1. I agree it is hard to find these people. Which is why my bias is to move much of that capability into software. Software can’t be as accurate so you need much higher volume of data (with meta-data) to feed it from. A scalable meta-data acquisition strategy is the key. Hard to see how this can work with humans on staff…

2. Take a look at the next post on the different generations of SEO–link at the end of this post.

You are absolutely right – metadata is often more important that the data itself! Now the real challenge, in a small organization, is how do we find content people that get it? Finding someone that can write, edit, proof and publish content in challenging. Adding to their job description, taxonomy, metadata hierarchy, URL configuration and other SEO tasks is that much more difficult.

Does anyone out there have suggestions on how they have tackled this? In previous lives I have actually hired full time “police” that QA’d all metadata and set the taxonomy. This worked well… but finding Liberian scientists — who want to police, is a bit difficult…

Should these tasks even reside in the content team?

Comments / suggestions are welcome!

Jon

I think of “intent” in terms of conversion rate. That is, are the paid clicks converting into active users? I don’t just wants hits or users, I want active users.