Being successful on search engines in 2014 is a different ball game than it was 12 months ago. in 2014, it relies on three key pieces of the traffic puzzle. 

Content Strategy

Your Content Strategy forms the basis of your web marketing efforts. It involves planning, managing, developing and publishing different kinds of content (like blog posts, videos, photos, or other imagery) that attract new readers to your organization. 

Using tools like editorial calendars and audience personas, your content strategy is a core marketing document that helps make decisions about what kinds of content you should be publishing, who should be publishing it, and when it should be published. 

Typically taking a few weeks to assemble, your content strategy is the kind of document you’ll reference often as you continually seek to drive more qualified visitors to your website. 

Authority

Authority is a tricky thing to define on the web. In general, your website will have authority if it’s content is influential within an area of expertise. For instance, the Wall Street Journal’s website is very influential in the business world, and thus has a lot of authority. 

On the web, a given website’s authority is typically measured in backlinks. A backlink is a direct pathway from one website to another. Often in the form of text or images, backlinks are clickable, and open up a page of a given website. 

Often marketers make the mistake of trying to build their authority by amassing backlinks. This is cart-before-horse thinking. The true way to build authority is to create outstanding content that will attract backlinks organically.

It’s also important to note that not all backlinks are created equal. Gaining backlinks from sites that already have a lot of authority is much more difficult than gaining links from non-authoritative sites. Just try to get a link from wikipedia.org, one of the most influential websites on the Internet, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. 

Building authority is about attracting attention from other authorities and using your content to get them to link to you. 

Social

Social Media is how good content gets famous. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the thousands of others have the potential to bring loads of eyeballs to your content. Think of it as a distribution network powered by popular opinion. If your content is great, it can cross the world in an instant.

Leveraging this platform is largely about tapping into people’s emotions. Some of the most shared content on Facebook involves shocking photos, emotional stories of the relationships between humans and their pets, and adorable videos of enthusiastic children. 

There’s more to each piece of this puzzle, and we’ll get into further detail as we move further into our series on success in search engines in a post keyword world, we’ll elaborate further.