The idea of content marketing has been getting a lot of attention lately from people who have websites, blogs and social media accounts. More often than not, this kind of attention has been generated because content marketing has been touted as, among other things, the “new SEO”. There are even content marketing advocates that say it is all you’ll ever need to make your website, blog or social media page a success. Just come up with great content, and you’re guaranteed a top spot in search engine rankings.

Content marketing is SEO

The thing is, content marketing if far from being a new concept, much less the “new SEO”. The only new hing about it is the fact that it’s a relatively new word, a new buzzword if you will. Whatever people have been calling “content marketing”, it’s just one of the many aspects of SEO. Simply put, content marketing is SEO, nothing more.

Perhaps what brought the term content marketing on is that every website has content—text, video, audio, images, infographics or anything that is put in it that can be seen by readers—and these websites are being promoted through marketing. Hence, content marketing.

Coincidentally enough, it’s what SEO has been doing too, for a long time now: enhance the visibility of any website in search engine rankings, which, regardless of what universe you’re from, is essentially marketing. In short, content marketing is no different from SEO. Content marketing is SEO, and it was already being done since SEO became SEO.

The Importance of proper SEO techniques

What’s galling are claims that in today’s world of Google Penguin, “content marketing” is all a website owner would ever need to do to succeed. While coming up with good content is indeed crucial in the success or failure of any one website, it’s far from being the only thing one will ever need for online success.

Considering the ever-changing algorithms being implemented by Google, an array of proper SEO techniques and tactics need to be implemented, including but not limited to internal and external linking, crosslinking, proper anchor text optimization and proper titles and descriptions. Checking for page speed, user-generated content spam, page crawl issues and malware or rogue sites are also proper seo techniques that are must-dos for every website owner.

“Content marketing”, as its advocates tout it these days, will never be enough. As long as search engines continue to use algorithms and content, the wide array of strategies that come with SEO—the “old” one—will still matter.