The answer to that question really has two elements – first and foremost you must have a content plan that spells out the key content subjects that make sense for you to dive deeply into. This should be a list of eight or ten major themes that comprise your organization’s keywords and phrases. In other words, it’s not enough to have ideas to write about, they need to be the right ideas.

When you create this list and stick to it you can create a body of work over time that includes a thorough exploration of every subject on your list and build up a library of focused content that can extend to fact sheets, eBooks, videos, articles, interviews, and case studies that support all of your major themes.

The second element to this question involves the tool set required to keep content inspiration high. If you simply sit down each time you’re going to write something armed with only your keyword list, you’ll struggle to create fresh ideas.

Below are five ways that I keep content pouring over my brain in an effort to help me stay focused and excited about content creation.

Questions

This one is my power tool. Think about it. People ask questions because they want to know something. Your customers ask questions constantly. One of the easiest ways to create content that relates to your business and fills a need is to simply get in the habit of writing responses to questions you know need answering.

Before you know it you’ll have a powerful group of answers that you can turn into an FAQ document. The great thing about most questions is that if one person wants the answer, there’s a pretty good chance that others do as well.

Check out popular question and answer sites such as Quora, Focus or LinkedIn Answers. These sites are great because you can sort by topic and get a sense of the most popular questions people in your industry are asking. You may choose to participate on these sites, but the real value from a content standpoint may lie in the inspiration you gain from addressing the questions in your own content.

RSS Feeds

I subscribe to over 100 blogs and I make a habit of scanning them daily using Google Reader and an iPhone app called Reeder.

This allows me to stay on top of what people are saying in my world and often stimulates ideas for things I should write about. Many times I can take an idea and explain it differently or apply it to something totally unrelated.

This is also where I get exposed to other people’s content that I want to share in my newsletters and tweets.

Books and Magazines

I still subscribe to about five print magazines and, even though I can consume them online, I find that sometimes I gain additional insight through the use of different mediums. So in addition to the content in these magazines there’s value for me in the context as well.

I read lots of books due to the nature of my business but I also intentionally seek out books that people recommend that are seemingly unrelated to my business. I often get incredibly insightful ideas from books on philosophy, architecture, math, science and nature. There are so many parallel ideas in these studies that help me express business ideas in fresh ways.

Here’s a list of five books that taught me to look at things differently.

Bookmarking Sites

I love to dig into sites like Reddit and Delicious just to see what other people are finding interesting though their bookmarks. This helps me uncover content, tools and ideas that might take weeks and months to trickle into the mainstream and also provides tremendous intelligence on what makes something popular.

I also make extensive use of the tool on my own by bookmarking lots of content that I find and tagging it with my core topic list for later use.

Intentional Reading

This last one isn’t a tool so much as it is a behavior. I discovered this years ago when I was compiling information for my first book.

One of the most potent ways I know to develop unique content is to read a number of books related or unrelated to your topic with a single, intentional point of view.

In other words, if I’m looking to develop ideas around the topic of referrals I will read books that may or may not have much to do directly with referrals looking for ideas that I could apply. So for example a book on technology might be talking about how to design something in a way that makes it easier to scale and from my referral point of view I might very well gain a unique way to express how to build a network.

It’s almost as though I turn into the narrator while reading.

The bar for content creation is ever increasing. Where simple quantity was enough several years ago, today’s need for insight over shear information calls for a much deeper relationship with the ideas you choose to own.

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What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is the process of over optimizing a page of content, for a word or phrase, which is then used over and over again, in order to improve the keyword density of the post. The higher the keyword density, the easier it is for search engines to figure out what that post is all about. The post I just read was 337 words long and repeated the same 2 word key phrase 24 times!

It’s a low value form of SEO, as these over optimized posts tend to achieve very poor conversion rates. Yes, people will find them via search engines, but because they are stuffed with the same phrase over and over and over again, they make little sense. So, people tend to leave those pages as quickly as they arrive.

Focus on conversions, not traffic!

Over optimized, keyword stuffed posts are tempting for bloggers, who are more focused on traffic than focused on conversions; sales, subscribers, emails, sales inquiries etc.

