Content is the meat behind any SEO campaign. Required for any long-term success, quality content will slowly but surely drive links, a steady customer base and what we call ‘site equity’ – essential for high rankings that will last for the long haul. Without such content, your strategy will quickly become:

• Overly focused with on-page SEO- most of your efforts will be aimed on over optimizing ever little aspect of your site. You may start to focus on tasks, such as keyword density, that don’t really help much. Often, the little content the sites have end up so over-optimized, they make for a terrible user experience.
• Shallow- once the on-page is finished (or well under control- its always can use a little TLC month over month) you will have little to offer users or search engines, and be just a skeleton of what it could be.
• Obsolete- eventually your competition will have so much more relevant content than you that you will have little chance of showing up on the first page for any keyword phrases you care about. You will have to resort to expensive pay-per-click ads for any traffic you want for your site.

The following principles should guide any content strategy

• Plan each phase (generally 3 months) at a high level before you begin
• Utilize content you already have
• Consistently create content
• Focus on high level at first- then drill down to technical specific
• Don’t just post- distribute the content

Coming Soon! Creating such content can be quite time consuming- but absolutely doable- when taken one piece at a time. The following scaffolding will help walk you through the process:

• High level brainstorm meeting
  • Identify keywords and areas of focus
  • Map out 3 month outline
  • Leverage existing content
    • Offline material
      • Training manuals
      • Brochures
      • Industry books
      • Trade magazines
• Plan types of content to be used
  • Bread and butter written content
    • Permanent site pages
    • Blog posts
  • Premium content
    • Reference Library design and creation
    • Videos
    • Infographics
    • Beefy blogs
    • Tutorials
    • Printable PDF’s
    • Flash animations
    • Interactive Flash element
    • Press Releases
    • Screen-capture videos
• Tools for creating content
  • Written content
    • Outshine competitors
    • Google Alerts
    • Screen shot tools
  • Premium content
    • Create a video studio
    • Design tools
    • Press Release creation resources
    • Screen-capture software (free vs. paid)
• Create monthly schedule for creation
• Create content
  • Quality over quantity
• Post content
  • Make is shareable
    • Social buttons
    • Embed code
• Distribute content
  • Social media venues
  • Industry specific sites
  • Premium link requests