Business Marketing: Optimizing For Humans And Machines

Marketing in the “new normal” means optimizing your messaging for both humans and machines.  That’s right, you heard me right.  Before you call out the Terminators let me explain.

Marketing in the distributed web provides a much larger footprint to find and engage  potential customers.  The other big benefit is that every piece of content has the opportunity to be indexed by the search engines. So you need to keep both of these objectives in mind as you write and distribute content.

Here are four tips to keep your distributed web social media campaign looking good to humans and search engine machines so you achieve your business objectives:

1. Your number one objective is to convert your customers, so when in doubt, go with the customer focused copy or headline.

2. Do your research upfront and identify (and answer) the most burning questions your target customers have.  This will keep  communication on target for both search engines and target customers.

3. Focus on a few keywords or phrases that your target customers are searching for, and thread those through your distributed campaign. Everything should line up including headlines, descriptions, Web 2.0 page headings and copy in the body of your articles or other text.

4. Use keywords as anchor text for links out, and also use the same anchor text to cross link your various distributed content.

So, we don’t need John Conner to save us from the machines.  We just need a good keyword strategy and consistency in how we use them.