Whilst it’s nice to see a few thousand people visit your blog each day, if they leave within seconds because the content fails to earn their attention, what’s the point? It’s a little like sending a huge mail shot out to people, which contains a badly written letter that makes no sense to the reader. It would reach lots of people, yet generate no positive response.

Organic optimization

The reality is that a well written post, which is on topic and focused around a single idea, can easily be picked up by search engines, whilst being of value to your target readership. Such posts are organically optimized. It’s natural. It reads great. It converts!

For example, if I were to write a review right now, for my new HTC One X phone, there would be a number of times where I would need to mention the full name of the phone. This would include the post title, the initial paragraph and at least one of the sub-headings. I’d also need to mention the full name of the phone in any stats I produced as well as the summing up section at the end of the review.

In short: Attract focused traffic by optimizing organically. Yes, it’s a smart move to ensure your blog posts are easy for the Google bot to understand, but stuffing them with keywords so they make little or no sense when people try to read them, is a waste of your time.

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I recently discovered that Google Analytics has a tool where you can generate a keyword cloud to display the keyword phrases that drive traffic to your website. However, because it treats each keyword phrase uniquely rather than looking for specific words within the phrase, it doesn’t give you much more insight than just viewing your keywords as a list.

I was looking for a tool that would help me quickly uncover trends and themes within the keywords my prospects were using by amalgamating multiple long tail searches…those very specific terms that goal-driven searches may look for. 

So I took a list of the 500 keyword phrases that drove the most traffic to flyte.biz in the past month, exported them, and popped them into Wordle, a free tool that generates tag clouds like the one above.

Pretty cool, huh?

Two caveats: 

• Wordle only looks at individual words, not phrases, so even “how to” is treated as two unique words. 
• The way I ran the report doesn’t factor in how many times a specific search was performed , rather only by how many times a word appeared in total within the list. I.e., “facebook cover photo” might have driven 50 unique visitors to our site in the past month, but “facebook,” “cover,” and “photo” only get one vote each for that specific search. The terms “business” and “facebook” appear larger in the tag cloud because so many unique searches included those terms. I could have run a scenario where “facebook cover photo” was repeated 50 times before I entered the terms into Wordle to get a better idea of how popular a certain phrase was, but I was looking for trends, not exact numbers.

While this is far from scientific, it does help me get a sense of the biggest challenges our ideal customers suffer from. 

What does your tag cloud tell you?

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The SEO mistakes she mentions are:

1. Having no value proposition
2. Segmented approach
3. Time-consuming workarounds
4. Caught in SEO trends
5. Slow iteration

The SEO tips she gives out are:

1. Do something cool
2. Include relevant words in your copy
3. Be smart about your tags and site architecture
4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools
5. Attract buzz: Natural links, +1s, likes, follows
6. Stay fresh and relevant

What do you think of these tips? Are you already following them? Do share your views.

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Strong Domain Name

Many argue about the value of using keywords in the domain name and whether that will make any difference at all in the ranking algorithms. Whether it’s a lot or a little, I believe the full process of optimization is largely about doing a whole lot of “not much.” SEO is often a series of baby steps that collectively get you closer to the goal.

Outside of using keywords in your domain name, there’s really not a lot you can do to “optimize” it. The best thing to do is, if possible, make sure your keywords are in your business name and secure that URL. Doing so will ensure that anyone linking to you with your business name will use your keywords in the link.

Effective Title and Meta Tags

To have search engine friendly title tags and meta description tags, they must meet two criteria:

• They are present
• They are unique

Optimizing them is important. However, if your site is live on the Internet, even if it’s not optimized, you need to make sure to have unique title tags and meta descriptions on every page. Do that first, optimize them later.

Making sure you have unique title tags on every page sounds like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised at how often sites are missing these two key elements. Several years ago, we had a client that used a programmer who not only failed to create a way to add a unique title for each page, but also didn’t make a way to add any text to those tags whatsoever! The site code looked like this:

<title></title>

We were told it would take several months to add the functionality we needed to craft unique titles for their pages, yet we were expected to get their site to perform anyway. They chose not to fire their programmers, so we fired them.

