 We're going to talk about how to make your content way better than it already is. To get started with that conversation, we're going to talk a little bit about taxing. So this is going to be a technical talk. There's going to be some review for people that already know about taxonomies and things like that. But hopefully there will be some helpful morsels. You'll be able to take with you and implement today. Don't do it during breaks because that's a great time to talk with people. We'll talk about the early years. When I was a kid, I loved our food. Who didn't? And I saved up my allowance for, I don't know, three months, something like that, to buy my first computer. Why? Because every single time I wanted to go connect to a BDS Baltimore system, how many of you in the room have connected to a Baltimore system in your room? Okay, cool, so I'm a good company. So every time I wanted to connect to a Baltimore system, I had to go to the local college. And that was no fun, because I wanted to be able to download things onto my own computer. I wanted to be able to see things on my own computer, to experiment with it to clothe it. And every time I left the university or the college, all of that was gone. So I saved up, I bought my first computer, and I took it home, and I went into my room, and I promptly took every tool in the house. And I took it to that computer, and I unscrewed every screw. I took every circuit board apart. It was all laying out on my floor. So I purchased this computer that I spent all this time saving up money for, and I took it all apart. It was work, right, on the ground. So my mom walked in, and she said, Mendel, why did you take this apart? What have you done? And I said, well, I was excited to see how it worked. Right? That's how much I loved computers. And so, anyway, it was messed up, right? Because then when I put it back together, I left the screw on the motherboard. It probably leads right to anyway. Long story. So I was excited about computers. I was excited about VDSs. And then my brother found out that you can download music on PBS, right? And my brother loved music. And so he taught me to love music as well through my first computer, my VDS, and eventually 56k connecting to the internet. So I was passionate about computers, about VDSs, right, which is immunity, and MQ3s. So I grew up, you guys have hit the light story right here, so enjoy. This isn't what you signed up for, right? You didn't want to hear my light story? There's a point. So college years, right? I started a business, it was a startup, it was a social network, right? More community. It was a social network. I created a social network that was all about getting Greek specials and house parties to people that matter most, which were college students. And this was before Facebook, so this stuff didn't exist. And so I created this website, it was awesome, and we started doing deals with local businesses. This is how I got started in web development. And we started doing deals with businesses, we started doing the marketing for them, we started doing the print advertising. We even started creating videos for them, YouTube videos, commercials and things like that, before that all was cool, right? And that eventually started creating websites. And this was crazy, this was cutting edge, but they loved it and it got them tons of, tons of traffic, right? And so at the same time, we were like, well, you know, if we can get traffic to these websites, maybe we can create some websites of our own, right? And so as Twitter came out and as Facebook came out, we started creating content aggregators and putting display ads on those contracts, that content aggregation site. And that was awesome, right? And so we were really excited and I was really excited at that point in my life about business, media, army, and again, community, right? Because I created community sites. And so this is what my first website, my first business website looked like. And you can see that this particular website was pretty spot on, right? Besides the fact that it wasn't WordPress, we'll get there. So here's marketing, media, R&D, and then a client area for my web development plans, right? And this is actually what that website looked like later. I actually started to miss the market, right? I strayed because I had marketing and then I had the process. Who cares about that and wanted to research anyway, right? That's a marketing that made that into a community. So now, right? I'm standing in front of you, it looks a little bit more like me. There are things I'm not passionate about now, right? So I work for GoDaddy. I love community. I love coming to things like this, meeting people, listening to cool stories, the wonderful stories that everybody brings with them about their businesses and why they do what they do. Business, right? I've always loved business. I've loved creating these websites for businesses. I love figuring out how to, you know, hack businesses and things like that. Development, right? So I was an enterprise developer for quite a while before I started working at GoDaddy. Did ASP.net, move, php, yay, and a whole bunch of other stuff, right? Database work and things like that. And because I've had such an awesome opportunity to spend time with communities, I've also become passionate about traffic, right? So these are the things that I'm passionate about now. I've talked a lot about passion. It's going to tie in. This is my website, right, at the moment. And it wasn't always this way, by the way, but this is my website. And you can see there's community business development traveling. And here's some crazy information. I've doubled my traffic, right? Who here wouldn't want to double the traffic to their website or to their clients' website? Really? Everybody doesn't want to do that? Is there anybody that wants to double the traffic to their website? Thank goodness. Otherwise, I'm just going to walk out, right? So with a plan, it's super easy to do, right? It's simple. Now, I'm going to give you guys a plan, but first I'm going to battle a little bit more about how I've done things wrong in the past. And we're