Every SEO company knows that high quality content is a staple of a good campaign. Compelling, relevant content helps a site rank (due to keyword density and by capturing long tail search traffic), greatly increases the potential for generating organic inbound links, and helps to increase conversion  thanks to increased traffic and a heightened perception of value and thought leadership in the marketplace.

However, developing content that is going to capture the attention of your target demographic is no easy task, and, to add another element of difficulty, it needs to be an ongoing process of developing and distributing compelling pieces. Even if you have a great hit with a single piece of killer content, you still need to be thinking about what’s next.

Unless you happen to have an insane genius on staff who simply can’t help but come up with killer content every time he or she touches a keyboard, you’re probably going to need a plan. I’ve spent some time outlining what I think are the core elements of an ongoing content development strategy, and I’d like to share them with you.

Building a Visual Outline

First, let’s take a look at this diagram, which I will explain below:

Let’s break down what the diagram is showing.

1. Expertise Categories

   Every piece of content generated needs to be based on the expertise of the person or organization it’s supposed to help promote. Blogs, for example, are wildly popular and useful because so many of them are written by knowledgeable, impassioned people who are providing useful, relevant information to their readers. You need to make sure that you follow the same model when crafting content. Don’t write about Paris Hilton because Google Trends is showing that she’s a hot topic today – write about what you know. Most likely, your expertise or the expertise of the organization you’re generating content for can be split into multiple topics. For example, a financial services firm might have expertise in risk management, retirement planning, and estate planning. Each of these would fit into the categories section, and would drive ideas for the types of content you should be generating

2. Buyer Personas

   After you’ve figured out what categories your content is going to live in, you need to think about the market for each of those categories. Who is your audience, and what writing style will appeal to them? In our example above, the markets for risk management and retirement planning might very well be quite different, and the types of people who will be consuming the content will be hooked in by different writing styles and topics.

3. Trends

   You need to know what’s going on in your industry right now if you have any chance of being considered an authority in your field. So, when generating content, it’s good to make note of current trends in the market that are worth commenting on. It’s always a good idea to have content in the pipeline that’s not time sensitive and can be used at any time, but late-breaking industry news is generally ideal to comment on.

4. Content

   Once you’ve figured out precisely what you need to write about, go ahead and generate the content. Make it compelling, make it personal. Afterward, you’ll need some kind of distribution mechanism. I discuss below the different distribution categories that content can fall into, but actually implementing a distribution plan is outside the scope of this post (though I will be writing about it later)

Applying it to a Real Website

Let’s take a look at what the diagram might look like in a real world example. We’ll use one of my personal favorite sites, seomoz.org. Seomoz offers a variety of SEO related services and is generally considered to be a leader in the SEO industry, especially thanks to their daily SEO blog. These guys pump out quality content on a daily basis, so I thought they’d be a good example for how toimplement a content creation plan. Note that this diagram is far from complete and probably far from accurate, but it’s meant only to serve as an example:

Expertise

I’ve taken three of the categories of expertise that SEOmoz has – SEO, tech startups, and online advertising. Additional categories can be added, but for the sake of our example, we’ll use these three.

Buyer personas

Next we have potential buyer personas for each of the areas of expertise included at the top. The colors indicate which areas of expertise are applicable to which buyer persona, with some areas being applicable to multiple or all personas.

SEOmoz provides search marketing consulting to high-end businesses, so that’s obviously a market they want to connect with. Additionally, they offer tools & services (branded as SEOmoz pro) to other SEO agencies who want to make use of their expertise, so I’ve also included a buyer persona titled “potential SEOmoz pro customers”.

A less obvious buyer persona

The other buyer persona, “colleagues and competitors”, is particularly interesting. Targeting this persona is useful not to generate sales directly, but to establish leadership in the industry. I have never hired SEOmoz, nor have I ever spoken to one of their clients, yet I have the distinct impression that these guys know exactly what they’re doing. Why is that? Because reading their content has given me that impression. This is a very important component of content development, usually dubbed “thought leadership”.

