Content & Motion: It All Begins with a C for Content Optimisation

POSTED BY: Roger Warner   /  CATEGORIES: Branding, Content Optimisation, SEO   ///   15 Sep 2008   /   2 Comments
TAGS: Branding, content, Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Online PR Agency, SEO

And ….we’re off!

The Beta version of the C&M web site was launched last week.  As the Online PR and SEO firm with a difference, I’m pleased to say that it’s already being indexed by Google.  If nothing else, this ought to suggest that we know what we’re about and that we’re not a bunch of fuckwits.

This here then is our formal launch blog post.  Instead of the normal blather about the heartache, pain and bloodstains behind the launch effort, I wanted to tell you how easy the whole process has been, and to talk a little bit about why we’re here and what we’re up to.

The Thank You’s…

That this web site is here is thanks largely to the efforts of the wonderful Paul Jarvis, our resident design and Wordpress development guru.  He really is one of the finest webheads alive.  A month or so ago, I had a rough idea about site design values and a vague sitemap that described our core content assets.  A few days later Paul gave me some templates and an Alpha site – the site you see here now.  I hope you with agree me when I say it’s a wonderful piece of work and that Paul’s a real genius.

Also from a design perspective, I should mention the intrepid efforts of Adam Bognar, friend of Paul, pictured above, and ace photographer/adventurer.  The images you see dotted around the site are all commissioned from his camera.  And here, blood and pain were in fact risked.  For example, the road shot on our contact page was so dangerous that it almost lead to Adam taking up homestead with a passing family who told him not to concentrate on his work so much, beware of the passing Chevvies (it was shot in Vancouver) and to be more careful with his karma.

(You can find out more about who else C&M works with here.)

In Very Simple Terms…

In terms of the business and what we do, I’ve described who were are here and why we exist here.  But in short, Content and Motion has arrived to help the world take a more profitable, cost-effective and content-first approach to its web marketing challenges.

Web marketing is not a rocket science activity in and of itself.  It is, however, treated by many in our industry as an atom-splitting exercise.  SEO, online PR, online branding and the like are often wrongly presented as deeply woven and multi-layered activities that require an army of expensive, chin-stroking consultants and a large dose of black magic.

My view is that this is not really the case.  Whilst it might have been necessary to rub crystals to improve your Google rankings a few years ago, today it isn’t.  Search algorithms now tend to ignore all the old black hattery in favour of good old high quality content.

Why?  Well, for a start, good content is like cream – it rises to the top and it’s hard to fake (…in that the fake stuff tastes like crap).  So rather than focus its efforts on metadata and the layers of invisible technical stuff that sits beneath a site, search crawlers are now primarily concerned with the content of your actual content.

This is because the ‘reputation’ element of search measurement (and SEO) is now more important than ever.  I mean in the sense of other people rating your site and ‘voting’ for you by linking to it.  The rise of social media apps and bookmarking services make this so.  Rather than focus on the technical make up of a web page, a search engine is able to get a far better read of its value by proxy – by relying on the thoughts and votes of the rest of the web.  And having the rest of the web cast votes just got a hell of a lot easier with the likes of Digg, Stumbleupon, delicious and Co….   Which is, of course, the key principle of Google’s PageRank.

What the World Needs Now: Content Optimisation…

So in terms of futures, the writing is on the wall.  Good web marketing, good SEO, good online branding and good online PR must now be based on great content that satisfies two audiences in equal measure – search engine spiders (so that you can be crawled, indexed and ‘understood’ in the right fashion) AND human beings (so that you’re compelling enough to be read, understood, rated and linked to).

As such, the job of web marketing is now less technocratic than it used to be, and relies more on the creative processes involved in hatching a good plan, producing great content and seeding it amongst the interweb.  Technical know-how is necessary (and we have it in spades here at C&M), but the real job is in producing killer content that makes heads turn – both the algorithmic and the fleshy kind.

In broad brush terms, we call this work ‘Content Optimisation.’ It’s more than just creating content – it’s creating content with a very specific web mission.  It’s more than online PR – it’s precision PR with a search marketing hat on…. and it helps you do your SEO in a very different, more productive way for your customers (by giving them interesting content rather than hidden ‘trickster’ stuff).

What’s Next…

Anyways, that’s the basis of what we’re doing here.   I’ll be writing up more of our mission statement on this blog in the next week or so.  In the meantime, do get in touch if you like the sound of it and need some help!

Oh… and feel free to leave me a comment or five about what you make of this all.  I’d love to hear your views!

 

POSTED BY: Roger Warner   /   CATEGORIES: Branding, Content Optimisation, SEO, The Online PR Agency Blog   ///   15 Sep 2008   /   2 Comments
TAGS: Branding, content, Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Online PR Agency, SEO

2 Responses so far. Add Your Own.

Leave Your Own Comment.

Your Comment
Name (required) Email (required) Website  Submit Comment