The content dilemma

Inevitably the conversation comes round to balancing the provision of sufficient information to your visitor without giving too much detail away to your competitors.

This is a tough balancing act so consider what you are ‘marketing’. This may well be your business knowledge, business capabilities, innovative products, competitive pricing, timely delivery or some other unique selling points (USPs).

Data, information and knowledge

So what should be written? With web content you are dealing with a hierarchy of three elements; ‘data’, ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’.

For example, if you sell TVs then:

• Data could be represented by the screen size, weight, display modes, price, dual tuners, etc.
• Information would be, for example, the TVs capability to record to external hard disk whilst watching another program because of the dual tuner.
• Knowledge is the experience to recommend one TV over another and why.

For a visitor coming to your website what are they looking for? Data, information, knowledge or a combination of all three?

What do you want to be recognised for?

What marketing USPs are you trying to project through your website to encourage contact? Is it domain knowledge to enhance your reputation and build authority or maybe it’s price and availability? In the end it’s a decision driven by your position in the marketplace, competitors offerings and most importantly how you want your visitors to see you.

Further references can be found on this blog post Website Content Authoring and on the Web Content Authoring Service page or you can contact us to find out more.

The question is, how to determine what these should be to make it easy for a visitor to find your blog post?

Why categorise and tag blog posts?

Simply to enable visitors to quickly get to the blog post which interests them and answers their question.

In addition to adding categories and tags, posts can also be date/time coded. Using these three approaches (category, tag and date/time) allows postings to be ‘sliced and diced’ so that your visitor can get to the relevant blog post quickly.

How to identify categories and tags?

This is known as designing the blog taxonomy – identifying unique categories and tags that will be used for all blog posts.

There are two things to consider:

• The greater the number of categories and tags the finer grained it will be possible to set each blog post.
• Too many categories and tags can result in blog post subject overlaps which can easily results in too many low quality visitor search matches.

Getting started …

So, the best approach is to start off with a small number of categories. These could be the main goods or services you provide or main subjects that you will blog about. It is worth recording these.

Next, create some initial blogs and categorise them. When this is done identify an initial set of tags and tag these blogs.

Finally, review how the blog categories and tags are distributed and make any changes.

Thereafter, as you create new blogs try to use these blog categories and tags unless there is a good reason not to.

Business marketing messages, information, products and services shape a website structure. Identifying the information architecture is the process whereby all these elements are brought together. The process identifies the major web pages and how the site will be navigated for intuitive browsing (website usability).

To design the information architecture requires a knowledge of the business. Business First is the process to gain knowledge and understanding thus ensuring the published website reflects the business marketing aims.

Large Websites

The larger the website the more important it is to review the information architecture to ensure information is placed logically within it, and to ensure there is room to expand without significant website redesign.

Reflecting Your Business

One important point worth noting is that the website information architecture should reflect the way visitors see your business from the outside, and not how your business in structured internally.

Simply, a website that has a set of administration pages that allow you to change the site’s content via the same web browser you are using to view this site. CMS and WCMS are generic names for all websites that have this type of administration interface. It is found on services websites (such as this), eCommerce websites and blogging websites to name a few.

CMS Administration and Updating

You administer the site through a web interface; adding, deleting, and changing content, together with adding new web pages and menu items.

No special software is required on your PC to manage your website, and the website management tools are easy to learn.

Finally, you can update your site from anywhere on the planet, providing that is, you have an internet connection!

Blogs fall into two basic categories; personal and business.

The aim of of a blog is twofold; to build an on-line community to give and receive information and secondly, to enhance your web presence as search engines love blogs because they represent active content.

Blog websites can be installed either standalone or integrated with a business CMS website solution (like this one).

For a professional installation, the ‘look and feel’ of the blog site should be consistent with the main website so that switching between the two is seamless for the visitor.

Business Blogs

A business blog is an informal way of marketing your business, ideas, goods, and services.

It allow you to inform visitors about new business developments, create a buzz, and seek feedback on ideas for new products and services.