There is no excuse for any Web developer to know so little about building websites that he or she fails to provide a place for unique title tags and meta descriptions on your site. If your site doesn’t have that functionality, or it’s not a function your developers can add immediately, find a developer who can!

Reduce Code Bloat

Code bloat is one of my minor amusements when I’m evaluating websites. I enjoy looking at the source code of a Web page and then scrolling down to see how long the code for the page is and mentally compare it to how long it should be. But what I really enjoy is when I see a well-designed page with very little code. That’s the way it should be!

Many developers use programs to build websites that allow you to create the page visually, then chop up the code. Some do a good job of reducing the code bloat, but it’s never 100%. Unfortunately, many “professional” designers don’t even know enough about code to fix the code bloat these programs create.

Reducing code bloat on your site cuts down on page download time, which is one of the signals search engines use when evaluating a page. By making download speeds quicker, search engines are able (or willing) to index more pages of your site for ranking in the search results. It also makes the user experience much better, which increases conversion rates.

One of the easiest ways to reduce code bloat is to remove unnecessary code from the page into external files. CSS and JavaScript code are two of the biggest culprits of code bloat that can easily be moved off each page. Your developers should already know this, but it’s often not utilized enough or at all.

By moving this code into external files, the visitor only has to download the file once and it applies to every page as directed. If the code is on the page, then it has to be downloaded with each page view. This, again, creates additional code for the search engines, and slows down the user experience.

Proper Heading Usage

There is some argument to the value of heading tags (h1-h6) in improving your search engine rankings. Again, the value may be small, but I believe that having strong semantic markup of your content using hx tags gives the search engines a better idea how to “read” your content and, therefore, value it.

Many webmasters simply bold paragraph headings or maybe make the font larger or a different color. That’s all fine for the visitor, and it may send a signal to the search engine, but the best way to indicate text is a paragraph heading is to make sure it’s in a heading tag.

Heading tags should be implemented similar to the outline format you used in high school. Your paper had your title (h1), three main points (h2) and your sub- (h3) and sub-sub- (h4) points. It’s that easy!

One mistake many developers make today is to put almost everything in a heading tag. Navigation elements, product links and even your logo! There is nothing wrong with using headings tags for each of these elements, but you want to reserve your h1-3 tags for your content areas. There should only be one h1 on each page.

Strong Navigation & Internal Links

Search engine friendly navigation and linking structures are the cornerstone of a search engine friendly website. This is the one area where, if everything else is done right but your link structure is all wrong, you’re shooting yourself in the foot in all your other optimization efforts.

Before developing your site, you need to have a clear idea of your navigational structure, and everything must have a clear purpose. Be willing to adjust and change your best ideas if your keyword research suggests you should in order to make the navigation more keyword and user-focused.

Two things to consider when building your navigation. 1) Be sure the search engines can follow the links. 2) Don’t make your navigation (header or footer) a site map to every page on your site. Both of these can hurt your optimization efforts.

Great On-Page Content

Several years ago, I had a potential client contact me to have us optimize their site. Through our discussions we came to an impasse. They were unwilling to make any changes to the content of their site. They had it “just the way we want it” and wouldn’t budge.

They had poured thousands of dollars into the design, and they liked it exactly they way it was. Not only were they unwilling to optimize the content, they were unwilling to take the text out of the images so the search engines could read it! At that point we knew there was nothing we could do for them.

Making sure your text is indexible by the search engines is paramount. Search engines cannot read text embedded in images, and that is one of the primary indicators for what each page of your site is about. If your pages have no (readable) text, the chances for rankings become very slim.

Once each page of your site is search engine friendly, you can then begin the targeted keyword optimization process. But don’t jump too far ahead. All the keyword targeting in the world won’t help if your site isn’t friendly to begin with. Start here and you’ll be surprised at how just making your pages search engine friendly will start bringing in the traffic you want. Optimization, at that point, is bonus!

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Once your blog has been correctly configured, write the best content you can, as often as you can and make it as easy for people to share as you can. Put your work where the right people will see it, social networking sites are great for this.

Then, keep on doing the work.

The software alone is not enough

I often see people who seem to spend more time changing the design of their blog and the plugins they use, than they spend blogging and improving their writing.

