Fresh, original, useful content is catnip to search engines and visitors alike. It’s also time- and labor-intensive to produce. Long-form feature articles can take weeks to research and write, and while the potential payoff in authority and relevance is tremendous, you need a regular stream of content for your social media channels and blog. One way to get that additional content is through curation.

Just as a gallery’s curator chooses artwork to display, a content curator finds interesting tidbits elsewhere on the Internet and houses it in one place. Buzzfeed, Gawker Media and TMZ are some of the most well-known content curation sites. Twitter and Pinterest are made for content curation and invite users to tweet, pin and share everything that strikes their collective fancy.

Like content, curation varies in quality. Some sites are known for finding valuable content elsewhere and showcasing it to an appreciative audience. Others are information dumps that don’t reach a specific audience, while still others are little better than plagiarists, siphoning page views from content-rich sites without offering proper attribution to the original source. That’s the category in which you never want to find your site, by the way, because eventually, Google and other search engines will catch up with these content-free sites.

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