going to look at some people's websites and get some information, learn from their websites as well. So I'm Mendo. I am a community outreach person, which means I travel around and drink beer with Beats for a living. I'm from Austin, Texas. I'm passionate. I know you guys wouldn't believe this, but I'm passionate about community business, development and travel, right? I'm not frequently at Mendo.me, and I'm at, if you will, it on Twitter. All right, so let's talk about building lots of great content. Remember that it's important to have a mention, right? Every endeavor should have one. And I'm going to show you my mention in a second, but I don't want to ruin that yet. You should be passionate about your mention, right? You should be excited about it, whatever you're doing, right? If it's your client, right? This is good advice to give your client. Your client should be passionate about what they're doing, right? If they're a business, it's better that they're excited about what they're doing than not excited about what they're doing. If you're creating a website, it's better that you're excited about that industry that you're creating websites for than not being excited about it. You heard Constantine talk in tons of nerdy detail about contributing to WordPress, right? Leading a release. And you can't do something like leading a release without being passionate about it, right? Your content should always reinforce your mention, right? It seems simple enough. And your content is equal to post and text on it. So a lot of people just think of content as content, right? I'm going to write some long-form content. It's actually a little bit more than that. So here's my site mention. A lot about professional passions to help others. Very simple. Simple statement, right? And my professional passions are development, business, and community. Again, big surprise. This is going to be coming up. The idea is to show you an example and you'll be able to apply this to your life. So what happens when you create a site without planning? I like looking at this, so I'm going to take a look with you. So I learned about this already, right? So you can laugh if you want to. Just trying to do it quietly, like quiet stickers. All right, so this is my first one. It was awesome. There was no navigation. Pretty amazing. And there was seemingly random stuff there, right? And so on the right, I put what my mission is. Just to remind you, okay? I didn't always know that this was my mission, but I know this now. So in retrospect, I'm looking at this. Now I learn the hard way by iterating over and over and over again. So Sarah Caulfield-Cray didn't know how much joy a unicycle could bring. Does that have anything to do with professional passions and helping others? Not a thing. All right, this, by the way, the CSS is missing. I pulled all of these from the web archive. So this particular one, it wasn't this bad, but it was pretty bad. So I have categories, home, entertainment, movie reviews, music, fitness, food, how-to. Those are great. Those are personal passions, right? But they're not professional passions. And talking about those things, writing content to those things, those are called others, right? This one was a real treat. There was no navigation. And quite frankly, I had absolutely no idea what I'm going to find on this site, right, except my name. And maybe Google Maps. We thought of it like there were none on the site. And then we started to get a little more interesting. So I started to get straight with myself, right, and understand a little bit more about what I was interested in. And I put development, business, and then two other really big passion points of mine, heights and coffee, right? I thought that was reasonable. And this is the last one before my current site, and this is development, business, events. Look at that. Community just showed up there, right? It doesn't have the right name. But community just showed up there, coffee and hiking, right? So it turns out that coffee and hiking shouldn't be on there, right? Actually, community business development should be there. And what I did is I split coffee and hiking up into its own site, right? And now I'm looking at this mission and it's becoming a lot clearer, right? These are my professional passions. Community, business, development, right? Good. Glad I read. You know, at least by the end of this talk, you all will know what I'm excited about. So, the thing is, this took about eight years, this entire process. I'm going through over and over and over and trying to figure out exactly what it is that I wanted, right? Exactly what it is that I was interested in. And the truth is, that sucks. That's a lot of time to go through and iterate and figure out exactly what you're interested in, right? And so, I'm going to help you out by solving some of this mystery so that you don't have to go through that painful amount of time. There's a lot of categories and a lot of tags. And you have to be true to yourself when you're looking at your mission because this might be something that you have to do, right? It's painful. It doesn't feel good to remove posts that you've spent hours creating. But sometimes that concept longs in a different place. So, let my journey help you. And here's where we're going to start. So, start with your passion, right? If that word hasn't been used enough, you can play a game later or something like that at the after party. How many times Mendel said passion. So, understanding a passion helps you create better content. Got it? Good. What do you care about, right? What do you care about? What topics are you passionate about? So, let's pick on some people that they don't know. So, I'll be careful when looking at the navigation to change the site after this, but in this case, we have presentations here and where on that. These are the things that come up on the site. And so, you can see Constantine's website from where we got the likes. Presentations, beer travel. And by presentations, I would extract that from the community. Makes sense. Here's another. I told you I was going to do that. All right. So, wonderful