The scrollExtend plugin is designed to automatically load new content at the bottom of the screen (by appending to a DOM element) when the user scrolls beyond the element, much like Facebook does with their status updates. The existing infinite scroll plugin was primarily designed to integrate with Wordpress, which didn’t really suit my purposes.

There are two plugins encapsulated here – onScrollBeyond, which allows the developer to specify a callback to be run when an element is scrolled beyond (or the end of the document is reached), and scrollExtend, which is simply an implementation of onScrollBeyond that automatically loads new content via ajax when a user scrolls past an element.

Works with jQuery 1.3.2 and jQuery 1.4.2

Tested in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Chrome, Safari

Originally created for the Junebug dating site

Update v1.0.1 – fixed scrollExtend would get stuck in a disabled state if beforeStart returned false, even if it returned true on subsequent calls

onScrollBeyond Options

onScrollBeyond API

onScrollBeyond Example

jQuery(document).ready(
       function() {

         jQuery('div.mydiv').onScrollBeyond(

           function() {
               alert( 'you have scrolled beyond this element' );
           }

         );

       }

   );

scrollExtend Options

scrollExtend API

scrollExtend Example

	jQuery(document).ready(
		function() {
			jQuery('.scroll_container').scrollExtend(
				{
					'target': 'div#scroll_items',
					'url': 'more_content.html',
					'newElementClass': 'list_item more_content'

				}
			);
		}
	);

Options

Examples

jQuery(document).ready(
       function() {

         //
         // When a user clicks the 'loading-default' link,
         // call showLoading on the activity pane
         // with default options
         //
         jQuery('a.loading-default').click(

           function() {
               jQuery('#activity_pane').showLoading();
           }

         );

         //
         // When a user clicks the 'loading-ajax' link,
         // call showLoading before performing the 'load'
         //
         jQuery('a.load-ajax').click(

           function() {
               jQuery('#activity_pane').showLoading();
               jQuery('#activity_pane').load( '/some/url',
                    function() {
                          // callback fires after ajax load completes
                          jQuery('#activity_pane').hideLoading();
                   }
               );
           }

         );

         //
         // When a user clicks the 'loading-bars' link,
         // call showLoading with addClass specified
         //
         jQuery('a.loading-bars').click(

           function() {
               jQuery('#activity_pane').showLoading(
                 {
                   'addClass': 'loading-indicator-bars'
                                              }
               );
           }

         );

         //
         // When a user clicks the 'loading-hide' link,
         // call hideLoading on the activity pane
         //
         jQuery('a.loading-hide').click(

           function() {
               jQuery('#activity_pane').hideLoading();
           }

         );

       }

   );

However, developing content that is going to capture the attention of your target demographic is no easy task, and, to add another element of difficulty, it needs to be an ongoing process of developing and distributing compelling pieces. Even if you have a great hit with a single piece of killer content, you still need to be thinking about what’s next.

Unless you happen to have an insane genius on staff who simply can’t help but come up with killer content every time he or she touches a keyboard, you’re probably going to need a plan. I’ve spent some time outlining what I think are the core elements of an ongoing content development strategy, and I’d like to share them with you.

Building a Visual Outline

First, let’s take a look at this diagram, which I will explain below:

Let’s break down what the diagram is showing.

1. Expertise Categories

   Every piece of content generated needs to be based on the expertise of the person or organization it’s supposed to help promote. Blogs, for example, are wildly popular and useful because so many of them are written by knowledgeable, impassioned people who are providing useful, relevant information to their readers. You need to make sure that you follow the same model when crafting content. Don’t write about Paris Hilton because Google Trends is showing that she’s a hot topic today – write about what you know. Most likely, your expertise or the expertise of the organization you’re generating content for can be split into multiple topics. For example, a financial services firm might have expertise in risk management, retirement planning, and estate planning. Each of these would fit into the categories section, and would drive ideas for the types of content you should be generating

2. Buyer Personas

   After you’ve figured out what categories your content is going to live in, you need to think about the market for each of those categories. Who is your audience, and what writing style will appeal to them? In our example above, the markets for risk management and retirement planning might very well be quite different, and the types of people who will be consuming the content will be hooked in by different writing styles and topics.

3. Trends

   You need to know what’s going on in your industry right now if you have any chance of being considered an authority in your field. So, when generating content, it’s good to make note of current trends in the market that are worth commenting on. It’s always a good idea to have content in the pipeline that’s not time sensitive and can be used at any time, but late-breaking industry news is generally ideal to comment on.

