Content curation, it’s not a term we hear overly often in the content marketing world, which is more than a little surprising. You can’t call yourself a content marketing expert unless you know more than a little about content curation. Why? Because content marketing as we know it involves a basic set of responsibilities, which include content creation and distribution, otherwise known as writing and publishing or content curation. Even if you haven’t seen the term often, you’ve seen the basic set of responsibilities religiously!
What’s The Big Deal?
Writing and publishing is pretty standard stuff, right? So, what’s the big deal? Why is curation a trending topic? The big deal is that content curation is an ever-growing trend in which a certain individual or an organized team find, organize, contextualize, and share the highest quality and most relevant digital content on a precise topic for a targeted audience. It can be a huge SEO plus.
According to Curata.com, curation hands marketers the ability to publish what people want: fresh, relevant content at a higher volume than a 100 percent content creation strategy would allow. That’s powerful!
Curation also offers a diverse variety of insights published for readers, effectively handing them diverse perspectives while allowing them to read peer published and other third-party source content. What does all of this create? Credibility. It actively positions your organization as a go-to resource.
Now, you just might be wondering if sharing already published content is a good idea. I mean, Google will rip rankings right out from underneath you if you start dabbling in duplicate content. So, again, what’s the big deal? The last thing you want to do is hurt your SEO.
If content curation is performed properly, it won’t create duplicate content or hurt your SEO. In fact, content curation can improve your SEO. And that brings us to all important part of this content curation: The Do’s and Don’ts.
The 3 Major Don’ts
You always want to avoid the don’ts, which is why we’re considering them first. When it comes curation, here’s what you should circumvent:
- Duplicating the full text of an article. First of all, duplicating content is unethical. It borders on copyright infringement, and it will hurt your SEO. Second, Curata points out that if you repost too much of the original text, especially without annotating, search engines won’t have the ability to know which content to index or rank in query results. Do this excessively, and Google will likely label you as spam.
- Curating from the same source multiple times. Variety is the spice of life for readers and search engines. Avoid curating from the same source a thousand times over. Instead, favor a variety of sites. Your readers and Google will see your content as credible and educational.
- Avoid duplicating full size images. It can seem like a quick means of getting that all important image factor into a post, but it’s a bad idea. You should only use a thumbnail size of the original image. Curata recommends that for the best SEO results, you should alter the image alt text, adjust the size, and create a relevant image name.
The 4 Powerhouse Do’s
Now that we’ve gotten the negatives out of the way, let’s talk about the things you want you do. These are the tips that turn curation into a stout tool:
- Work with a view toward your audience. As is the case with any tool used for SEO, we sometimes tend to think more about making it work for the search engines versus the people reading the content. Take this tip from the pros: always keep your target audience in the forefront. If they like your content, they’ll be back…with friends. They’ll even link back to you as an industry source, which means SEO boost.
- Select your curations carefully. Once you start curating, it’s easy to get carried away and start pulling, well, everything! Keep your topic firmly in mind and only curate what is highly relevant and annotated with your own insights and opinions. As a result, you’ll increase content value and give your audience a broader perspective.
- Retitle all of your curated posts. This one is important. By retitling, you ensure that you are not competing in the search results with the original article. Search engines consider the title more than the body text. Take advantage of this by retitling with your own keywords.
- Include your perspective. Annotation and inclusion of your organization’s perspective are a massive must. Your written content should be longer than the excerpt taken from the original article. By giving more than you take, you promote strong ethics and improve SEO by avoiding duplicate content.
Tools to Help You Grow
Online content curation is a viable way of killing two birds with one stone. It helps populate your site with fresh, relevant content while simultaneous building your credibility as an expert resource. As you start to flex your curation muscles, you might consider using some of the awesome tools currently available. Some of the most popular web-based tools currently include Curata, Listly, Scoop.it!, and Storify.
Content curation is a trending and effective content marketing strategy. It can and will increase credibility while driving leads and SEO in positive directions. However, it’s not a point and click tool. It takes work. You still must be willing and able to craft your own unique content and incorporate your spin on each and every piece you decide to curate.
Low-quality website copywriting kills. As long as you use curation as a means of increasing your standard of high quality copy, it will benefit your content marketing plan tremendously. Whatever you do, don’t use it as an excuse to copy and paste quality copy from other places without giving more than you take. Otherwise, you just might find that Google takes a lot more than they’ll be willing to give back when it comes to your search rankings.