site. Very simple. I like simple. What? All right. So, apparently my screenshot skills aren't that great, but we're going to get more information here, okay? So, we have senior project manager, human-made, co-founder of Open Media Foundation, WordPress evangelist, polyglot team. All right. So, here are the things that we can extract from this that we know immediately, right, that Petch is interested in. The top, right? So, chocolate, project management and human-made of Open Media Foundation, polyglots. Remember this cereal is, I had this this morning, whatever the cereal is that is in Switzerland, that is chocolate and just a little crunchy, it's amazing. No idea what it is, but it's incredible. So, let's talk about business now, right? What does your business care about? Or what does your client's business care about? What does your business stand for, right? What's important to the business? What are the topics, right? What services do you offer? Don't worry, I'm not going to pick on human-made. This time, this time it's going to be born creative and this is an agency out of the U.S. and you can see that the things, the services that are important to born creative are strategy design development, right? Up front, you see that. It's there. You can't just save this, right? If you click on services, you'll get more information about it, right? All the content is written about those things, about those passions or those topics that are important to the business and if you look at Tenno, right? They've done something else that's kind of interesting. They've combined both their services, those strategy design and engineering, with things to manage them, right? Giving back. So, those are building blocks. Those are things that are going to help us in the rest of the conversation. It's a little bit of content, right? And I'll try to talk about passion a little bit less in these next slides. So, bear with me. But I am going to talk about being awesome. I'm really bad at spelling, but this is not a mistake, okay? So, it's kind of a way to remember how to create content on your site. So, number one, organize. Create categories that are related to your mission, okay? Now, some of this, again, is going to seem like review, but I guarantee you with the biggest review you're not in your head and you're not in awkward. Now, maybe you've left. Hopefully, you can hear me. You're coming back in. You should reevaluate against this list of criteria, right? And see if your site still is true to these concepts, right? Because these are things that we think about in our head, but we don't always put together in practice. So, here's my site, right? First of all, quick review, categories. They're hierarchical and they're topical, right? So, in my case, I have development. I have WordPress. I have themes. Remember, I told you that categories are also topical. Those are just as important. The way you categorize and the way you talk about the classification of your content is just as important as your content. Alright, so we have development, WordPress themes, community, event, conference, business, marketing, right? Marketing is the subcategory of business. This is my category structure, right? And then make sure to create tags because you're creating a home for this wonderful content that you're going to write based on your passion. You are not hierarchical, right? They don't have children. They don't have parents. And they're descriptive, right? They describe the content in the categories for which you're making them, right? So, for, and this isn't showing up that well, but so for WordPress, for themes, right? Maybe you create tags for CSS or JavaScript or for community, maybe it's an awesome community or it's a WordPress community. And for marketing, maybe you're interested in talking about optimization in the WordPress, right? So, the next thing is, right? You've created all of your categorization and the next thing is the signal, right? And this is something that a lot of people meant, a lot of people meant. And when I changed this, I'll be really honest. I talked to Yost and Yost kicked me around and said, listen, you got to do this right. And I did it and my traffic increased, right? And it increased two times, right? And this, what I made this change was a big deal. So, the first thing is, this is my application, right? The first thing is, treat signs, right? You have to indicate where you're going to go. You have to indicate where your visitor should go, right? And so, in this case, you can see this yell it out line here, right? These are all the subcategories of events. So, I'm telling people where to go before they even get there, right? And what this does, it helps your user get to the right place wherever they want to go, right? These are all the types of events that I write content about. But it also helps Google discover to and create a relationship, right? This is like an insurance policy for your user so that they know exactly where to go back to. So, in this case, I have the breadcrumbs up here, right? And now you can go back to the community and back to home. And again, very important in full usability and searching for optimization. And so, this is the second S in awesome. And you guys are all going to probably tweet that Mano doesn't know how to spell and he comes from America and English is his first language and he should know how to spell awesome. But again, I told you not to make fun of me. So, write about questions you Google, right? So, turn on your Google search history. And when you Google things, they will automatically appear, all those queries will appear in your Google search history and then go back to that after a month and see what you Google. Because I guarantee you that things that you Google are things that you're passionate about, things that are related to your business, things that are related to your personal passion if you're creating a personal website. So, in this case, I don't know how many times I Googled WordCamp Switcherlin 2015 to get the schedule, right? I wasn't going directly to the URL that I remember, right? And so, I'm going to after this, you can bet I'm