Web Content Strategy: Sources of Content

There are four basic ways you can get content for your site:

1. Licensed content that you can publish on your site for a one-time or recurring subscription fee, or in exchange for putting a link to author's site under article. The main benefit of this kind of content is that you can build up your site quickly. The drawback is that hundreds if not thousands of other sites will be publishing same content, which means you will get little search engine traffic from it. Also, within a few years, subscription fees or value of visitors who leave via required link to author's site will amount to more than you would have paid to have original content professionally written.

2. Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook-style comments. The main advantage of this content is that it costs nothing and gives you insight into your visitors. The disadvantages are (usually) low quality and constant vigilance needed to police it for misbehavior.

3. Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site. This content is usually informational articles, whitepapers, and sometimes, press releases. Distributing content is an essential component of getting links to your site.

4. Original, well-written content that's exclusive to your site. You should have some content that you hold back from republication, to avoid giving visitors or search engines idea all your content can be had somewhere else. This can include FAQs, "about us" pages, case studies, testimonials, and other content that other sites would not want to reprint anyway.

What Kind of Content to Use

So, which of four kinds of content should you use on your site? Ideally, all four. That way you'll maximize amount of quality content your site can have.

But, precise ratio of four kinds of content you end up using will depend on goals of your site. Some examples:

Knowing where and how you can use your keywords will greatly improve efficiency of your search engine optimization.

There are 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords:

The Title Tag The Keyword Meta Tag The Description Meta Tag Alt Tags for images Body copy on page

Of these page Body Copy, readable text on page, is single most important place for your keywords. More about this later.

Let’s first take a look at Title Tag. This is one of tags in head section of html code of your web page and lists title that is displayed in web browser. For instance, Internet Explorer displays this tag in top bar of browser window. But there are other uses for Title Tag as well. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as title of your listing.

In general you can use from 60 to 115 characters in a Title Tag. The Tag can include company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords. Consider this a short description of your web page. One more thing, Title Tag is also used as link when URL is saved into a web browser favorites list.

The Keyword Meta Tag used to be main way search engines indexed your page. Now-a-days many search engines will simply ignore this tag, but that may not always stay case. Some search engines still take s look at this tag to help categorize your site. There is no reason not to have this tag on your page, just in case. You are not penalized for including a Keyword Meta Tag.

The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put less important and general keywords later on. Search engines no longer pay attention to case of a keyword, so keywords can all be lower case. I have seen recommendations of 25 keywords or 1000 characters in list. In general Keyword pairs or triplets are better than single keywords. I try to have one or two lines of keywords if I use this tag.