“Ten Things Local Newspapers Need To Do” is an interesting article that ran on paidcontent.org this morning.

Here are some of my favorites:

“3. Out with circ staff, in with SEO: This one will be hard for newspapers to follow, but Glaser says to cut the circulation, printing, print production side and supplant them with more tech, SEO, community managers. Your readers are online and it’s time to cultivate that readership.”

OK, for selfish reasons, I really like No. 3, but I do believe community newspapers should invest more money in their online staffs, both editorial and advertising. Community newspapers should also help small companies create a better Web presence for their business. If you can help little guys like Nick’s Good Times Tow — (Aside: That’s a real business, and I always imagine having my car towed by them and being handed a beer or something.) — improve its Web presence, it’s only going to help your ability to sell local online advertising.

“6. Find a better reason for multimedia: Just because anyone can use a video camera, doesn’t mean you should run clips for the hell of it. Find a good reason to use video or audio—and if you don’t have one, don’t use it.”

At the same time, don’t assume you have to use a lot of expensive equipment and know a lot about video production in order to use video on your site. A cheap digital camera, YouTube and a basic understanding of Windows MovieMaker is a good place to start.

“9. You’re in the directory business: Newspapers missed out early on by not broadening their advertiser mix to include plumbers and pizza places. Online directories snapped up those dollars when the space was still growing substantially. Still, better late than ever, a number of newspapers have been turning to local businesses they previously ignored. And given newspapers’ continued brand advantage, they can set up their own local directories and beat the interlopers at their own game.”

Creating directories are a great way to attract new readers and encourage readers to come to your site for more than news. For each directory, you should create a separate page for each business or organization that you list. This will help you rank for each business or organization and will also increase your average page views per visit (stickiness). 2142256228449621456-5420503278809648999?

Let me start off with one of those trite sentences about how long it’s been since I’ve updated this blog. Yes, it has been a long time, but I’ve also been very busy with some new projects.

Of course, the biggest change came in September when I accepted a new job. This change will likely impact the subject matter of this blog going forward, but I don’t intend to change the title or the focus completely. Hopefully I will still have some SEO content that will relate to journalists and other media professionals.

The new job, however, is really quite a change and a whole new challenge.

At my last job, I helped a group of magazines develop their online content strategies. The new gig is for a professional organization for administrative professionals. The organization has a fairly robust Web community, which offers its members a variety of social networking options, as well as a simple content management system (CMS) for its chapter and division Web sites. The organization has somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 members, all of whom could potentially contact me with questions. So, yeah, it’s a much bigger pool of people to deal with. But so far, it hasn’t been too overwhelming.

There really is very little emphasis on SEO at this point, but I hope to eventually (and gradually) inject some SEO principles to the group, which I think has the potential to bring in some new members.

So, at this new job, we have 100′s of chapters and divisions all over the country. Most of them have their own Web site. When these webmasters have questions or problems with their sites, they email me. They also email me if they can’t log on to our headquarters’ web community. They also email me to ask how to add documents to their online libraries, and how to upload images, how to place a sponsor’s ad, how to have their site added to our chapter locator, “What’s a domain, anyway,” and “Can we add this or that to the site?”

Basically, I do a lot of explaining, a lot of impromptu tutorials and emails fixing problems and finding solutions.

But I think the change will give me a different perspective on Web content than where I came from. It’s a totally new focus, with different needs, different people and very different levels of Web knowledge. I definitely think getting away from ad impressions, page views, unique visitors and all that other “revenue-facing” junk will be good.

It’s definitely a different work environment, but also not bad. I really enjoy everybody I work with in our building, and the members I interact with on a daily basis have, for the most part, been very easy to work with. I expect it will open some doors to some new ideas, so hopefully I’ll have time to occasionally share some of them. 2142256228449621456-221062738115078310?