Make your content work for you over and over - re-imagine, don't just recycle. (Photo: apSos.de)

This past week, My good friend Ann Handley and I participated in a Webinar about re-imagining your content. The main takeaway:

Don’t just re-purpose your content. Look at it and figure out ways to present it to new audiences, in new formats and with differing end-goals. Re-imagine, don’t recycle.

In a nutshell:  Build out a plan – by quarter, by year, by season – with focus on each section on a single theme. Next, build one major piece around that theme that covers all you want visitors, customers and readers to take away from your business. You’re the expert, and here is where you prove it. It can be in the form of a seminar or presentation, a white paper or eBook, or some other weighty item – as long as it’s both focused on the current  theme, and complete enough that it covers many angles.

Next, use that larger piece to make smaller, bite-size, well-timed, targeted chunks that you can use to spread the word out over time, assert your industry expertise across a few different channels and keep interest in the theme high – all of which will consequently keep visitors coming to your site for more.

Sounds simple? In essence it is – but it’s hard work, as Ann and I discussed. (more…)

There are a few battles out there that bring forth impassioned arguments from a variety of sources.

Superman vs. Lex Luther.
Broncos vs. Raiders.
Ninjas vs. Pirates.
Subdomains vs. Directories.

Yes, in the world of SEO, one of the biggest debates is the use of subdomains or directories to segment different microsites or site sections. (more…)

Monkeys and tigers?

Google and Bing?

It’s rare for Google, Yahoo! and Bing to get along. So when they announce any kind of joint effort to establish standards – it’s important to take notice.

This past week, the big three introduced Schema.org – a collection of common tags website owners and content managers can use to distinguish specific data elements on their site. (more…)

On one of my recent trips on the Content Revolution Tour with the great Ann Handley of Marketing Profs, I found myself hanging out with Ann in a seemingly unexpected place: The Mall.

And let me tell you, just like Ann takes content pretty seriously, she doesn’t mess around with clothes either. Or shoes for that matter.

The interesting thing, though, was the similarities we started seeing between our experience and content strategy. (more…)

All of us folks who are passionate about SEO and – more importantly – content, have spent many an hour in the past couple of weeks talking about Google’s most recent algorithm change.

Dubbed the Google Panda/Farmer update, Google aimed to target low-quality content sites. The end goal was clear – reduce rankings for content farms and other sites focused more on SEO tactics and less on good, useful content. And, this single algorithm change was pretty measurable – impacting close to 12% of the searches people make on the Web.

But this post isn’t about Pandas.
(If you want to learn more about the recent change – read it directly from the source.)

What I want to talk about is what’s next.

What is the next big change Google will make to their algorithm and what impact will it have for brands, large and small? (more…)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is near and dear to my heart. But, all to often it plays the lead role in a company’s content marketing efforts.

The plot goes something like this:

1. Either an internal or external SEO expert suggests to the company that they need to create more content in order to attract more traffic to their site.
2. Said expert performs keyword research and identifies opportunities for additional content. Generally, 1-2 keyword terms or phrases are focused on for each piece of content to really help drive relevancy.
3. Content is created focusing on these 1-2 keyword terms. Title tag is optimized. URL is beautiful. Keyword density is spot on.
4. Effort is repeated. Again. And again. And again.

Here’s the thing, the steps above aren’t bad – heck, when building out an SEO strategy for customers I often find myself returning to these core principles.

But, the steps above ARE NOT a content strategy. They are a component, something that shouldn’t be ignored but certainly shouldn’t be the central strategy either.

(more…)