It’s no secret that inbound links to your website are one of the most effective methods of improving your position in the search engine results. Quality links convey much of the trust and authority of the linking site. When this valuable link juice is passed through to your website, your rankings start to climb and visitor traffic increases.

Providing valuable content to third-party authority websites is one of the most widely used techniques for acquiring inbound links but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to create fresh content in order to get good links. Curated content is an effective alternative to creating your own original content.

What is Curated Content?
Content curation is the process of selecting high-quality and relevant content created by others that would be useful to your audience and publishing it on your own blog. The most effective curated content should include an original annotation that contains your own unique insights and opinions in addition to an excerpt of the original post and links.

How Does Curated Content Affect SEO?

• Curated content can rank just as well in the search results as the original content. The key is to carefully select quality material and combine it with your own unique content in a way that provides added value to the reader.
• Curated content can attract inbound links to your site. When you publish content from an authority site and properly cite the source, you will usually attract the attention of the original content creator. This not only gives you an edge in acquiring links in the future from that creator, it may provide additional links if they decide to share your curated content with their blog and social media audiences.
• Curated content increases your chances of ranking for both long-tail and shorter head term keywords. The more curated content you add, the more opportunities you create for your site to rank for related keyword terms.
• To get the most SEO benefit from your content curation efforts, create separate pages where you can organize curated content around relevant sub-topics of your site’s primary topic.

How to Do Curated Content the Right Way
Curate content for the benefit of your audience, not the search engines. Keep your focus on your audience, and on curating content that will be useful and add real value to their lives. When you create a positive experience through your content, the links and rankings will follow – which is a more effective and safer strategy than trying to “game” the search engines.

Always annotate your curated content and add your unique insight. Content curation does not mean you simply “copy and paste” someone else’s work. You’re adding a fresh perspective to an excerpt of the original article. Your content should always be longer than the excerpt – the golden rule of curation is that you always give more than you take.

Always re-title your curated posts. Title content receives more attention from the search engines than body text; a new title containing your targeted keywords will help boost your SEO and prevent your content from competing with the original article.

Link back to the original article from within your curated post. This not only gives due credit to the original content creator, it allows readers to quickly and easily access the original article in its entirety. As an added bonus, outbound linking improves your SEO by demonstrating to the search engines that your site is a credible source of relevant information.