Amy Campbell’s Web Log

Well executed web sites do win business for law firms as well as other professional services firms. As a web content strategist, I’ve tracked how relevant content, usually in the form of articles, can bring the right people to my clients’ web sites. If a web site is set up properly to engage readers and invite search engines, it eventually will conjur up some solid leads. A client of mine recently commented on how an article on cell tower leases was pulling in calls from the other side of the country.

Larry Bodine has done a good job of pulling together some hard proof on the subject. See his weblog for more details.

Need help optimizing your site for search engines or developing a content strategy? Call me.

Boston Women’s Business has published my top five “power writing” tips for business. The article is a shortened version of Power Writing in the Age of Spam posted on my web site, which stresses the importance of writing with clarity and authority in an age of electronic publishing and information overload — all part of a book project in the works.

Those folks who have a My Yahoo! account can now easily add RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! accounts. When Yahoo! returns search results from a web site that has a headline news feed (RSS), it includes a link that reads “Add to My Yahoo!.” (I just enabled Amy Campbell’s Web Log with the “add to My Yahoo!” button on the right.)

This is a step in the right direction and what I’ve been waiting for — an easy way to manage RSS feeds in one place without having to download and install software on my system (which is a real deterrent to using aggregators, I don’t want to take the time and trouble to download some software that may create compatibility or other issues on my now solid platform). Also, it formats headlines cleanly and simply. See .

At a recent meeeting, I witnessed a group of very intelligent professionals (for whom computers/web is not their business) and it was amazing to see how rudimentary their approach to using even simple search engines is. What I’m trying to say is that most people don’t even know what a blog is, let alone an RSS feed or how to actually utilize an aggregator. I think blog enthusiasts miss this point often. RSS needs a PR campaign. It’s not going to be mainstream, until it’s simply a button that people can push. Syndication needs to be incorporated into web tools and news sites with less jargon and requiring less technical understanding. Yahoo!’s taking a step in the right direction.