Trends

The trends indicated above were generated just from my knowledge of what’s going on in the industry right now. I was pleased to find that it was very easy to find content on the seomoz site dedicated to these trends, since it helped to reinforce my ideas on quality content development. For example, I know that a lot of large companies are dealing with budget cuts right now due to the economy, so I figured there would be a post about how SEO is the best place to spend your marketing dollars.

Content Distribution

Great content will not only get people to read it, but will generate inbound links. A full inbound link plan it outside the scope of this post, but I did want to break down the distribution categories a piece of content can fall into. Deciding on where you want to publish content can be integral to your success, and I may actually add that decision step in a next revision of the diagrams above.

Content distribution categories

• Internal / Generated
  This type of content is created by you and posted on your own site. It can include general website content, blog posts, or anything else that comes internally from you or your organization, and ultimately lives on your own site
• External / Generated
  The external/generated content type is where something like a guest blog post might live. You wrote the content yourself, but it didn’t get posted on your own site.
• External / Acquired
  The external/acquired type of content is where a newspaper article about your organization would fit. You may have had to request that the article be written (as in traditional PR), or a writer/journalist may have come to you for an interview. Either way, your involvement was an integral part of the process, which is what separates this type from the External / Organic type
• External / Organic
  The external / organic content type is covers content that was written about you or your organization, but that you had no involvement in whatsoever. For example, a blogger creating a post specifically as a reaction to a post on your blog would fall under the external / organic category

Conclusion

Engaging web content is the new way to market any business. With 113 billion searches being performed every month, you need to have a plan in place to get your expertise into the marketplace so that people looking for answers find you first. If you’ve already solved a problem for them before they’ve even gotten in touch with you, you’re way ahead of the game.

I recently decided that our monthly SEO and conversion strategy reports were kind of weak, so Brian (one of our SEO/conversion strategists) and I set out to redevelop our report template. We came up with some fairly concise, direct principles to follow, so I thought I’d include them here in case anyone can make use of our efforts or can add to what we’ve done:

1. Lead with what’s important

   I’ve seen a lot of reports that start with very basic, dashboard-style metrics that provide an overview of site traffic, visitors, bounce rate, etc. Those metrics are useful (in the right context – more on that below), but if you’re really looking to do well by your clients, you’re looking at conversion, conversion, conversion.

   As a result, we decided to start the report with two things: goal completion metrics (as compared to the previous month), and an executive summary of the status of the campaign. The summary outlines very concisely how our efforts fared that month, our assessment of strengths and weaknesses (e.g. why some things worked and others didn’t), and plans for moving forward into the next monthly cycle.

2. Put the data in context

   Another issue I’ve seen with SEO reports is that they’ll give information such as “the site received 10,000 visits this month”. The problem is that, by itself, there’s no way of knowing if 10,000 visits is good or bad. This is true for any metric: if you don’t compare it to some kind of benchmark, it doesn’t provide any actionable information to anyone. An easy way to give the data a reason to exist is to simply compare it to the previous month’s data.

3. Don’t include useless data

   There’s probably no reason to include your top 100 keywords or top 100 content pages in a monthly report. If the data isn’t directly actionable – if it doesn’t spur you to tweak your campaign – it’s probably not really relevant enough to include in the report.

   Depending on the size of the site, we’ll take a subset of the top (or the most important) keywords and content, and make some decisions based on the metrics around that subset. For example, we recently noticed that the media page for one of our clients was their top content right beneath their home page, so we included a media player widget on the home page. Eliminating that one click actually increased the number of qualified leads generated through the site.  Instead of listing out the top x content pages, we included that decision in the report, which I think is much more compelling than a generic export of top content.