4. Content

   Once you’ve figured out precisely what you need to write about, go ahead and generate the content. Make it compelling, make it personal. Afterward, you’ll need some kind of distribution mechanism. I discuss below the different distribution categories that content can fall into, but actually implementing a distribution plan is outside the scope of this post (though I will be writing about it later)

Applying it to a Real Website

Let’s take a look at what the diagram might look like in a real world example. We’ll use one of my personal favorite sites, seomoz.org. Seomoz offers a variety of SEO related services and is generally considered to be a leader in the SEO industry, especially thanks to their daily SEO blog. These guys pump out quality content on a daily basis, so I thought they’d be a good example for how toimplement a content creation plan. Note that this diagram is far from complete and probably far from accurate, but it’s meant only to serve as an example:

Expertise

I’ve taken three of the categories of expertise that SEOmoz has – SEO, tech startups, and online advertising. Additional categories can be added, but for the sake of our example, we’ll use these three.

Buyer personas

Next we have potential buyer personas for each of the areas of expertise included at the top. The colors indicate which areas of expertise are applicable to which buyer persona, with some areas being applicable to multiple or all personas.

SEOmoz provides search marketing consulting to high-end businesses, so that’s obviously a market they want to connect with. Additionally, they offer tools & services (branded as SEOmoz pro) to other SEO agencies who want to make use of their expertise, so I’ve also included a buyer persona titled “potential SEOmoz pro customers”.

A less obvious buyer persona

The other buyer persona, “colleagues and competitors”, is particularly interesting. Targeting this persona is useful not to generate sales directly, but to establish leadership in the industry. I have never hired SEOmoz, nor have I ever spoken to one of their clients, yet I have the distinct impression that these guys know exactly what they’re doing. Why is that? Because reading their content has given me that impression. This is a very important component of content development, usually dubbed “thought leadership”.

Trends

The trends indicated above were generated just from my knowledge of what’s going on in the industry right now. I was pleased to find that it was very easy to find content on the seomoz site dedicated to these trends, since it helped to reinforce my ideas on quality content development. For example, I know that a lot of large companies are dealing with budget cuts right now due to the economy, so I figured there would be a post about how SEO is the best place to spend your marketing dollars.

Content Distribution

Great content will not only get people to read it, but will generate inbound links. A full inbound link plan it outside the scope of this post, but I did want to break down the distribution categories a piece of content can fall into. Deciding on where you want to publish content can be integral to your success, and I may actually add that decision step in a next revision of the diagrams above.

Content distribution categories

• Internal / Generated
  This type of content is created by you and posted on your own site. It can include general website content, blog posts, or anything else that comes internally from you or your organization, and ultimately lives on your own site
• External / Generated
  The external/generated content type is where something like a guest blog post might live. You wrote the content yourself, but it didn’t get posted on your own site.
• External / Acquired
  The external/acquired type of content is where a newspaper article about your organization would fit. You may have had to request that the article be written (as in traditional PR), or a writer/journalist may have come to you for an interview. Either way, your involvement was an integral part of the process, which is what separates this type from the External / Organic type
• External / Organic
  The external / organic content type is covers content that was written about you or your organization, but that you had no involvement in whatsoever. For example, a blogger creating a post specifically as a reaction to a post on your blog would fall under the external / organic category

Conclusion

Engaging web content is the new way to market any business. With 113 billion searches being performed every month, you need to have a plan in place to get your expertise into the marketplace so that people looking for answers find you first. If you’ve already solved a problem for them before they’ve even gotten in touch with you, you’re way ahead of the game.

For those who don’t know what it is, Raven is a web-based application for managing Internet Marketing campaigns. It’s a hosted solution, so there’s nothing to install, and it is either $79/month or $199/month depending on the number of users you’ll need. It has a whole host of features that you can check out on their website, but the three I’ll go over here are the SERP tracker, Link Manager, and Social Media manager.

SERP Tracker

Trending for Philadelphia SEO Firm

Initially, we weren’t too impressed with the SERP tracker in raven, but we found that it’s important to let it run for a few weeks before you can really see the value here. You don’t get immediate results the way you do with a local application like WebCEO, but I’ve come to really like Raven’t SERP tracker, especially since it supports graphing of SERP history (pictured left)

Link Manager

Raven Link Manager

Social Media Manager

Twitter Account Tracker

Conclusion

So far, we’re digging Raven as a campaign management tool. We’re currently using it on the $79/month plan, which is a pretty reasonable price for what you get, though I do think that they could stand to give more than two user accounts at that price. We don’t have any relationship with Raven whatsoever, so this isn’t supposed to be a promotional post, I just thought I’d post some thoughts after using the package.

