Across the Internet marketing landscape, you’ve probably seen other blog posts with titles along the lines of “Content Marketing vs. SEO.” At some point (perhaps after some algorithm updates), people made SEO into some bugaboo – when it’s actually a potent ally to content marketers everywhere.

Thinking of SEO as a bad thing is a common misconception, likely brought on by high-profile examples of black-hat SEO. As with any industry, there are ethical and unethical ways to conduct business. While SEO has its fair share of shady characters, it’s far from an inherently underhanded business.

Following that portrayal of SEO, marketers sing the praises of content marketing – us included. Well-written content is an excellent basis for building links to your website and establishing your company as a thought leader in your respective industry. However, if no one can find your great content, it’s not really doing you any good. That’s where SEO comes in.

The purpose of SEO is to take your content and present it within a framework that makes it accessible to search engines and users alike. By using white-hat SEO services, it’s possible to get great, long term success from your content marketing efforts. To be successful in Internet marketing, you can’t have one without the other.

Of course, we can not forget to mention that SEO goes beyond content marketing to address important technical issues, such as Google+ authorship or tag markup, metadata optimization, schema.org implementation, XML sitemaps, and much more.

While content marketing is heralded as the end-all-be-all of Internet marketing, the reality is that it’s only a part of the equation. To be the most effective, content marketing needs SEO to be polished, popular, and profitable. That’s an important concept to remember when designing your future marketing campaigns.

With all of the competition on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), it can seem impossible to make a case for why customers should click through to view yours. And with the rollout of each new algorithm change by Google, one-sentence listings just won’t cut it. So what’s a savvy SEO-minded person to do? Well, to start, write a Meta description that says “Hey! You should really click here,” by following these four simple steps.

• Step 1: Incorporate keywords. Based on the content within your web page, select a keyword phrase you’d like to target. Then, incorporate that keyword phrase two to three times within your Meta descriptions. For example, if your web page is about vintage rings, try to use the keyword phrase “vintage rings” at least once toward the beginning of the first sentence, and again toward the end of the second sentence.

• Step 2: Utilize your word count. Meta descriptions should be 110 to 160 characters, including spaces. Maximize your impact by writing description tags with two sentences that come as close to 160 characters as you can, without going over. If you do go over, you run the risk of being cut off mid-sentence—and losing your target audience. If the call-to-action cuts off at, “Want to read more about …” you leave it up to your audience to finish your sentence. Give them enough information to indicate what type of information you have to offer, which will simultaneously help filter out users who aren’t potential customers. Which brings us to our next point …

• Step 3: Include a clear, call-to-action. Start the description tag with an action verb, such as, “Explore Costa Rica through our outdoor excursions.” Then conclude with the action you want the user to take: “Book today and venture to Costa Rican rainforests, volcanoes and waterfalls on our outdoor excursions.” Asking questions is also a great way to qualify your audience, such as, “Looking for an outdoor excursion in Costa Rica?” If their answer is, “Why, yes actually, thanks for asking,” they’ll click through to learn more about your offerings and how they can book their next trip.

• Step 4: Use cliff-hangers. Why? For the same reason people came out in masses to see “The Matrix Reloaded”: To find out what happens to Neo, Trinity and the future of Zion. Take a page from Hollywood and use cliff-hangers to entice people to click through from your Meta description to your web page content. For example, if your web page is about a beachside home in Laguna Beach, Calif., describe a few of the home’s amenities in the first sentence and then end with, “What else does this Laguna Beach home offer that others don’t? Click here to find out.” Give your potential customer just enough to leave them wanting more, and then make them click through to get it.

By incorporating keywords, utilizing your word count, including a call-to-action, and using cliff-hangers in your Meta descriptions, you can maximize your CTRs, and also increase your chance to close a sale.

If you have blocks of content that is the same or substantially similar to other content within your company website or across multiple domains, this is often referred to as “duplicate content.” When duplicate content is being used across multiple domains, such as the same description of a red pencil skirt being promoted on different department store websites, a potential customer who is conducting a Google search on “red pencil skirts” may see results that display the same or similar content. This creates a poor user experience and, as a result, Google’s bots may flag this duplicate content and eliminate it from search results. Although this content may not have been duplicated intentionally, the filtering could still be the same. So, now that you know why duplicate content is bad, what can you do to avoid it? MoreVisibility provides you with five tips to avoid duplicate content. MoreVisibility provides you with five tips to avoid duplicate content. (See? No one likes to read the same sentence twice.)

1) Make your web content unique from other competitors’ web content. If you have content for the same product, like a red pencil skirt, that other companies may sell, don’t pull a description of it verbatim from the clothing brand’s website, catalog or press release that your competitor will also have access to. Add a brief introduction to the product description about what you offer as a retailer that the other guys don’t.

2) Create copy for users first, search engines second. When creating unique content, don’t “keyword stuff” to force in words or phrases that don’t naturally fit into the sentence to try to manipulate search engine ranking. The search engine bots will know, and so will your target audience.

3) Repurpose, don’t reuse. If your company produced a great article on how to prepare your kids for a new school year that was heavily viewed and shared, don’t post the same article in multiple places in hopes that it will further drive traffic to your site. Take a look at the theme of the popular article and create spin-off ideas that your audience will also find relevant and enjoy reading.

4) When necessary, link directly to take the user (and search engine bots) where you want them to go. Instead of putting the same content in multiple places, select the one page that best categorizes the information you want to share and direct your audience there from other pages.

So, in the aforementioned pencil skirt example, don’t link to:

http://www.clothingbrand.com/clothingline/pencilskirt/

http://www.clothingbrand.com/clothingline/pencilskirt

http://www.clothingbrand.com/clothingline/pencilskirt.htm

5) Understand how your content is being managed on the backend. Some Content Management Systems may be set up to store a blog post in multiple locations on your live site. Make sure you know exactly where your content is going to “live” when it goes live so it’s not being duplicated. You may need to utilize canonical tags in the event that the system can’t otherwise be overwritten.

With these five tips on avoiding duplicate content, MoreVisibility hopes that the information you share will keep search engine bots, and potential customers, happy.