The thing is, it’s the quality of our content and the regularity with which we show up with great content, which makes the difference. This is why you can have blogs like ZenHabits or Seth Godin’s blog, which are extremely plain looking and get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and blogs that use the latest glossy WordPress theme, which very few people read. Leo and Seth write great content, regularly.

For those who want a bigger, targeted readership for their blogs, there are 2 areas I recommend you focus on.

1. Show up regularly

If people respond well when you write, (i.e they share your posts, link to them and talk about them), but you don’t write very often, increase the frequency of your blogging. Here’s how to write great content every day. The big secret to being able to produce useful content on a regular basis, is to do it. The more you write, the easier it becomes.

2. Show us what you know and what you think

If you write regularly, but people tend not to respond when you write, I suggest you take a look at what you write. People love to read and share blog posts, which offer them some kind of value, either because it makes them think, makes them act or makes them laugh out loud. The best thing you can do is be yourself, rather than try and copy what others are doing. One of the reasons you have not seen me writing about Pinterest or SOPA, is that thousands, maybe millions are already doing that. I can’t add value there. It would be a me too post.

Turn up regularly and do the work. Show us what you know and what you think. Give us a reason to keep coming back for more, to share your work with our friends, and that’s exactly what we will do.

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Too often though people will just plan their initial website. They have a variety of web pages and they create them and call it good. Your website should always be a work in progress so that it continues to generate new visitors for you. This will also ensure that you get plenty of repeat traffic from people that have been there before. Your site will continue to be trendy and current with new content instead of becoming boring and outdated over time.

Studies indicate that the top ranking sites on the search engines out there are those that have regular updates to their web pages. They also contain a great deal of very good content that is relevant to that their site is all about. You have to evaluate all of it from the view of the search engines. They know that if they want to be of value to the customers they have to give them the best possible experience.

This is why Google is the search engine of choice – they offer lots of information on any subject. There is typically not any reason for a consumer of Google to go to any other search engine. They are going to find what they need high in the pages of search results that come back to them. If that wasn’t the case then they would be starting with other search engines. If you want to place well in Google, then you must continually be adding good content to your web pages.

It is a good idea to get into the habit of routinely adding content to your website. You may decide to write it on your own. However, you can also outsource to a ghostwriter that can offer you some fresh content on a weekly basis. This is a cost effective way of getting better rankings and that will generally also increase your conversion rates. There will always be new topics in your niche that you can use to add content with. Make sure you optimize what you add with keywords that consumers will most likely be typing into the various search engines.

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Why Bother?

One of the top reasons to focus on content is that it helps solidify your online presence. Google’s recent Panda update to its search engine algorithm puts a significant premium on the quality and depth of content on your site. If you are continually updating it with high-quality content, you will probably maintain your website’s search ranking. When your content quality or quantity drops, so will your ranking.

Respond to a Need

When creating content, don’t just write the first thing that comes to mind, but instead, be intentional. For example, Alert1 offers products like life alert systems that respond to what they see as a need for their consumer base. Likewise, your content should respond to a need that you see in your audience. What is lacking in their knowledge, skills or tool set? You want to equip them with valuable information that will help them excel in making wise decisions or being better informed.

Expect Results

As you produce quality content on a regular basis, you will find that your customers feel more in touch with you, and are more likely to work with you again. You can make yourself and your site valuable assets to consumers by sending regular email updates with information not just about your company but about market trends and things that are relevant to their needs. In addition, quality content will help you continually build your client base as people find you online and come back because they know that you are an expert in the field with valuable contributions to make.

Now is the time to focus on quality content again. Get started by making a blog on your company’s website and updating it with engaging articles several times per week. Create white papers about industry trends and make them available on your website and at your office. And don’t forget the power of email newsletters to keep clients’ loyalty with interesting and informative content on a regular basis.

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Blogging time

A common misconception regarding blogging, is that the time investment required to build a successful blog, is primarily the time it takes to write posts. Whilst at the very beginning, the time it takes to write your posts accounts for a big chunk of your blogging time, once your blog gets established, the time you spend writing the posts becomes a smaller and smaller percentage. Currently, just 20% of my blogging time is spent writing posts. The majority of my time is spent looking after the elements that come into play, when thousands of people read your content every day and your work becomes highly visible.

