Why people share & link online: content strategy
Information is cheap these days. Yet content that is linked to and shared in the vast, commoditised space of the internet is valuable. Moreover, the audiences that gather around trusted content are also valuable.
Gaining backlinks from other websites has been a search ranking factor since Google upended search by scanning links back in 1998.
Links from one website to another are a sign that others find content valuable. It’s one of the few quality signals for content in an age when more content is created than people can read.
The reason content strategy has become such a necessary force is to make sure valuable, quality content is not drowned out in all the noise of people publishing content as blogs, videos, social media updates and websites. I mean, just because you CAN publish content more easily doesn’t always mean you should.
Gaining links to content online is a sign of trust
If you want content to rank in search engines, it’s not as easy as getting a few links or shares and magically ranking in position one to bring in endless streams of traffic. (Don’t we wish …)
Links from other pages help search engines understand the authority of a page or piece of content and are a vote of quality. Yet behind every link is a person (OK, in truth, it is sometimes a bot, but the good search engines don’t trust them). And people share information in order to build, strengthen and support relationships.
Even though this research is old, the facts of this 2011 New York Times study into why people share content still remain. There are five main reasons people do it:
to delight others with valuable & entertaining content,
to identify and present ourselves to others,
to foster relationships,
for self-fulfilment,
to spread the word about issues, products & brands.
When the web first launched, links were solely navigational. The purpose of links was to take web browsers from Page X to Page Y, not merely within one website but also between different sites. And while links are now used as a ranking factor by Google and search engines like Bing and Yahoo, the principle hasn’t changed. Great links are a signal of valuable content.
But good content needs to earn links the right way. Because people want to link to the content: not because some scammer sends pleading emails to ‘swap links’ or promise you they can boost your SEO.
Search engines are smart enough to work out links that are genuine versus links that are scammed, artificial or untrustworthy - after all, their billion-dollar search engine advertising businesses rely on quality search results to sell ads against. It’s not in search engines’ interests to allow artificial links to boost rankings.
So the question remains - how do you get others to link to your content? The answer is by providing something of value that others want. Making high value content that is shared and linked to really is how to do it. Slowly. And over time. With a high quality content strategy in place.
The rise of prolific amounts of information online is leading to new and different models of directing our attention: but the human need for quality information that connects us to others remains at the core of why we make content in the first place
Quality content is highly linkable and shareable
That said, good quality content is not the easiest or fastest thing to produce - unless you can get artificial intelligence tools to do some of the heavy lifting.
And that’s where a good content strategist can help brainstorm, research and develop data-driven content that makes meaning, not noise.