Your web site content helps you get in search engines, speak to visitors, and ultimately get visitors to buy, contact you, or follow a link. Meanwhile, your content has to be updated at least once a month if you want to get return visitors and search engine traffic. To be successful, you need to have a web content strategy. Web Content Strategy: Sources of Content There are four basic ways you can get content for your site:

Licensed content that you can publish on your site for a one-time or recurring subscription fee, or in exchange for putting a link to the author's site under the article. The main benefit of this kind of content is that you can build up your site quickly. The drawback is that hundreds if not thousands of other sites will be publishing the same content, which means you will get little search engine traffic from it. Also, within a few years, the subscription fees or the value of visitors who leave via the required link to the author's site will amount to more than you would have paid to have original content professionally written.

Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook style comments. The main advantage of this content is that it costs nothing and gives you insight into your visitors. The disadvantages are (usually) low quality and the constant vigilance needed to police it for misbehavior.

Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site. This content is usually informational articles, whitepapers, and sometimes, press releases. Distributing content is an essential component of getting links to your site.

Original, well-written content that's exclusive to your site. You should have some content that you hold back from republication, to avoid giving visitors or search engines the idea all your content can be had somewhere else. This can include FAQs, "about us" pages, case studies, testimonials, and other content that other sites would not want to reprint anyway.