4. Don’t include graphs for the sake of having graphs

   Graphs look pretty, but I’ve seen reports where the graph serves no function other than eye candy, because they were too small or pixilated to actually read. Resist the urge to fill the report with fancy graphs instead of filling it with concise but complete textual content that outlines your findings and details how they will affect your campaign moving forward.

5. Use your own words

   The report should read like a summary of a meeting where your team outlined what was done during the previous month, analyzed the metrics, then decided what the next course of action should be. If something you previously implemented didn’t work out as well as you had hoped, include that in the report, then follow it up with what you’ll be doing to fix or replace the failed strategy. Be candid, as if the client was in front of you asking you to give them the nitty gritty of what’s happening with the campaign.

In the end, the new report format came out looking like the outline below. I’m sure we’ll continually revise it, but I’m much happier with what we have now as compared to what we were doing previously.

• Conversion & goal metrics (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Executive summary / overview of campaign status
• Visitor stats overview (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Search Engine rank
  • a list of where we’re currently ranking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for our target keywords and phrases. We’re now using Raven to track these for us.
  • Also includes a brief analysis of what we can do to improve or maintain ranking, or branch into new keywords & phrases
• Traffic sources overview (as compared to previous month)
  • direct traffic vs. referring sites vs. search engine traffic
  • Brief analysis of what we can do to bolster traffic sources we might be lacking in, or how we might generally increase referred or search traffic
• Top Keywords (as compared to previous month)
  • Brief analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly here as well – what we can do to further penetrate the keywords we’re doing well on, and where else we can look to target traffic
  • References exported list of top 10 keywords, which is included as an appendix after the main report
• Top Content (as compared to previous month)
  • Same as above, references exported list of top 10 content pages, again included as an appendix after the main report

When clients are on a budget, it can be tough to build a decent inbound link campaign. Even if you’re only looking to acquire free links, there is a lot of time and effort involved in researching & securing links, especially if you want permanent, high-PR backlinks that are going to help bolster your search ranking.

One method a lot of SEOs use to jumpstart a link campaign is to submit their clients’ press releases to websites that will allow you to do so for free, and will also allow backlinks to your website. We set out to find some of the better, more SEO-friendly free press release sites, and I’ve included our list below (in no particular order). All PageRanks come from the Google toolbar, so they’re more of an approximation of PageRank as opposed to anything official.

Free Press Release Sites

1. www.prlog.org
   PageRank: 6
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
2. www.sanepr.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: Yes
3. www.pressreleasepoint.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
4. www.free-press-release-center.info
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
5. www.transworldnews.com
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
6. www.theopenpress.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
7. www.information-online.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
8. www.pagerelease.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
9. www.pressexposure.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
10. www.pr-usa.net
    PageRank: 5
    Allows backlink: yes
    Custom anchor text: yes

One of the toughest questions for businesses – especially businesses who don’t sell products directly through their website – is: how can we generate return on investment after launching our new website?

If you’re asking this question, you’re on the right track. Many businesses never bother to ask about website ROI, and instead pay for flashy web design and copywriting, only to realize that none of it had any effect on their revenue.  If you fall into this category, please be sure to read on, as you may be surprised at just how much your website can do for you.

Goals and Analytics

Website ROI comes down to two things: goals and analytics. In this article, I’m going to focus on setting up website goals. A followup article will detail how to measure and report on the effectiveness of your implementation of those goals.

Too many businesses think of their website as an online business card – a place where people may go if they’re directed there by a salesperson, but nothing that is going to drive new business opportunities.  Oftentimes, we find that our clients have never viewed their website in the appropriate light, and instead subscribe to an antiquated idea of what it means to do business on the web. Regardless of your industry, your service offerings, or your target demographic, your website should be a tool for generating new business, for creating and maintaining contact with warm leads, and for decreasing their overhead costs.

Setting Goals

So, how do we shift our thinking and get started with ROI on our website? First, set a goal.
Many companies have never asked themselves: “why do we have a website?”. Other questions too rarely asked include: “Ideally, what types of visitors would we like to attract to our website” or (this one is very important) “what do we want them to do when they get there?”

