Content Strategy

"Longer, richer pages are more expensive to create, but our data shows that as the quality of a page increases, its effective revenue decreases. There will have to be a pretty significant shift in traffic to higher quality pages to make them financially viable to create."

- Paul Edmonson, HubPages CEO, Interviewed in Google Panda Two Years Later: 5 Questions With HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson,  Search Engine Land, February 26, 2013

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM.  To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience.  What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.

Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.

Thanks to Blend Interactive's Corey Vilhauer, I was reminded via an email blast that this is the last day to register for the Now What? Conference at the "early bird" price. This one-day conference is designed to help anyone who works with a website post-launch answer the question, “How do we keep our website useful and relevant?” The conference was created to help bring together web and marketing professionals from across the region to hear from some of today’s leaders in web project management, web governance, and content strategy while talking shop with colleagues and speakers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results but as search engine providers are constantly tweaking their indexing algorithm website owners should review the SEO techniques they utilize for their own site.

Key Factors that Improve SEO Ranking

Following are some of the key optimization parameters that the author believes will contribute to the improved SEO Ranking:

I spent most of the last two weeks camping and hiking in the Grand Teton National Park of northwest Wyoming. If you've never visited this national park then take my word on it that Grand Teton is one of the most beautiful places a person can visit in this world. The mountains in this place peak near 13,800 feet and rise from the valley by almost 7,000 feet. Despite the warm summer much of the United States experienced, ice glaciers can still be accessed through a number of day hikes. For anyone that loves the outdoors, this place has everything in the form of wildlife, scenery, and activities. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending from your perspective), what the Grand Teton doesn't have is good 3G or 4G cell phone coverage.

"The most successful people online, starting with Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, or Guy Kawasaki, all have one thing in common. They maintain a very active blog. At the end of the day, this is where your online home base resides.

If you want to succeed online, get a blog (via Tumblr, WordPress, or Typepad) and start crunching out quality content. It's the lifeblood of your online presence."

- Ilya Pozin, 7 Habits of Web-Savvy Entrepreneurs, Inc., July 5, 2012

During the Memorial weekend, I decided to pull the plug on the CMS related news feeds we were streaming into Planet CMS. One of CMS Report's biggest strengths has always been pointing people toward the right direction in their search for content management systems. Knowing that one site couldn't support all the stories that needed to be written about CMSs, we began to rely more heavily on using a news aggregator within our Drupal CMS to provide you the links and excerpts to articles written elsewhere. I did this all with good intentions, but Google apparently disagrees.

“Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.”

- Matthew Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, Quoted by Bobbie Johnson, "New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way", May 23, 2012

François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and content management system SilverStripe.

Hollande’s website http://francoishollande.fr was the web-based focal point of the door to door campaign and functioned as the main communication tool throughout the whole election period. In the month before the election, the site had three million unique visitors and ranked 15th most visited information site in France.