That’s what I want to share with you in this post.

A wonderful challenge

It’s a wonderful challenge to have, but one that is seldom discussed. The thing is, if you are thinking of either starting your own commercial blog or you are about to start taking your existing blog seriously, you need to know the kind of time commitment required once your blog takes off.  In the case of this blog, it’s a few hours a day now.

When I started Jim’s Marketing Blog, almost 4 years ago, I would invest around 30 minutes writing a post and then an hour a day marketing that post and the blog itself. I would get to know the people who commented here, connecting with them on Twitter and (back then) Friendfeed. It was fun, enjoyable work, but there was a time investment required, which I knew I needed to make if I wanted the blog to progress.

Fast forward 4 years and I still do all of that, though I now use Google+ (a LOT), Twitter and Facebook. However, today I ALSO invest around 2 hours on other blog related activities.

Blog related activities?

As your readership builds and your blog ranks well for lots of popular search terms, you will attract lots more attention. This includes:

• Sales pitches: Anyone Googling the words ‘marketing blogs’ will find my blog on page 1, so, when they want someone to pitch a marketing related product to, they always find me.
• Guest bloggers: I also get emails daily from people asking if I will let them ‘guest blog’ here. Because none of them do any research, they are unaware it’s a self-authored blog, so email me anyway.
• Reader questions: I get lots of emails every day from readers, with often extremely complex marketing related problems. Whilst I am unable to offer them individual support, I do reply to every reader email.
• Advertiser emails: Because of the blog’s position on Google, I get emails all the time from people who want to advertise here.
• PR spam: PR firms insist on adding me to their lists, without consent, when sending out their client’s press releases, even though I have never published a press release here. PR spam is easily the biggest source of unwanted email I encounter, with 30/40 emails a day.

N.B: Yes, I know it would be a lot easier for me to just hit delete on every email or have filters set up to try and catch the pitches, PR spam and link requests, but it would mean many genuine, reader emails being lost and I am not prepared to do that.

All in all, I would say that actually writing blog posts is now less than 20% of the time I currently invest in this blog and activities directly related to it.

And in return?

The rewards are many and huge!

If you have the time or can make the time, to handle the feedback created by a successful blog, the pay-off is amazing. Make no mistake, starting this blog was easily the most valuable business decision I ever made and has repaid me many, many times over for what I have invested into it. The benefits of blogging can be stunning, if you manage to develop a large, targeted reader community:

• Most important for me is the opportunity to connect with, work with and meet amazing people. The readers of this blog are my biggest commercial asset. I feel like I know many of those who comment here and must have spoken to a couple of hundred of you so far. It’s a true reader community and invaluable to me.
• You can contribute to others, in a way that helps hundreds of thousands of other people every year. It’s impossible to overstate the value of this, for those of us who are committed to serving others.
• You can build a very enjoyable, 6 figure business from it, as I did here. If affiliate products or software sales are your thing, look at what Brian Clark did with copyblogger, launching several, million dollar businesses off his blog. It just requires skill, time and a LOT of work!
• You will attract countless opportunities for you and your business, as your reach and influence increases.
• You will also get a massive amount of enjoyment from it.

In short: If you are serious about developing your blog into a massively valuable asset, make sure that you have processes in place, for what happens as your blog takes off.

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There are two great tools to accomplish this. The first and my personal favorite is Keyword Discovery by Trellian. This keyword research tool compiles search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide. Wordtracker is another great tool and is currently the most well know keyword research tool on the market. Both are subscription based, but well worth the price you pay. You can also use the free keyword research tool provided by Yahoo! Search Marketing but this won’t provide the extensive data that the other two products will.

Once you have developed a list of keyword phrases to target, the next preliminary step is to identify which pages on your site will support each phrase. Sometimes this may be an easy task while other times it may require quite a process. This is especially true if you are working on a client site where you are not completely familiar with the products and/or services or the structure of the site itself. If you are having trouble identifying which pages coincide with specific keywords, trying searching the site with the “site” command (site:www.yoururl.com keyword phrase). This will often produce a list of pages from your site that may be good candidates for your list.