For companies that sell products online, the answer to these questions is generally pretty simple – “we want our visitors to go through the buying process and purchase our products”. There is still plenty of room for creating efficiencies & identifying goals in that process, but right now I will take a moment to talk about those companies who don’t sell products online. Maybe they are service based or have a lengthy sales cycle due to custom or niche products. These are quite often the companies that overlook the value of their website, assuming that because they don’t have an online store, the web can’t be at the forefront of their business. This type of thinking is toxic to a business model in 2009, and needs to be addressed and updated.

Why do you have a website?

The answer to “why do we have a website” should be something to the effect of “to drive new business to our company through search engines and to offset our customer service costs by providing information and online support to our clients, employees, and investors”.

The first part of this answer is handled by search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the process of positioning a website high in the search results for given keywords and phrases. This process should be handled by a capable SEO firm, but be wary of SEO companies that promise big results but don’t ask many questions, or who seem to be unable to give a clear idea of what you should expect from the process.

The second part of the answer – offsetting customer service costs – is often overlooked. Consider how many man (or woman) hours your company might save if you were able to reduce the number of customer service calls by 20%? What about 40%? What if you directed your customers or investors to a web page rather than mailing out hard-copies of presentations, white papers, or financial reports? For many companies, having complete, constant control over their website content is something they think is out of their reach, because the old method of content control is to email your web design company and have them make small changes to existing text (usually at a hefty hourly rate). However, content management systems (CMS) are the standard for building websites in 2009, and if you are operating on anything else, you are at a disadvantage. A CMS makes updating your website as easy as word processing, and is a staple of a successful website.

What types of visitors would you like to attract to your website?

The answer to this question should be: “everyone in your target demographic”. Often we find companies who are convinced that their target demographic is not using the web. Actual statistics show otherwise. According to Internet World Stats, 248,241,969 people in North America have access to the Internet (consider that the entire population of North America is 337,572,949, according to the 2008 census). Additionally, a recent PEW research study concluded that “Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the ‘Net Generation,’ Internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life.”. Make no mistake about it: your target demographic is on the web, and right now, they’re browsing your competitors’ sites.

What do you want visitors to do when they get to the site?

The simplest answer here, if you’re not selling products directly, is “contact us”. It is extremely common for companies to purchase warm leads, why not use your website to bring in your own? Browse through your website and ask yourself “how hard is it to figure out the specific services we offer, and what value we bring as compared to our competition?”. Also ask, “how easy is it for a potential customer to contact us from any page of our site?”, and “how easy is it for visitors to get to specific information about our products and services?”.

Implementation

After you’ve determined what you’d like to do with your website, you need to implement changes to help reach your goals. A competent web strategy firm will be required to help you with this process. If you have separate marketing and web development teams, you should ideally have your marketing team develop a clear plan for the web team, who should then implement the changes.

Context can help you get the most out of your website by developing and implementing your goals, then measuring and reporting on the progress and ROI. Please read more about our SEO, Website Optimization, and Content Management services.

What’s Next

Once you’ve identified your goals and updated your site to best suit those goals, you need to find out how successful you’ve been in your implementation. This is where analytics comes in, and I will be following up shortly with an article about measuring ROI.

I’ve found that the best way to keep on top of the available tools for web development is simply to maintain communication with other developers, finding out which products they like, which products they don’t like, and why they choose one option over another. So – what’s in your toolbox? Post some comments & let us know. Below is a list of a few of the tools we use over at Context to make our lives easier and make our clients happier:

Drupal (Content Management)

There are several content management systems we’ve worked with and have had good experiences with, but as we move forward, Drupal seems to be the winner in terms of features, scalability, and support. I suspect we’ll be using Drupal as the CMS for all projects in the foreseeable future, and I strongly recommend looking into it if you haven’t already. One thing I will say about Drupal is that its power isn’t at all apparent from the default install, so make sure you browse the documentation a bit in order to gain an understanding of just how much Drupal can do.