I’m going to try to make the case here that every company – even one with as few as 2 people – should be using project management software. Below are the three major reasons people usually give as to why they don’t have any such system in place:

1. “Our current way of doing things is just fine”
   I would invite anyone who’s thinking this way to simply try a project management or issue tracking system for one week. There will almost certainly be a marked improvement in productivity and a reduction in stress for everyone involved in the project.
2. “It’s too expensive”
   While it’s true that some platforms have hefty licensing fees, there are plenty of cost-effective and even free alternatives to the more expensive products. BaseCamp, one of the products I discuss below, has pricing as low as $24 per month. We use a free product called Redmine (also discussed below), but it does take some tech know-how to get it set up.
3. “It’s too hard to learn”
   While it’s true that there is a learning curve for any new process or software, some of these products  are surprisingly intuitive right out of the box. The gains in productivity will vastly outweigh time lost in the learning process, not to mention that fear of new things is never a good reason to stick with the status quo.

Here’s a quick look at three products I’ve personally worked with. You can find a comprehensive comparison of project management software on Wikipedia.

Redmine

http://www.redmine.org

Redmine Issues list

Cost: Free (Open Source)

Pros: Price, Usability

Cons: Requires some technical knowledge to install (though any web developer will be able to tackle it), no commercial support.

Notes: We use Redmine here at Context, and I’m always impressed and how intuitive but powerful the system is.

Basecamp

http://www.basecamphq.com

Basecamp Screenshot

Cost: $24/mo to $149/mo depending on number of projects

Pros: Hosted solution, so setup is completely turnkey. Usability is great, and it has a vast feature set.

Cons: No native support for version control systems like SVN or GIT, which is only an issue for software developers.

Notes: Basecamp is what I recommend for businesses looking to get started with a project management solution. The usability is great, the pricing is reasonable, and it’s ready to go right out of the box.

Jira

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

Jira Navigator

Cost: $150-$2,000/month depending on number of users

Pros: Enterprise class, packed full of features

Cons: May be too expensive for small agencies, higher learning curve than less sophisticated products

Notes: I used Jira on a large scale web development project a few years ago. There’s a learning curve, but I was impressed with the comprehensive feature set. I would recommend Jira to companies who are willing to invest in their project management software.

The rundown is this: We’re currently ranking well for a fairly competitive term in the Philadelphia region. Our organic positioning is in the top 3, and our local business positioning is generally #1 out of about 5 “top” results. However, for the past week or so, we’ve noticed that our client has become the only local business result for the phrase, despite there being very clear competitors who are also engaged in SEO.

To illustrate, the local results used to look something like this:

Google Local multiple results

And now, it triumphantly looks like this, at least from when and where I’m searching (identifying information removed):

Google local single result

One of our changes at the start of this month was the implementation of hCard formatting for their address, so I’m wondering if that change has given us a leg up on the local results. It’s quite possible that there are other factors at work here, but it was enough to make me wonder. Any thoughts?

My family owns a banquet hall in the heart of Northeast Philadelphia that my grandparents built up from scratch, starting with a small corner tavern in the Kensington section of the city and eventually growing into an event hall capable of holding 600 guests. It’s a regular reality TV show of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins trying to keep the doors open and the guests happy without strangling one another.

Although the hall had seen prosperous times in the 80s and 90s, the past few years have proven to be difficult for business. The declining economy in Northeast Philadelphia – coupled with a few antiquated business practices – was causing a drastic drop in revenue, and it was clear that something had to be done to revitalize the business.

I decided to put Context to work building a new website for the banquet hall and implementing an SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to the site.  We paid attention to our landing pages and optimized for local search, and the results were stellar.

With their old site and no SEO, they saw maybe 1 or 2 leads per month coming over the web. However, thanks to our efforts, they now receive an average of 4 to 5 leads per day. In fact, I just checked the analytics, and 9 leads were generated in the past 24 hours. Their website is now a core component of the business, and things have started to completely turn around.  With this new source of revenue, they’ve been able to renovate the banquet rooms, which in turn is generating even more business.

I guess the moral of the story here is that SEO works. More importantly though, SEO can go as far as to revitalize a struggling business. And while some people may think to themselves, “this is probably a ‘results not typical’ kind of situation”, I’d have to respond by saying that I have yet to find a client who didn’t see direct benefits from our efforts in search optimization and site optimization.

1. Lead with what’s important

   I’ve seen a lot of reports that start with very basic, dashboard-style metrics that provide an overview of site traffic, visitors, bounce rate, etc. Those metrics are useful (in the right context – more on that below), but if you’re really looking to do well by your clients, you’re looking at conversion, conversion, conversion.

   As a result, we decided to start the report with two things: goal completion metrics (as compared to the previous month), and an executive summary of the status of the campaign. The summary outlines very concisely how our efforts fared that month, our assessment of strengths and weaknesses (e.g. why some things worked and others didn’t), and plans for moving forward into the next monthly cycle.

2. Put the data in context

   Another issue I’ve seen with SEO reports is that they’ll give information such as “the site received 10,000 visits this month”. The problem is that, by itself, there’s no way of knowing if 10,000 visits is good or bad. This is true for any metric: if you don’t compare it to some kind of benchmark, it doesn’t provide any actionable information to anyone. An easy way to give the data a reason to exist is to simply compare it to the previous month’s data.

