post by Jakob Neilsen, while Problogger discusses what elements draw a reader deeper into blog, illustrated by eight specific examples.

Why startups need to blog (and what to talk about) is at TechCrunch.

Taking exception to the conventional wisdom that content is king is a guest post at GrowMap, asserting that relationships are king.

Marketing Sherpa posts an article sharing five insights into email optimization, and Copyblogger posts the four words that will get your email opened.

Famous Bloggers features an interesting guest article by Andreas Kramers, in which he discusses mind mapping.

Finally,  what Don Corleone could learn from Guy Kawasaki is at Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing.

SEO & Search:

Search Engine Land posts why quality is the only sustainable SEO strategy, while Search Engine Journal posts eight reasons why SEO audits are needed before websites are built.

Level 343’s Gabriella Sannino looks at the big picture of measuring social influence.

Search Engine Journal shares 10 tips to use Twitter to improve your SEO efforts, and SEOmoz discusses building “social media embassies.”

SEO Book discusses tracking offline conversions for local SEO and looks at Yahoo’s Search Direct.

Search Engine Land reports that Google will let its Display Network’s Adwords advertisers target contextually by categories as opposed to just keywords, and that the Big G has brought Instant to its Google Places.

SEOmoz gives detailed instructions for weeding out your lowest-performing pages in the wake of Panda, and tackles the issues of what link metrics to use (Part 1) in Rand Fishkin’s whiteboard Friday video lesson.

As a bonus of sorts, SEOmoz’s Fishkin also shares four SEO presentations with tips and graphics data that readers may use.

Great post at Search Engine Journal about the long-term value of good SEO, and aimClear discusses which video platforms gets results in the universal SERPs.

Finally, Level 343 takes on the subject of building marketing campaigns around keywords and phrases, and Joe Pulizzi shares how Content Marketing Institute changed the game of search by defining its own content category at SEO Copywriting.

Social Media Marketing:

How to optimize your Facebook page for visual branding is posted at Social Media Examiner, while iMedia Connection looks at seven brands that post “awesome Facebook updates.”

Brian Solis posts a must-read for businesses with The Rules of Social Media Engagement, while The Next Web posts a “quickstart guide to social media for business” via infographic.

eMarketer reports that SMB’s turn to social media before search with their marketing efforts, and Convince and Convert’s Jay Baer discusses how social media turns “tie games into brand wins.”

Mashable reports on a Yahoo Research study that shows a mere 20,000 (0.05 percent) of Twitter “elite” users make up for half of all the tweets “consumed.”

Advanced social media search tactics are shared by Ann Smarty on Mashable, and Jon Rognerud explains “the new black hat social media” and how to avoid it.

Tips for boosting your business on Foursquare are at Entrepreneur, and a relative valuation of Facebook vs. Twitter for publishers is at Mashable.

Michael Steizner (video) inverviews Jay Baer on why most businesses get Facebook wrong at Social Media Examiner, and Brian Solis (video) interviews Guy Kawasaki on the art of enchantment (and the release of his new book, “Enchantment”).

Finally, noting LinkedIn’s watershed of over 100 million users, Mashable posts an interesting infographic about the social media platform.