Content strategy is more important than a lot of people think, but that’s mainly because of the hype that surrounds SEO. Don’t get me wrong, SEO is super important for your entire site, but content is the oxygen that keeps your site alive.

Think about a piece of paper that is shredded into a thousand little pieces, these pieces represent each page on your site. To help those pieces be more understandable, we’ll have to pour on some glue to mend them back together – that’s our SEO. But sometimes things get messy and we realize that we don’t actually need or want all of those thousands of pieces, because people don’t really like the dull, ugly pieces. So, we cut out the ugly pieces and we’re left with a beautiful, bright and shiny collage that even a child would appreciate (this analogy has gone too far). The point is that, that beautiful, bright and shiny collage is your content strategy. Of course there’s a lot more to it, but the results typically pay off for you and your readers/customers.

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I monitor SEO for a lot of clients on a monthly basis. A lot of it appears to be redundant to them because there aren’t many changes, but all of it is relevant for a very important reason. If an update occurs on your site and something goes down behind the scene, you aren’t going to notice it unless you or someone else is monitoring you websites SEO on a monthly basis. This is a list of things that I recommend you or someone else should be monitoring for you so you can ensure that you site continues to rank well in the search engines.

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I write a lot of content on the Internet.  Sometimes it’s for personal reasons, other times for SEO blogs and this blog, and a lot more for Bridgeline clients.  Each of these outlets has its own unique personality, and that personality has to show through the voice in the writing.

First of all, the writing (or content) voice has to be concise across the entire site, because it is technically the personality that represents the company, but this can be hard to do – especially when there are multiple people adding content to a single site.  So, it’s important to figure out what that voice is and make sure that everyone involved with writing on the site is informed as to what that voice should be.

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The Basics of URLs

Let’s start off this post by explaining what URLs are. If you Googled “URL” and landed on this page, then odds are you know what they are, so you can skip to the next section.

A website is made up of a very organized (or at least I hope yours is) and complex system of folders and files inside of folders, inside of folders. The main folder that houses everything is the root domain, otherwise known as your homepage. Each time you create a new page, you are adding a folder or file thus extending the length of your URLs.  URLs are what you type into the top of your browser to get to a page; in essence, it’s an address for a website or web page. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but you will never hear that term. In fact, I had to look it up.

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I love SEO.  Seriously, it’s like chasing a game that’s always changing the rules.  But, I have to declare something once and for all.  I’m putting my foot down today, because I’m tired of hearing it: You will never rank on the first page of Google just because you change the meta titles, descriptions and keywords on your site.   And if you do, you’re probably already working on the things I’ll be discussing below.

In case you didn’t catch that… there’s more to ranking in the search engines than meta data.  Phew, I’ve been waiting to get that off of my chest for a while.

So what else do you need?

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Just about three weeks ago I wrote an article on the difference between Facebook Like, Facebook Share and Facebook Fan.  I mean, I’m still crackin’ up over that funny baby picture, that’s how new it is!  But, as the Internet goes, everything from that post has changed.  Where there was once a big difference between Like and Share, Facebook’s latest announcement makes them almost one of the same.

It makes sense though, the Like button didn’t stand a chance next to the Share button.  The Share button is just more sociable and more clickable than the Like button ever was.

Okay, let’s reexamine this, shall we? And let’s use, yet another, awkward family photo:

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