3. Don’t include useless data

   There’s probably no reason to include your top 100 keywords or top 100 content pages in a monthly report. If the data isn’t directly actionable – if it doesn’t spur you to tweak your campaign – it’s probably not really relevant enough to include in the report.

   Depending on the size of the site, we’ll take a subset of the top (or the most important) keywords and content, and make some decisions based on the metrics around that subset. For example, we recently noticed that the media page for one of our clients was their top content right beneath their home page, so we included a media player widget on the home page. Eliminating that one click actually increased the number of qualified leads generated through the site.  Instead of listing out the top x content pages, we included that decision in the report, which I think is much more compelling than a generic export of top content.

4. Don’t include graphs for the sake of having graphs

   Graphs look pretty, but I’ve seen reports where the graph serves no function other than eye candy, because they were too small or pixilated to actually read. Resist the urge to fill the report with fancy graphs instead of filling it with concise but complete textual content that outlines your findings and details how they will affect your campaign moving forward.

5. Use your own words

   The report should read like a summary of a meeting where your team outlined what was done during the previous month, analyzed the metrics, then decided what the next course of action should be. If something you previously implemented didn’t work out as well as you had hoped, include that in the report, then follow it up with what you’ll be doing to fix or replace the failed strategy. Be candid, as if the client was in front of you asking you to give them the nitty gritty of what’s happening with the campaign.

In the end, the new report format came out looking like the outline below. I’m sure we’ll continually revise it, but I’m much happier with what we have now as compared to what we were doing previously.

• Conversion & goal metrics (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Executive summary / overview of campaign status
• Visitor stats overview (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Search Engine rank
  • a list of where we’re currently ranking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for our target keywords and phrases. We’re now using Raven to track these for us.
  • Also includes a brief analysis of what we can do to improve or maintain ranking, or branch into new keywords & phrases
• Traffic sources overview (as compared to previous month)
  • direct traffic vs. referring sites vs. search engine traffic
  • Brief analysis of what we can do to bolster traffic sources we might be lacking in, or how we might generally increase referred or search traffic
• Top Keywords (as compared to previous month)
  • Brief analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly here as well – what we can do to further penetrate the keywords we’re doing well on, and where else we can look to target traffic
  • References exported list of top 10 keywords, which is included as an appendix after the main report
• Top Content (as compared to previous month)
  • Same as above, references exported list of top 10 content pages, again included as an appendix after the main report

One method a lot of SEOs use to jumpstart a link campaign is to submit their clients’ press releases to websites that will allow you to do so for free, and will also allow backlinks to your website. We set out to find some of the better, more SEO-friendly free press release sites, and I’ve included our list below (in no particular order). All PageRanks come from the Google toolbar, so they’re more of an approximation of PageRank as opposed to anything official.

Free Press Release Sites

1. www.prlog.org
   PageRank: 6
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
2. www.sanepr.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: Yes
3. www.pressreleasepoint.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
4. www.free-press-release-center.info
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
5. www.transworldnews.com
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
6. www.theopenpress.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
7. www.information-online.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
8. www.pagerelease.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
9. www.pressexposure.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
10. www.pr-usa.net
    PageRank: 5
    Allows backlink: yes
    Custom anchor text: yes

#googlefail

I had simply assumed, like many people probably did, that when I started having Google connectivity issues, the problem was with my local connection. However, almost immediately, the #googlefail tag started trending on Twitter. One of the most interesting points about the Twitter trend is that the news outlets who picked up the story during the outage also used the Twitter trend as their source of information (The Huffington Post even had a direct feed of the #googlefail trend). Social media had a big win today, and I suspect that the argument for microblogging as a valuable tool (as opposed to just a time waster) gained some credibility among the (misinformed) nay-sayers today.

Our Reliance on Google

Productivity took a huge hit for the time when Google was down, since so many sites directly and indirectly utilize Google services. Obviously, YouTube, blogger, and other Google properties were nowhere to be found on the web, but sites that use Google analytics or link to Google Code also suffered. Many sites were continually loading as they waited for google-analytics.com, to no avail. Additionally, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google tasks were all down, resulting in complete work stoppage for some (deemed #googleholiday on Twitter)

What it will mean

Honestly, I don’t think we’ll see any major fallout from today’s outage. People won’t be running away from Google Analytics or returning to pen and paper for their calendar. Nothing is perfect, even the Google network, and early reports (see ZDNet link above) seem to be suggesting that the problem was with AT&T’s network. However, today will probably be cited as a risk factor for the emerging interest in cloud computing, and it will be interesting to see how the web community’s perception of Google is altered, if at all.