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Intermediate SEO: The Magic Content Principle

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 2, 2007 in Intermediate SEO

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke is often quoted as saying “any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic”. Magic is burdened with so many definitions you really cannot be sure of what it is. For my part I’ll say that “magic is the art of changing things through thought and symbolism”.

We don’t influence search engine results through our thoughts but we do influence them through the expression of our thoughts. We also influence search engine results through symbols; more precisely, we influence search engine results through metaphors. Like magic, metaphor is burdened with many meanings. In computer programming a metaphor is any word, symbol, or expression that is substituted for some other word, symbol, or expression.

Metaphors are useful constructs when you’re dealing with ambiguities and unknown (or unknowable) quantities or qualities. Mathematics uses metaphors all the time. We’ve been taught to call them variable names (which are not exactly the same as the variable names used in computer programming languages).

Think of a metaphor as a place-holder, something you put down on the table to remind you that something else will be placed there later. The metaphor allows you to visualize a larger concept and proceed on to a critical step in a process that doesn’t require you to know exactly what will eventually be placed on the table.

I’m speaking metaphorically when I speak of placing something on the table. The table is a metaphor for your plan of action. Or it is a metaphor for your analysis of a situation. For example, you know that Google somehow works with trust but you don’t know exactly how so you speak of Google’s trust algorithm, or of Google’s trust factors. Those are just metaphors for something (or some group of things) you don’t know much about.

When we speak of “Google’s algorithm” or “Microsoft Live Search’s algorithm” we’re speaking metaphorically because in reality each search engine employs many different algorithms. It’s just easier to speak iof the algorithm rather than to say “the Google Web crawling algorithm, the Google page parsing algorithm, the Google Web data indexing algorithm, the Google query parsing algorithm, the Google query resolution algorithm” and so on.

There are many algorithms and no one really cares which one is most relevant to a particular Web site’s issues: we just speak of THE algorithm and leave it at that. SEOs tend to speak in metaphor so much, in fact, that most of our metaphors are very poorly defined and it’s nearly impossible for anyone to use many of them fluently.

For an industry that speaks mostly in metaphor, we generally have no idea of what we’re really talking about. And that is where the Magic Content Principle comes in to play.

When you cook up your SEO recipe you have two ingredients to work with: links and content. There is nothing really magical about links, although there is a great deal to understand about them. But content so mystifies people that it has taken on the aspect of something very esoteric. Most of today’s SEOs wouldn’t recognize good content if it came knocking on the door with a Good Content sash across its chest.

We have been schooled not to think about content because in many cases we don’t have the option of working with content. Either the client refuses to change their Web site or their every attempt to incorporate content is so pathetic that it seems like it would have been better to leave it alone in the first place. The content is always better on the other guy’s site.

But in our dreams and in our sales pitches we say to the client, “All you need is some good content and your SEO problems will melt away”. The challenge then becomes figuring out what that good content really should be. It would be nice if we could put a Web site under our pillow and have the Good Content Fairy drop by while we sleep and leave us exactly what we need.

Good content is good because it works. Magic content is good content that does what we want without our having to touch it. The illusionists of the SEO world use links to force content to look like something it should not to the search engines (which is why the search engines should stop passing link anchor text, but that is neither here nor there).

If you don’t have the option of using links to alter content’s relevance score then you have to be more creative. You have to work with the content more directly without touching it. And that is where the intermediate SEO has an opportunity to display some skill.

There are a few things you can do to alter the relevance of content without touching it:

1. You can frame it or otherwise embed it in other content
2. You can replicate the content on your own terms and force visitors to “return” to the original content
3. You can brand the content for a new query
4. You can write about the content in such an intriguing and compelling way that people won’t stop searching until they find it

Framing content is no longer popular but it works very effectively with today’s major search engines. Embedding content is more generally accepted as long as proper attribution is made because people assume that embedded content is just a leader segment offering a segway to more content.

Replicating content sounds like something spammers do but in fact blogs do it all the time. So do article distribution sites, press release distribution sites, and blog indexing sites (social media sites, feed readers, etc.). Other types of Web sites legitimately replicate content without ever generating a complaint from search engines or users.

Branding content for new queries requires some actual marketing — researching how people view the content and creating advertising campaigns that promote the content in the right context. You can combine rebranded content with branding content that wraps, refers, or describes the rebranded content but you don’t have to,

Teasing people to search for content is one of the least developed skills in today’s search engine optimization community. Link baiting is easier for many people as long as they can spam social media communities. But the art of being coy is still a valuable resource to use when you want to drive people mad with curiosity. Just make sure you provide a lot of solid, usable content or they’ll hate you for playing with their hearts.

Content is very mundane stuff but it is the stuff of the Web. It takes no particular form and conforms to no specific set of rules. Content may be an image, a .PDF file, a dynamic page that never shows the same text or images twice, or it could be an old HTML page that never changes. Content by itself has no value except the value that you place in it.

To make content interesting you have to make it shine, glitter, float, walk on water, or otherwise seem miraculous. When people realize they have found what they have been looking for they usually stop looking. Magic content is the last thing people look at when they are looking for something specific.

In basic search engine optimization you’re told that the goal is to make a Web site the first thing that users find in search results. In intermediate search engine optimization you need to understand that compelling content — magic content — is the last thing the users find in search results. Magic content is a better fit for a searcher’s needs than anything else in the SERPs.

You cannot build magic content by focusing on specific keywords. You have to build magic content for concepts and trust that it will be found for those concepts. In the age of the non-semantic Web that means we have to work with more keywords than the client may think of.

With regular content the search begins at the first position. With magic content the search ends wherever the content is found, even if that happens to be on the third page of results. There is more value in magic content than in mundane content and people will search longer, farther, and harder for that magic content than they will for the mundane content.

Magic content works in all weather, across all search engines, for more than just one keyword. It doesn’t prove you’re a great copywriter or the best SEO ever. It simply performs better than mundane content. Magic content doesn’t draw a lot of links or hit the front page of social media sites. It just brings in relevant, convertable traffic.

You don’t know what magic content is when you start the optimization process. It’s just one of those things where you know it when you see it. It’s rarely the same thing twice, never conforms to any formulas, and is more closely associated with luck than with styles or tried-and-true principles.

You don’t just go and write magic content. It’s magic, so you have to put some thought into it and maybe use a few symbols. Looking at the content symbolically helps you see the bigger picture. The symbols can be simple things or complex things. They can be computer generated images or squigglies you draw on the back of a napkin.

When you can lay out a Web site with symbols and execute a successful optimization campaign, you have begun the process of learning how to create magic content. From that point forward practice makes perfect. The more you rely on the concepts and the less you rely on the techniques and principles that carried you through your SEO apprenticeship, the more magic content you’ll produce.

You will eat, breathe, and sleep in magic content. Every door opens into a new magic page. Every experience becomes a new magic site. Your approach to designing content — not in terms of HTML formatting but in terms of shaping and expressing ideas — will become sufficiently advanced that it will seem like magic.