this is justwebcontent.com

If you’re new to the wide world of the web, or even considering the relaunch of an existing site, then you should really be giving some thought to a strategy for content.

A lot of sites around today happened without a content plan: they simply grew organically from the germ of an idea and the basis of a design. That’s all right for hobby sites, but when it comes to content for a purpose wishy-washy organic won’t cut it.

Obviously, you want a richly-populated, deeply interesting site; one which will attract those all important back links from popular sites because it has something interesting to say. Like a novel, every good website content needs a plot. And while that plot may develop over the coming years, it should always fit perfectly with your business objective at any point in time: there should be no gaps, no awkward pauses, no pages that are hinted at but just aren’t there.

So from the get go, you should have a plan for web content so that as your business grows, the content grows with it. Get it right and within five years you’ll have a huge resource on your hands with a minimum of effort. Get it wrong and you’ll be left with a nightmare of time-consuming revision, rewriting and damaging contradiction.

Back-Breaking Back-Links

And there are great SEO benefits in well-planned and seamless content. Right now you’re probably thinking about cross-linking campaigns and not looking forward to the prospect. It’s a laborious enterprise and more trouble than it’s worth, not least because the websites most likely to reciprocate are those with the smallest page-rank and hence the least clout SEO wise.

But, if your site is full of interesting joined-up content, there’s more chance that sites with good page rank will link to you automatically. You don’t have to be a TIME, Wikipedia or a BBC to be interesting enough for TIME, Wikipedia or the BBC to link to you: you just have to be relevant, original and authoritative.

1. Write Rubbish

If your content makes no sense, if it’s dull and irrelevant, if not even your mother would make it all the way through, then you can be sure it will be bad for SEO. Make content interesting, make content readable, make content fun!

2. Duplicate It

There’s nothing quite so annoying as content repeated again and again. I mean, there is NOTHING so annoying as content which is repeated time after time. Really, repeating content again and again and again is really, REALLY, really annoying. The search engines don’t like it either, you might even describe it as SEO’s worst nightmare. Don’t use content which is duplicated (or even just summarized) elsewhere on the internet — even if it’s your own copyright, especially if it’s duplicated on the same site. Check for originality on copyscape.com if you’re not certain, and even if you are. Even if the content is your copyright and has been copied by someone else, it can hit your SEO if the copying site has a higher Page Rank than yours.

3. Make It Invisible

For search engines, invisible text equals SEO scam. Technically, making content invisible to the naked eye — for example, making it the same colour as the background or making it transparent or putting it in comment tags — comes under the heading of “Black Hat SEO”, or cheating. It’s a way of artificially loading content with keywords [SEO, content, search engine, timeshare, cialys, pre5cription5] to bump up the density, and the search engines got wise to it years ago. It will hurt your SEO.

4. Use JavaScript To Present It

Search engines just won’t index content which is provided by JavaScript. There have been too many SEO scams using scripts in the past and Google and the rest aren’t taking chances any more. If all you can see in the content source code is a ton of JavaScript, then you can be sure that the search engines won’t be seeing it either.

5. Make It Chaotic

Content should make sense. Part of that is how it is organised. One of the best ways to ruin your SEO is to order content in an illogical, inconsistent fashion so that the reader doesn’t know whether they are at the beginning, middle or end. This extends to your <h> tags: use them in the order <h1>, <h2>, <h3> … <h6>. Keeping content organised means the search engine spiders can crawl it, index it and rank it to the best effect.

This may not yet be the Golden Age of Content, but it IS coming. Getting those all important search engine places has, until now, been a matter of juggling organic search elements.

These include keyword factors like good meta tags, keyword density in text, internal links and even the domain name itself, domain registration age and history, good backlinks and relevance to the topical neighbourhood, the age of links and the quality of the sending domain and metrics such as the time spent on pages and the number of searches.

Google’s current algorithm certainly has some direct analysis of content beyond keyword densities, and there is some speculation that further content endorsement comes from good old human beings (search specialists will also tell you that a good route to prominent Google placement is via the The Open Directory project — dmoz.org –which is entirely human-based).

Google’s own comment on their search algorithm is simply: “Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult”.

Google watchers say the algorithm changed last year to the detriment of many existing sites using the arsenal of so-called “White Hat” tricks such as keyword density and Long Tail. One way of regaining SEO that seemed to work was increased pagination: more content. It seems as if Google (and other search engines) have good, relevant and interesting content in their sights.

But isn’t that what search engines were meant to be? Somewhere people went to find readable pages relevant to their interest.

You should take note of this now. Don’t abandon White Hat, but be aware that your site should be more than a series of search engine algorithm tricks. Content is king.

I spotted this sign recently in a major NHS children’s hospital and I had to smile (perhaps that’s the point, though I reckon the humor is too nerdy for most kids — or their parents). It’s an example of colour contrast, first outlined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and shows that some colour combinations just don’t work, in this case yellow and white.

So the joke is that the one statement that’s most difficult to read is all about communication.

Some colours just don’t work with each other, if your main aim is clear communication. Yellow on White (although white on a deep yellow may work); Green on Red; Red on Green; Blue on Blue; the list goes on an on …

Fortunately, there are several web-based tools to help you choose color schemes. My favorites are ColorJack which is  very good for accessibility testing; DeGraeve’s Palette Generator; Colormixers; and the 4096 Color mixer.

