The biggest curator on the Web, Google, is making a stand by continuously placing a squeeze on what they feel are inferior sites, this in their never ending attempt to further raise the surfers search experience. Their quest is to provide the most accurate quality content possible for their users.
With all of the various updates, Penguin, Panda, EMD, and whatever tweak is next, their message is loud and clear, and the entire search industry has been somewhat affected.
The warning issued was that just quality content presented on your site or blog is admissible to sustain and remain in their search rankings. This as a result has substantially increased the demand for those who write unique content.
But is publishing unique content just for the sake of adding a string of words forming sentences which passes Copyscape, and then posting it on your blog sufficient enough so you’ll survive their wrath, most likely not.
The Internet is still viewed as a wild west frontier where justice is dictated by the survival of the fittest. The content on your blog has to prove that the information will meet the quality standards set out by G, whatever they are since it’s a forever moving target.
Does just publishing unique quality content on a daily basis make your site bulletproof, protecting yourself from any further attacks when it comes to search engine visibility.
To make their presence known, companies will appoint specialized writers and ask them to produce the content on their blog for them. This however can be a “hit and miss” proposition since the content may not even meet the elusive quality standards that are set out by Google.
It’s entirely possible that the content may not offer any ranking value in the results at all, not improving the site’s search visibility whatsoever.
What’s Considered Quality Content
So what’s considered content that’s worthy enough to be selected for ranking. In the past, the content needed to be:
• Trustworthy, original and not duplicate, relevant to the topic
• Free of spelling, style, and grammatical errors. Well edited
• Unbiased while presenting both sides of the issue
• Presented on a site which has domain authority while also reflecting authority in brand
• Information deemed worthy of sharing by their readers
• Detailed and lengthy enough to be informative
Is Content Curation The Solution
For most businesses, continuously creating this unique rich content isn’t possible or becomes too expensive, so the only other option is correlating topical content which is produced by others. This to the publishing industry is known as curated content.
Content curators are basically researchers who will perform search activities on the targeted or topical information, and then present it in a “Ready To Absorb” format. So if you’re struggling to become a content creator, then becoming a curator instead may be an option.
Content curation is all about locating the most relevant data regarding a particular topic or trend online, and then providing proper attribution via links, along with including your “opinion,” and then presenting it on your blog.
Content curation, however, doesn’t mean that it’s the easy way out, and it doesn’t mean just “Copy and Paste” information of what others are creating. Similar to being a content creator, curators are required to meet certain quality standards.
How To Properly Curate Content
To properly curate content to be effective and rank has become a talent to learn. Listed are some some ways on doing it well:
• Research the Internet, locate related topics from authority sites which you’d like to curate
• Compile and organize this information, much like a librarian would
• Focus the information directly on your niche target audience
• Curate from a variety of content information that’s related to your topic, such as: infographics, whitepapers, images and videos, news and press releases, ebooks etc.
• Always pay attribution while including your own opinions and comments before you share the resource
• Understand and know the curators code which is found here: http://curatorscode.org/
Advantages Of Content Curation
The content curator currently appears to have an edge over content creators when it comes to site prominence. This most likely because the curated resource is more similar to a library which refers to the related topic.
The curated content also continues to get updated with additional new and relevant information from around the web, keeping it current and trendy.
What Curation Offers Your Site
• It gives your blog an authority factor which adds to your web presence
• It keeps your site and readers on par with the latest developments and trends in your industry
• It generates substantial amounts of natural inbound links
• It elevates the social signals which magnifies your social media presence
• It helps your readers as well as the Internet by eliminating information overload by supplying filtered quality information
• It helps the existing content to have more of an amplified outreach
So Do You Create Content Or Curate Content
Content curation actually can’t exist without content creation. The quality of the content you create gets more outreach because of the quality of the curation.
Content creation is more of a broader term in the creative process, while curation is more of a scientific logical process. What effective curation involves is assimilating content, filtering out all of the unwanted content, adding your own opinions, and then sharing the content.
Curation isn’t necessarily the easier path to take, but rather a different method of getting correlated with the trend or topic in your industry. Curating helps in creating a certain identity, getting connected with your community, reaching out to your audience or customers, and then gaining their trust, which establishes your online authority.
Where Curation Becomes Content
So content curation when compared to content creation doesn’t really compete with each other, but rather complements each other.
Most suspect that Google will come up with some type of a curator markup, which will give curators an identity, much like the way that Google has implemented authorship for content creators.
So whether you create or curate content, make sure that you get correlated to the topic of the content of your particular industry segment. Make sure that you meet the quality standards to survive in the ever changing and evolving Internet.