Now on to the elements of the page that can be optimized as well as some basic guidelines. In most cases there are only five elements of a web page that you need to optimize – 1.) Title Tags, 2.) Meta
Description Tags, 3.) Page Copy, 4.) Alt Attributes and 5.) Anchor Text in Textual Links.

Title Tags

Title Tags are the most important element of optimizing a page. If you can do nothing else, optimize the title tag. There are various methods optimizers use but I generally like the following format:

<title>Keyword Phrase Here | Company or Website Name Here</title>

Some people like to have the company name first for branding purposes. Others leave it out altogether so they have more characters to work with. You generally have 64 characters to work with in a title tag before it may get cut off by an engine. That is not a hard and fast rule as each engine is different but it is what I follow. I like to have the company name in the title tag because branding is very important
to me. At any rate, try to avoid stuffing too many keywords into a title tag or using repetition of the same keywords over and over again. The key is to make sure your targeted phrase is in place but at the same time make sure your title attracts clicks from searchers.

Meta Description Tag

While many engines will actually use a snippet of text from your body copy to form the description that you see in the SERPs (search engine results pages), it does not hurt to write a description of the topic of the page. These can appear in the SERPs and engines do index them as well as factor them in their algorithms. They can also be useful when filling in description forms in directories or providing a well written description for someone who may be linking to that page from their site.

Body Copy

Most often a site will already have decent copy. The idea is to ensure your targeted phrases are represented in the copy but in a natural language. In other words, don’t try to force a phrase in so often that your copy looks unnatural or just plain stupid. Your copy needs to be written to convert, educate, entice or whatever else your goal is. It needs to be written for your users. They are the ones that will end up supporting your business, not the search engines. So the idea is to have effective copy that also represents your targeted phrases for that page. Don’t worry about keyword density formulas because they don’t exist. If they did, it would fluctuate every time because competition for positions in organic search is always going to vary. Depending on how much copy actually exists on a page, I try to make sure the phrase I am targeting is represented at least a few times. Avoid scenarios like this:

Our blue widgets are the best blue widgets in the blue widget industry. We offer big blue widgets as well as small blue widgets. We offer blue widgets in large quantities as well as small. When searching for blue widgets, you need to look no further because our blue widgets are the best blue widgets in the entire spectrum of blue widgets.

Have you had enough? Sounds stupid, doesn’t it. That’s because it is and it will turn off visitors faster then anything else you do.

Alt Attributes

Alt attributes, also commonly referred to as “alt tags” (although the wrong term for them) consist of the text that lies behind images or graphics. Search engine algorithms do take into count alt attributes
behind linked images whereas they do not with images that are not linked. While all of your images should have an alt attribute for usability’s sake, linked images should describe the page they are linking to while un-linked images should describe the image itself. So the optimization really comes into play with linked images. It is here that you can insert keywords that are relevant to the page they are linking to but keep it simple. Don’t use these as an opportunity to stuff an endless stream of keywords in there.

Anchor Text in Textual Links

Just as alt attributes in linked images can help an optimization effort, so can using targeted anchor text in textual links to other pages. Again a caution and that is when optimizing anchor text in textual
links, keep your site visitors in mind. Make sure copy remains in a natural state.

What’s Left?

You may have noticed that I did not discuss the keyword meta tag, header tags, bold tags, etc. That is because they are not that important. The keyword meta tag is pretty much useless. I still develop one for each site I work on but do not go through the effort of creating unique ones for each page. They can be good for representing common mis-spellings of keywords – that is if there is not a lot of competition out there for those same words. Google and MSN do not index them  while Yahoo and Ask do. So, if you want to target a few mis-spelled words, better to do it here then in your copy. Heading tags have never made that much of a difference. The same is true of bolding text. You can certainly employ these but do so again where it makes sense to do so and not just because you think it will help your rankings.

Well that’s all I have on this topic. Keep in mind that these are basic fundamentals. Each site and each page for that matter is different and as such can create unique scenarios. These are simply some
fundamental things to keep in mind when optimizing individual web pages.

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