Good points but…..

Doing extensive keyword research or measuring KEI is most common and primary techniques to write targeted content – no comment on effectiveness of the content.

However, think yourself to be a journalist - you work on a topic that is unknown to the world. Nobody could guess the earthquake in Peru 2 days back, but it is now one of the highly searched terms. Do you think Wordtracker, Overture, or Google Adwords are powerful enough to predict these terms!

Writing content for forum or news portals is different from writing content for regular websites. In forums and news portals, you must concentrate on “immediate needs” of the visitors. It is not enough to know what terms people “used” to come to your forum or news portal – you must “guess the trend” and write accordingly. All these apply only if a content writer is trying to “add some value” or trying to “help the visitors”.

“Learn about the topic in different websites” – it is fine to learn about the subject from different websites – but what next. Are you adding something to what already exists?

“yahoo gives more importance to content compared to links” – does yahoo announce authenticity of the information? We all know that .org, .gov or .edu sites provide trustworthy information – but is there any guarantee to it?

1. Look through the keyword tracker (just to know what people want, not to use the same keyword again and again, otherwise it will be a typical SEO article)
2. Learn about the topic in different websites (This is what i do mostly and that too in yahoo as yahoo gives more importance to content compared to links).

And, if I am writing content, I am focusing on one particular page at that moment and how to make it the best page on that topic. My goal at that moment is to write content such that I can make the visitor read/scan (as they mostly scan) the entire article and help him out with some great info. It doesn’t matter (at least to me) how many pages my website has..

Categorizing/Sitemap is useful but still a search is better recruit.

Manojit, good question. According to me a visitor goes through following stages

• Visitor (first 15 secs) -> Looking for trust and information (You have no say on these people. It’s their take. They will not click on “click here” links). It’s very important that within the 15 secs you can establish your authority.
• Visitor (>15 secs) -> Here the visitor is fairly impressed and started trusted you. Now you can hold his hands and navigate through multiple pages. You are permitted for more action and they will click on links saying “click here”.
• NOTE: If your link takes time in loading then it is like leaving their hand, so make sure your links are loading really quick as speed means sales.

Now getting back to your question “It is not always possible to cover all the required information in a single page”, each page has its own purpose and does not need all the content. Spend time in analyzing the content-purpose conflicts, remove as much conflicts as possible. As I explained in my classes, “Do I understand XYZ?” is more inline with the purpose of the page than “What is XYZ?”. Bigger things doesn’t give a bigger impact but a combination of smaller things will do.

Here is a golden rule for TLs
Focus on the first 15 secs -> make your content scan-able to let the visitor know that you have it and in building the trust(template, logo, punchline plays a role here).

Another great post.
However, we have forgotten another important page – the sitemap. What if the sitemap becomes the home page for a big forum?

Am I moving wild? Perhaps not!

@ Manojit
What is the use of content, if the visitor does not use it! It is more about content distribution and that’s where the issue of proper funneling comes in.

There might be a lot of situations like:
1: Visitor knows where it is and spends few clicks to reaches there
2: Visitor do not know where it is and thus leaves
3: visitor knows where it is but do not feel like reaching there
4: etc and etc
……………… and thus you need to act accordingly. Success depends on webmaster’s efficiency of tracking user’s behavior. And Google analytics is not complete solution.

In next generation web (the age has begun), the emphasis will not simply be on content management – it may go a step further – content catering.

I have a doubt.

It is not always possible to cover all the required information in a single page. And some times we intentionally create more than 1 page to provide all the information, otherwise the page gets too long. In that case, it might happen that page get more than 0 click and time spent is also more than 30 Seconds. Then, will it true say that the page does not have enough content.

Manojit