Content is King

Yes, I know...the several months of silence has been due to the arrival of Liam, our second child. At first it wasn't so bad but then all the wheels fell off at once.

This post is on what site content you should consider (once you start a web site) based on who you are and what you want to accomplish with your history site. This is fairly straight forward...

1. If you have a building filled with history that you want people to visit: the focus of the site should be an index of what you have available to the public. The index will be most effective if you break it out into categories. Be sure to give the web visitors a taste of what you have using photos and short but descriptive paragraphs. Your goal is to drive people to your door so be sure to make your contact information and address visible on each and every page of your site.

Once you have an index of your collections posted online let the World know.

a. Newspaper articles are great traffic boosters, just ask the reporter to forward you the story prior to release...this helps cut down the mistakes and misquotes.

b. Showcase your collections by displaying some at the local library, community center, bank(s), etc... Be sure to have your web address displayed too.

c. Showcase your photos in calendars, either print your own or partner with a bank or real estate office. Be sure to have your web address displayed on every page.

2. If you wish to become strictly an online source of information you will need to digitize your collections of historic documents and photographs. It is not an easy task and will take a considerable amount of effort but in the end it is worth it. The reason why digitizing is important is- Search Engines, digitized content can easily be filtered and ranked by their robots, PDFs or scanned images take the Search Engines longer to filter thru and thus suffer in the rankings. Because you wish to be an online source of information you need to take steps to make the information you have as accessible as possible and that task starts with digitizing (i.e. transcribing print material).

As an online source of information the traffic you generate will come from partnerships you create. Don't believe anyone who tells you they can get you to the top of the rankings, even if they say they use "safe" or "legitimate" tactics. The only way to the top is good, relevant content for the keywords that people are actually using to find sites like yours. To find out what these keywords or terms used by actual people you can use wordtracker.com or keyworddiscovery.com. It will cost you a fee but it is worthwhile. Why rank #1 for "locomotive" when everyone is searching on "trains"?

Once you have your content posted live keep track of it. Use web statistic programs and Google's Webmaster's Toolkit to track which pages are most popular with your visitors and what search terms are being used to find your web site. This will help you to focus on what is important to the general public when you create new content. New content is essential to the success of your web site, do not get complacent once you achieve a high ranking, you need to maintain that ranking and the best way to do that is with new content on the subjects you are promoting.

In the next post I'll discuss more about tracking your online successes and failures.