I contributed a guest blog post at the Minnesota chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA) website. My topic is a high-level approach to building content and links for search engine optimization (SEO). Here is an excerpt:

I was throwing around tips and tricks with some SEO pros the other day when the conversation lulled. One of the old hands, a self described reformed black-hat search engine optimizer, remarked wistfully, “When it comes down to it the only thing that matters over the long haul is content and links.” After some smiles and nods from his audience he continued, “You can try all the tricks and schemes, but Google eventually catches on and changes the game and then you’re back to what works anyway.”

Will online video kill the SEO industry that relies on text to drive search engine indexing?

Not likely, thanks to Google. Very soon, online video is going to be an even bigger tool for marketing your company, brand, product or service.

Online video has been great if someone stumbles upon your site or YouTube posting. If you went viral, you could make a lot of noise. However, search engine marketing (SEM) is where the real power of online marketing is right now, and video is largely on the sidelines because no one can search for the content in videos. You can put tags on the videos, but the keyword richness of a video is lost in today’s search indexing.

Google is working hard to change this. First they bought YouTube, a fantastic move that will pay off massively considering the next move. Google is going to transcribe and index the words spoken in online videos.

Now you can publish your video ads, customer testimonials, product demos, ect. on YouTube (or anywhere) and Google will index the content, whether its spoken or displayed as text. Consider how many keywords are in a two minute overview of your product. This is SEM gold.

The biggest challenge to SEM is producing fresh, relevant content for the search engines to index. Once you get over the technical and production hurdles, video may become the easiest method to produce tons of relevant content.

UPDATE

Here is a nice technique that works today. Transcribe your own videos and upload them using YouTube’s Captioning capability (aka subtitles). The text of the speaker’s words will appear over the video. The best part? This text is indexed by Google.

BIG UPDATE November 2009

Google has formally announced that they will be auto-captioning YouTube videos! This is big news that will make videos an essential tool for all online marketers. Video after the break.

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Online marketing relies upon frequent publishing of relevant content. A great challenge for many companies (and consultants!) is producing original content that matters. Too many business managers assume they don’t have interesting things to say, or that there isn’t anyone who cares to listen. Even if that were the case, Google is listening so you should be talking!

The truth is most companies already have great content in their business; it’s just buried where a typical marketing or public relations person can’t access it. These stories are in sales people’s heads, in manager’s notes, in product manager’s meetings, in customer service rep’s trouble tickets. The challenge is in finding, editing and publishing the content in a way that is usable, especially online.

Here’s an idea: hire an internal journalist. A trained journalist knows how to dig for the good stories. They know how to interview people and how to ask probing questions. Put them on a deadline and get them publishing on a schedule. An good internal journalist that is focused on your company, its products and services, its people, customers and industry will find and produce more content than you could ever use.

This recession has been hard for marketers, but even worse for journalists. There are plenty of experienced writers willing to work. Bringing a trained journalist into your organization is a great way to get high-quality, publishable content for newsletters, e-mail campaigns, blogs, social media, case studies, white papers and more. And this content is great for public relations as well. The media is always pining for good stories, and what better way to feed the beast than to have your own journalist pumping out fully-formed story ideas.

Content is king for online and search marketing. “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” who can write.