Big tips for using Google search for content curation

Here’s the big tips for using Google search for content curation. Increase the quality of your content curation by running targeted searches against websites that you know are good sources.

Say you want to create a curated newsletter about “SEO marketing for start-ups” so you can send it to your client mailing list.

What a great topic yes, but how do you find great content? Remember, my goal here, is to find 5 great online articles about SEO marketing that i can mash together into a mini curated digest.

These aren’t articles i’ve written; they’re ones written by SEO experts. Once i’ve found the articles, i can create a small summary and a link back to the original article.

Use specific searches NOT general searches

It’s easy enough to do a general search on Google by entering the search term “SEO marketing”; you’ll get a bunch of content thrown back to you but the quality and relevance is going to be lacking. Here’s what i got:

What’s worse, is that virtually all these search results are for agencies trying to sell me an SEO service. I dont want service providers, i want good blog articles on the topic.

Here’s how to fix the problem.

Think of a really good website that does online marketing – like “techcrunch.com” – and run a search against that targeted site.

All you need do is enter “techcrunch.com: SEO marketing“. Your quality and relevance will be much higher. Take a look:

The second article in the results (“14 Steps To Successful SEO for startups”) is perfect. It’s geared up to my audience startups, is written by a credible author and has already proven to be popular (it has 1,145 Tweets).

Here’s the link: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/21/startupseo/

Now all you have to do is repeat this with 4 other sites and you have your 5 articles. See below on how to find good sites.

Finding good content sites to curate from

Content aggregators

Content aggregators can be a great source for curated content. They work well for the big popular topics – SEO marketing is one of them – and they’ve done a lot of the sifting for you. Of course, you still need to cherry pick (curate) the ones that you think will match your audience.

Even if you dont use the aggregators for sourcing your actual articles, they do provide a good list of the sites that you can run your own search against.

Example of a good aggregator site is alltops.com.

Here’s 2 website sources i found on alltops that i’m going to run my “SEO Marketing” search against:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog (my search term was the “seomoz.org/blog: seo marketing”

http://clickz.com (search “clickz.com: seo marketing”)

Sites you already know

You can probably list of the top of your head a handful of sites that would be good to search against. Remember, they don’t need to be directly associated with your key word / topic search. Many times, good articles on a specific topic come from the more general sites.

Examples: The New York Times or BBC

“nyt.com: seo marketing” found this article “Web Words That Lure The Readers”

“bbc.co.uk: seo marketing” found this article “A journey through SEO optimization”

My 5 curated articles & sources

Here’s my 5 curated articles and my 5 sources on SEO Marketing. The big plus about the sources is that i can now reuse these to search for articles on different topics the next time around.

(I clipped and saved my articles using the FlashIssue Clipper)