How can you help ensure that your customers will find your great content? First, it’s critical that your content is optimized for search. Because algorithms and keyword usage can change rapidly, it’s important to understand the latest research in these areas so that you use the right approach to optimize your content for search.
Second, take advantage of the community to promote your content by using Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Tags.
SEO is the work that you do to improve the visibility of a website or a webpage in unpaid, algorithmic search engine results. Because most customers click one of the first few search results, it’s important to do all that you can to ensure that your content is returned at the top of a search engine result page.
The four main areas to focus on for SEO are keywords, links, titles, and descriptions.
Know the words and terms that customers use (not the words and terms that you use) to search for your information, and use these words as early and as often as possible in the following places in your content:
There are specific tools that you can use to learn what search terms customers use—just search for “SEO.”
In addition to including keywords in link text, you should link liberally to other content. If you have many incoming and outgoing links that use your keywords, you’ll help improve your position in search results. The highest value is given to incoming links that match your keywords and which are from pages that also use your keywords.
Each page on your site should include some type of “share this” feature so that readers can easily link to your content from their content. This will take advantage of social media technologies and help increase the number of well-formed inbound links to your content. For more information, see Social Media Optimization (SMO).
Ensure that your links are not circular (that is, don’t link back to the same content), because search engines discount these links (and it can be a lousy experience for your customers).
Fix any broken links that occur in your content—if a search engine can’t search your content because of a broken link, your ranking will be lower.
Titles are used by search engines to determine ranking and are then used as the page’s heading (anchor text) in the search engine’s results page. Use the following guidelines for titles:
Use no more than 10 to 12 words, or about 65 characters.
Use the most important keywords early in the title.
Unless brand names must appear first in the title or unless the page is mostly about the brand, important keywords should precede brand names.
The title should be specific and include what is unique about the content.
The page description appears in search results as a short paragraph between the title and the body of your content. It’s important that you provide this text because if you don’t, the search engine will decide what text to present. Use the following guidelines for descriptions:
Include keywords in the description and put them as close as possible to the beginning of the description.
A description should be no more than 160 to 170 characters.
Write from specific to general.
Use active words that clearly state what the page is about and that compel customers to access your content (without sounding like a sales pitch).
Descriptions should be grammatically correct complete sentences.
Avoid superfluous words. Don’t begin with stock phrases, such as “This article discusses” or “In this technical article, we will….”
For white papers and other long articles, indicate the length of the document.
“Tags” are keywords and terms chosen by the content’s creator or by other users of the item (depending on the system) to classify the content. Tags are a kind of metadata that helps customers find the content by browsing or searching. Tags are often specific to the systems in which the content is published. That is, tags are useful within a specific wiki, but do not necessarily increase discoverability from external search engines.
As with keywords, use tags that customers would use, not just the tags that you would use.
Many blogging and wiki systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, placing the post into categories. For example, a post might display that it has been tagged with “Windows” and “operating system.” Each of these tags is usually a link leading to an index page that lists all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog or wiki might have a sidebar listing all the tags in use, with each tag leading to an index page. In many systems, the font size of the tag title will be bigger or smaller, depending on the popularity (measured by customer use) of the tag. This gives customers a visual indicator of what content on the blog or wiki is most popular.
You can use social media like Twitter, Facebook, forums, newsgroups, and YouTube to promote your content and identify content needs. It’s another strategy—complementary to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—for making people aware of your content and increasing the amount of traffic to your site.
Social media evolves rapidly, so the approaches that you take to optimize your content today might need to be different six months from now. Because of this rapidly changing environment, the following information is limited to high-level approaches; there are resources available online for detailed information.
There are four main ways to approach SMO:
Understand the social media “community of influencers” that might have developed in your area of expertise. Engage with them to promote your content, and use social media tools yourself.
Collaborate with a partner team, such as your organization’s marketing team, to promote your content.
Monitor social media sites for common customer problems and use this data to identify gaps in your content. For example, in addition to responding to a forum or newsgroup post, you might need to add or correct content in your portfolio.
Use social media technologies, such as bookmarking, blogging, RSS feeds, and other sharing technologies, to improve SEO by increasing the number of well-formed inbound links to your content.
To understand your community of influencers, you can use various listening and monitoring tools, known as “listening platforms.” Listening platforms not only monitor and track what is being said about you, they also offer insight to help shape your strategy, giving you knowledge about sentiment, influence analysis, community, and engagement.
With social media, as with blogging, you need to have the resources to post and monitor frequently (once a week is a reasonable target) and respond to customer feedback promptly (a 24-hour to 48-hour response time is a good goal).