Magento (E-Commerce)

When it comes to E-Commerce, Magento takes the cake in terms of architecture, scalability, and customizability. Its architecture might be a little bit intimidating to some developers (it’s built on MVC and EAV), but its potential is just limitless. Most of the complaints I’ve heard about Magento seem to stem from a lack of understanding of MVC development, or a poor configuration of mySQL that leads to performance problems. Magento does still need some performance enhancements, but those enhancements are being addressed in an upcoming release slated for this month, and even now the speed is quite acceptable if you have mySQL tuned properly. I’m very interested in hearing alternatives to Magento, because I haven’t come across anything yet that, in my mind, is a legitimate competitor.

Fuse (PHP Development Framework)

Our own homegrown MVC framework, Fuse is definitely our weapon of choice for any custom PHP development. We’ve even successfully integrated it with Magento and Wordpress (e.g. the blog you are reading right now). Built to give us the flexibility of Rails but the freedom of using PHP, Fuse has grown into a very powerful competitor in the PHP/MVC world.

jQuery (Javascript framework)

If you’re not using a javascript framework, please start today. Even if you go with Prototype over jQuery, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not leveraging one of these phenomenal tools. It’s almost hard to quantify how much hassle we *don’t* have to go through to add historically tedious functionality like drag & drop, ajax forms, and dhtml popups. jQuery can turn an hour or more of tedious coding into a 30 second task – maybe a minute and a half if you first need to Google for the function name & available options.

I think we’re all patiently waiting for a standard way to embed any font into a web page via CSS, but adoption of the CSS3 standard for embedding fonts has not only seen slow progress, it has been met with opposition due to potential copyright issues. You can read more about the woes of standard cross-browser font embedding here.

However, you won’t have to wait until the CSS3 issues are worked out to be able to embed clean, anti-aliased, non-web fonts in your page without resorting to embedding text in images. The answer is here, and it’s called sIFR, the scalable Inman Flash Replacement.

Some people have called sIFR a hack, I just call it clever. And it’s no secret on the web – it’s been around in some form for quite a while now – but it seems that a lot of people I meet in the web design or website development business either haven’t heard of it or haven’t actually tried it.

sIFR works through a mix of CSS, javascript, and Flash. It performs surgical replacement of page text with dynamically generated flash movies, and those movies contain the replaced page text in the correct, non-standard font. Now, that may sound a bit overly complex and kludgey, but sIFR is packaged in a clean, easy, robust manner that works across browsers and allows a very fine level of control over the text replacements.

Let’s take a look at an example:

THIS IS MYRIAD PRO (which is not a standard web font)

The heading above uses a standard <h2> tag that is transparently replaced by sIFR with the flash movie containing the Myriad Pro font. One of the best things about sIFR is that if the user agent doesn’t support flash, it degrades gracefully into the default font for an h2 tag, so the user still sees the text. You may also noticed that you can highlight and copy the text as if it were a normal <h2> tag.

There is a lot of documentation on sIFR at the sIFR site (make sure to use sIFR3 for the best results), which should allow you to get things up and running quickly.

sIFR opens up a new world of web design freedom when it comes to choosing fonts. While I wouldn’t recommend replacing every bit of text on the page using sIFR, it works exceptionally well for headings and subheadings. We implemented sIFR quite a bit on the Native Eyewear website, and were very pleased with the results.

There are alternatives to sIFR such as Typeface.js, but so far sIFR seems to be the most reliable candidate for providing freedom of font choices in your website design. Your designers will be happy knowing that sIFR is in your toolbox, trust me!

Update (again): I had initially uploaded a jQuery based fix to get this selector working in IE6, but Emil Bjorklund pointed out that Dean Edwards’ IE7.js also fixes the issue, so I would recommend using that script to get the selector to work in IE6.