going to have a post that says WordCamp Switcherlin 2015 can have pictures, right? And that's going to come up in the Google search rankings, right? So, it's going to bring people to my content. It's going to be interesting for me to some of you, right? And at the same time, I'll create a content that I'm passionate about. Business, same thing. How to run a marketing proposal. How do I do it? I respond to Gallery and Best Coffee in Austin, Texas. All of these things I've either written about or will write about. All of the things that I've written about have brought good amounts of traffic to my website. So, these are common client questions. How do I create a new post of an item to the menu? If you have a more advanced client, though, and you do a specialized type of work, then these questions can be different, right? They're not all going to be beginner's questions. Maybe you're doing development for an adult company, right? You're trying to bring them in. What do you think your clients, what do you think clients of other web design companies that aren't getting the right information are going to look at, right? They're going to go on there, they're going to go on to Google and say, how do I create a post? Because their web development company didn't sell them how to create a post. Guess who's going to get that business? It's going to be you. To me, right? To make content. So, what do you stand for, right? Do you stand for kindness, passion, or learning and exploration? Do you stand for improvement? These are all qualities that you can weave into your content. But, you should write passionately and solve problems, right? So, I'm writing about things I'm passionate about and I'm weaving in my individual values about community, business, development, and travel, right? Does this all make any sense? Is all coming around in a circle? So that's awesome, right? O-S-S-M. So I want to give you a list. I want you to do bold, right? I want you to remember that you can change your content. You can change your navigation. You can remove things. It's okay, right? It might hurt a little bit, but it's okay to do. So be bold, restructure your site. If it doesn't make sense, restructure it, right? There's nobody telling you that you can't do this. Create a mission. Remember to create a mission because that mission will drive you and save you eight years of your life, right? Or more. Some people who know might struggle with this in their entire life without creating some sort of mission, right? Reflect your mission and pass it on your site. And lastly, these are changes that you can make today. Don't do it during a session. I may be doing it during a session. Don't do it during a break, right? Spend time talking with people. But these are things you can take home into immediately, right? So I'm not at all. I'm at Iggy Wellett. You'll be able to, if I can do a break with my schedule and you'll be able to see this presentation. Not all that means a lot of presentations. Thank you very much. You're saying reorganize. Reorganization means creating new URLs, structures, new categories, et cetera. Or does Google think about new URLs? Yeah. So the question of what Google feels about new URLs, I have constructed many times, right? So I have good experience with changing structure. The truth is Google's pretty quick. As long as you're doing all the things you should be doing, right? So including site maps and Google Webmaster tools, right? Making sure that if there's any exclusion that you need to make with a page or something like that that you're doing it. And also making sure that in any applicable places there's a 301 redirect to new content. Those are all really important. When you do that, Google picks up on it very quickly, right? And so I have seen traffic. Change traffic patterns change, you know, in a week's time after changing navigation, after restructuring. Don't be scared of that. Just remember that you need to make the best experience for your user, right? So don't have a piece of content that's linked in Google going nowhere, right? Make sure that you have connected the dots for people. Thank you very much. Great talk of the year. I meant, obviously, because you could fire up. I have one question. How do you do with the category and text? Because if I, you know, teach logging to people or if I start with them on a content journey, right? Man, I usually try to explain them, you know, turn your dimension of meaning, your primary dimension of meaning into your categories, right? Because you just have one dimension. And then for the text, you know, just whenever you write a post, just whatever comes into your mind, you know, parts of the text and write that down as text. Do you actually have everything pre-planned, like category and text, and then you just take from there so that you have a more refined space or something to stay within your content or do you just make things where you go along? It's a good question. So I've learned from people that do content manipulation for a living. Number one, if you have a post, one post, it probably doesn't belong in its own category. If you have five posts, it probably does belong in its own category. But as a rule, I don't create all of my categories at once and I don't create all of my tags at once because I don't necessarily know what I'm going to write about all the time. What I do is I come up with, and this is why patterns are important, right? I come up with those things that are really important to me, right? Those big topical areas that I like to write about. And I lay those out as the three categories that I'm going to write about. And then from there, I will create categories underneath that, sub-categories, right? Or I will create descriptors. The distinction I made between categories being topics and tags being descriptive I think is very important because there has to be a difference. Otherwise, you're just creating tags that will later become categories or categories that will later become tags, right? So there has to be some sort of method for how you qualify those those different tags on these. Does that help? Great. Thank you, George.