How to get creative with Google, SEO and Social

So you’ve arrived here to find out how to get creative with Google, SEO and Social? Well here’s the killer question, does anyone really know how? My theory is no, not really! We are constantly bombarded with do this, do that and before you really know it you’re deep into expensive stat subscriptions, analytic monitoring, time consuming link strategies, content marketing strategies… oh hang on! Now we might be on to something there but, what exactly?

Let’s face it the Google brain is a law unto itself. Google is cleaning up and irradicating the data they’ve accumulated over the years –  about time too! SEO’s have probably had it far too easy over the years but hopefully, if Google get it right, it’s going to be a better search experience for all of us. I noticed a while ago that the image search has had a massive overhaul, for the better in my opinion.

Fact: it’s a guessing game for  SEO no matter how much you hear about structure, link strategy, content marketing or social signals. It’s probably not a well known fact but Google sandboxes individual sites as well as established sites fullstop! Either automation or manually the fact is that Google commands the search space and with all the scaremongery that goes along with Google+ its no wonder traditional SEO could be coming to an end.

We all know that SEO is in a changing phase. Traditional forms of SEO we are told will not carry so much weight in the future and getting good search engine results is going to get harder without publishing good, fresh content. Buzz words like Social Marketing, Social Signals, Search Engine Marketing (which is SEO with a little advertising thrown in so marketing companies can squeeze more money from a client) are hot topics at the moment. Personally I haven’t seen much change and, if anything, traditional forms of SEO still seem to work… for the moment anyway!

With any business sector marketeers are always going to try and come up with the next buzz trend, “we are social”, “social marking strategies that work” blah blah blah! For all this buzzy baloney to work you still need content and that’s it, if you don’t have time to add content to the internet then you should think about concentrating your marketing efforts elsewhere like advertising or networking. The web needs content and if you can’t add that content yourself or afford to pay a copywriter to do it for you your website could just be a wasted igotmyawesomedomainname.com gathering some cyber dust in a cold room somewhere around the world.

Despite all this marketing malarky majestically made up by the marketeers, unfortunately social does seem to be the key. Without content you can’t exploit things like Social Signals – the beacons of cyber blinks that happen when you or your audience share good content on the internet that drives traffic to your website, or when a page is bookmarked for being useful so your audience can refer back to it later giving the site a back-link.

One thing is a given and that is that without Google we wouldn’t have SEO and as far as Google is concerned opinion seems to suggest that social signals are just as important as traditional forms of SEO , but like I’ve already said, without content your website is pretty much dead in the water! This leads me back to the key point of this post and how to get creative with Google, SEO and Social and that’s this, the Creative is to write good content, content that is useful and worth sharing or bookmarking. Google will cotton on to your SEO efforts and the social nature of sharing content will reap benefits in the long run without even thinking about a linking strategy. So from that I would only surmise that content is still king full stop! Get creative folks.