Recently, we’ve been making substantial use of a CSS selector that I stumbled on almost accidentally in the w3c docs: the “~=” selector, which can more compatibly be written simply by separating class names with a dot (and no spaces) . It’s certainly no secret, but I haven’t seen it in use much, and that’s a shame because it lends itself to some really clever and intuitive CSS. Here’s the definition for the selector:

Matches any E element whose “foo” attribute value is a list of space-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to “warning”.

It doesn’t sound too interesting, but what we’ve found is that it lets us use very intuitive, almost straight English syntax for our css classes by daisy chaining class names in a logical order.

Consider the situation where your template has a main content area, sometimes with a sidebar, sometimes without. There are plenty of ways to handle this fairly simple problem in CSS, but I’m finding the most elegant solution to be the following:

.main_column {
    min-height: 300px;
}

div.main_column.with_sidebar {
    float:left;
    width: 690px;

}

Now, when our main column needs a sidebar, we can do:

<div class="main_column with_sidebar">

<!-- Content here will be floated left -->

</div>

Why is this better than just defining “.with_sidebar”? Because it may be the case that two different classes (maybe “main_column” and “page_content”) both support a “with_sidebar” version that applies different width & floats depending on which class it’s being applied to. (”main_column .with_sidebar” won’t work because “with_sidebar” is not a descendant class of main_column.)

Taking it a step further, let’s add a green background:

div.main_column.and_green_background {

background-color: green;

}

now, how about:

<div class="main_column with_sidebar and_green_background">

<!-- Content here will be floated left with a green background -->

</div>

Again, there’s nothing here that can’t be solved in other ways, but I just wanted to introduce other people to this oft overlooked selector which, in my opinion, allows for very clever, elegant CSS.

In a time where so many businesses are concerned about their environmental impact, I find it surprising that the fax machine is still used as a day to day communication tool.

The Problem with Faxing

Consider the situation where I have a document typed in Microsoft Word and it’s been requested that I fax it to someone. I have to print the document at my location, then I have to fax it to the recipient where it is printed again. More than likely, my original copy goes in the garbage (I don’t need a hard copy), along with the fax report that my machine printed for me. Additionally, the receiving fax machine will print a cover sheet, the document, and a report. In the end, 5 sheets of paper were generated in order for the recipient to receive a single document. Had I used email instead, zero sheets of paper would have been used. Not only is it more eco-friendly to email, but it can save you money on paper!

In the situation where the document is already in hand as a printed document, it’s still ideal to scan it and email it instead of wasting 4 sheets of paper for the two reports, the cover sheet, and the duplicated document. Most all-in-one or business class scanners can be configured for one-button “scan to email” – ask your IT department about setting it up.

Additionally, faxes are very often printed in poor quality and end up crooked or cropped. There’s no need to settle for a degradation of quality in this day and age!

Finally, a common misconception is that faxing is secure. While one may be able to make the argument that faxing is more secure than unencrypted email, faxes are certainly nothing that any security firm would be willing to certify as a means of sending sensitive information. Also, encrypted email communication, which is becoming much more widely used (transparently to the senders and recipients), is considerably more secure than a fax transmission.

Making the Change

There are some situations where faxing is such an integrated part of the business process that it’s not going to disappear overnight. In the IT industry, we would refer to this as “legacy” infrastructure. However, now is the time to start thinking about a gradual shift away from fax-centric procedures and move toward scanning and email. Make it part of your goal for the next year to do less faxing.

Fax Alternatives

As indicated above, the ideal fax alternative is simply to email a file directly from your computer to the intended recipient. Most people in the business world have the ability to view Microsoft Office documents, but even more common are Adobe PDF (”Portable Document Format”) files. In fact, you can create PDFs right from Microsoft Word by downloading the free Save as PDF add-on directly from Microsoft.

If your recipient insists on faxed documents, you can still save yourself from having to print & fax the document by using an electronic fax. This is a simple process that can be accomplished via services such as EFax.com .