So why beef up the content on your website? The logic goes that the more people you get to come to your website, the more business you get. Logical really …

It used to be said that success on a website was defined as a “conversion rate” of anything better than 1% — that is, for every 100 people coming to your website, one made a purchase.

Yet there is a potential problem. The more varied content one offers, the higher visitor numbers should rise and that is good. Conversely, the more varied the content one offers, the more varied one’s audience will be. In fact, much of your audience will consist of people who have no need for your prime service. By that logic, page views may go through the roof and sales double or treble, but the conversion rate will fall.

No matter. This is a case where it pays not to get caught up in the jargon. The key phrase is sales DOUBLING or TREBLING. There are some analogies with the retail idea of “pile it high and sell it cheap”, if you sell lots, you can afford a smaller profit margin, though that’s not the whole story. Getting many more people to come to your website will help to make your brand a household name. And as the business develops — and as markets develop too — the people that drift through the site today may be the customer of tomorrow looking for the product of the moment.

That’s why some content streams might not seem to be “target audience”. Your net needs to be spread further.

Everyone likes good publicity: just look at the film posters quoting reviews of the movie. Of course, these can be misleading.

A recent blurb for the TV movie The Girl in the Café quoted The Oregonian newspaper:

“An endearing romantic comedy.”

What The Oregonian actually said was:

“This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.”

You can see more of these at Gelf Magazine.

You probably don’t have to be so economical with the actualité. But it’s not so easy to bathe in glory. One great content idea is a gallery of what people have said about your company or site. However, content usually comes with a price, and as we discovered recently with a CNBC video clip of our CEO, simply linking to a video or article is not enough. Within hours of linking to the clip on CNBC, they imposed a subscription-only tag. There’s nothing suspicious here: in a charged-content model, content is usually free for a set period before the curtain comes down.

News providers such as magazines, newspapers and broadcast media have been arguing for years about charging for content (news agencies like Reuters and the Press Association survive by charging for content, but their main customers are the aforesaid magazines, newspapers and broadcast media). Because the enduring ethos of the internet is “everything is free”, it’s been very difficult to get drive-by surfers to pay for anything. Some have tried. Most have failed. TIME magazine charged for content from their magazine for four years and made a profit (the only part of the operation that did!!), but when their sister site AOL decided to open up their content to everyone, TIME decided to drop the “curtain” — and still made a profit!

Incidentally, TIME used to charge for magazine content seven days after it hit the newsstands on the basis that people would pay for a magazine online which they couldn’t buy on the streets. The exception were religious stories — which they charged for immediately: religious feeling as it is in the U.S., people would pay for that content at any time. Religious stories were the big money earners!

The fact is that some copy is off limits to non-payers (or at least non-subscribers), and while a “What They Say About Us” page would be great, it will not be easy.

1. Because you always have access to your content

Managing content using flat-XHTML and a code editor means you ALWAYS need a code editor. Even if you have a team running a round-the-clock service there will always be gaps. A good Content Management System or CMS means an authorised user can nip into any cybercafé in the world and change stuff to their heart’s content.

2. Because you can keep tabs on who’s doing what

Flat-XHTML is anonymous. A good CMS will include an “audit trail”, a clear record of who’s done what to which. This means sources of error can be pinpointed; ageing content can be freshened up or removed; differences in individual workloads can be managed; and weak areas can be highlighted. This may seem a little Big Brotherish but, in reality, it’s about spotlighting excellence as well as under-achievement.

3. Because you can maintain a style

Even with the world’s best-written style manual, bespoke additions to flat-XHTML content produce differences: it’s human nature to squeeze and poke things into position and cumulative, piecemeal changes can be difficult to roll back. A good CMS enforces style by limiting changes to content to those sanctioned by content managers.

4. Because it helps you to delegate

A good CMS allows access at different levels; from the Site Manager who can do anything, to the writer who can only enter and revise text. Now your website can be built by people with no internet skills, which is most of us.

5. Because things change

A good CMS allows you to change the way your site as required in the least harmful way. So, if your company totally rebrands, then the website can totally rebrand (and at much less cost). And if new rules or ways of thinking come along, you can meet the challenge easily because your content is held as raw data by the CMS.

Surfing websites like I do all the time, I’ve become very good at spotting those which have been crudely SEO’ed to within an inch of reason. It’s very easy to get sucked in by the great Nirvana of good Keyword Density.

Time and again, you find tiny passages of content crammed with so many keywords in such a small space that they become almost unreadable. They have been optimised to be picked up by the Google Bots and the Yahoo! Slurps but for the end-user — the humble surfer wanting to find answers to questions and possibly buy your services — they can be practically useless.

As one part of my quest for good web content, I’ve written a tool which you can use to show how much you’re repeating yourself. Keywords aside, you should be aiming at variety in the way you express yourself.

The long answer is that keyword density is just one part of the picture. A well optimised website pays as much attention to density of content, back-links etc.

A friend pointed me to this tool which does some calculations to give an overview of how well the site works with search engines against others. One of the outputs is a comparison radar graph. What you want to see is a weird big space-hogging pentagon; anything less and your site is not what it could be.

If your site shows this big pentagon, then you’re obviously not obsessed with keyword densities. Good for you!