Blogs are often run in parallel with other social media routes to market, for example, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Personal Blogs

Typically an informal on-line diary used to express your thoughts and gain feedback from others.

Your website must have immediate visitor appeal (see website usability guidelines) but there is a balance between sufficient information for the visitor to make a decision and too much that they won’t read. Getting that balance right is the hard bit.

Authoring takes into consideration your business marketing (see Business First), website structure (the information architecture) and SEO requirements (see SEO).

Services Websites

Services websites require sufficient and engaging information to persuade visitors that making contact with you is worthwhile. Think of it as your business CV, and like any good CV it won’t get you a job offer but it will get you an interview.

eCommerce Websites

eCommerce websites have different information criteria covering products, descriptions, pricing, availability, reputation, and security. It is important that your website covers all these in sufficient depth to encourage visitors to undertake transactions.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process by which a website’s words and structure are polished so that when a potential visitor issues a search request via (say) Google, your site is displayed high up on the search results page.

There are 2 aspects to search engine optimisation:

• On-site optimisation (or organic search engine optimisation). This is attending to such items as page titles, meta tags, text placement, relative font sizes, link text, keyword density and content relevance. This is to ensure your web page link appears in the highest possible position on the search engine search results page, and that the text displayed is sufficiently inviting that the visitor clicks through to your website.
• Off-site optimisation. This is the building of quality inbound links to your website. One of many criteria search engines like Google use to rate websites, is the number of quality inbound links. They work on the principle that if other people reckon your site is good, they will link to you. Quality links can enhance your search result position and vice versa.

Of course, it is possible for even the smallest of businesses to be somewhere on the first page of Google without any inbound links, providing your website is optimised and you have a unique offering. It depends on what you want to be famous for and then reviewing your website content and structure to ensure that they reflect this.

It’s worth remembering that the wider your business offering, the harder it is to be number 1 for everything.

As an ethical SEO company, we are unable to guarantee getting your site to page 1 position 1.

Building a successful website requires an understanding of website usability blending website structure and content together.

Website Structure

Structure should follow established conventions to prevent visitors having to learn new ways of interacting.

Website structure covers for example, ‘look and feel’, search engine optimisation, accessibility and font styles and sizes.

Website Content

Content sentence complexity should be aimed at the target audience.

Web content covers writing style, language complexity, sentence and paragraph construction and information presentation.

Positive visitor experience

• Interaction. Visitors want to interact with your site at their own speed.
• Site navigation. Ensure the site layout and navigation are intuitive and follow established conventions.

Negative visitor experience

• Distractions. Heavy use of advertisements or moving text and images.
• Registration. Asking your visitor to register before providing basic information.
• Incomplete site. ‘Under construction’. If there is nothing to say, don’t say anything.

Visitors increasingly see ‘Search Engines’ as ‘Answer Engines’ to answer their question.

The Challenge

Visitors to your website want answers quickly, and with the minimum of effort expended.

They can be quite ruthless in assessing the benefits of spending time on your website.

This results in visitors ‘information snacking’. That is, coming to your website, collecting a piece of information, then going off to another website for another piece of information.

The challenge therefore is to answer the question and retain the visitor on your site long enough for them to undertake a transaction.

Positive visitor experience

• Content scanning. Visitors interact with your website by scanning content on the web page. If it looks interesting they will read it.
• Information foraging. Your site structure and content should support foraging to enable visitors to find the answer they seek.

Negative visitor experience

• Unreadable text. Block text, small fonts and poor colour contrasts are difficult to read on screen.
• Introduction screens. Visitors almost always opt to ‘Skip intro’ when flash introduction or splash screens are displayed.
• Browser plug-ins. Don’t expect visitors to download a browser plug-in to see your content.
• Page load times. Visitors are impatient. Too long and they will give up and go elsewhere.
• Browser incompatibility. Failure to display your web page correctly on their browser.
• Poor site navigation. Not knowing where they are and how to navigate their way round the website.