Our September 9th Meetup at Posh CoWorking Lounge was a Deep Dive discussion that focused on Content, Content Content.
It was an open-ended, fast moving discussion about all aspects of content development strategies and management. Our attendees ranged from writers who produced their own site content, 
to site managers and owners who had content produced in-house or contracted-out to professional writers here and abroad. We concluded that successful site owners and managers have a clearly defined content plan, based on keywords, identified through on-going research. Several attendees brought up points from Tony Tovar’s August SEO Presentation: how content drives a successful link campaigns, that site content has to accurately address customer queries, and provide a clear call to action. Content controlled why customers came to the site and it can be why customers quickly bounce of the site.
As promised here are some of the links we discussed during the meeting. Here’s hoping the steps provided will help you get all those words and phases out of your head and organized into a site that does what you need it to do.
- Developing a Content Strategy
- Avoid Common Content Development Errors
- Creating a Useful, Information-Rich Site
- Optimizing Content
- Linking Categorizing and Tagging Content
- Building a Link Strategy
Content, Content, Content — Continued!
Here are the links for the various plugins and services we discussed during the meeting
The Organize Series WordPress Plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series. http://wordpress.org/plugins/organize-series/
Yoast SEO Optimize your WordPress site with just one plugin
The most complete SEO plugin for WordPress available today offers you everything you need to optimize your site. http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
ShopTalk is a podcast about front end web design, development and UX. Each week Dave & Chris will be joined by a special guest who is there to talk shop and help answer listener submitted questions. This is a great POD CAST model to emulate. http://shoptalkshow.com/
Editorial Calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog. http://wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/
KeyWordSpy Realtime tracking to monitor keyword performance. http://www.keywordspy.com/
Add rel=nofollow Plugin is a wordpress plugin that inserts the HTML tag rel=nofollow on every <a> tag mentioned in the post. http://wordpress.org/plugins/add-relnofollow-to-links/
Tag: nofollow Improves your blog’s search engine optimization by “noindexing” pages you choose. Now also for page-based (as opposed to date-based) http://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/nofollow
Get the Image is a plugin that grabs images for you. It was designed to make the process of things such as adding thumbnails, feature images, and/or other images to your blog much easier, but it’s so much more than that. It is an image-based representation of your WordPress posts. http://wordpress.org/plugins/get-the-image/
Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed. The list is based on the content of the title and/or content of the posts which makes them more relevant and more likely to be of interest to your readers. This allows you to retain visitors, reduce bounce rates and refresh old entries. http://wordpress.org/plugins/contextual-related-posts/
Thomas Umstattd Jr. is the CEO of Castle Media Group the parent company of Author Media. You can follow him on Twitter @ThomasUmstattd and on Google+ He loves helping people use technology to change the world. Great newsletter to model and a profession writer’s best friend. http://www.authormedia.com/author/thomas/