Content Optimization Versus SEO
SEO has been all the rage, focused almost entirely on keywords, which ones work, which ones attract the attention of the search engines like Google, Bing and the others. The relevance of your site’s content hasn’t been particularly important, in many ways, as long as the pertinent key words were present in sufficient numbers to generate hits.
The problem with SEO is predominantly that while it may drive searchers to your site, there really isn’t much to keep them there or make them want to browse or spend, once they arrive. She’s searched for a keyword; she’s found a site with that keyword. Yay. Now what?
Content optimization picks up where simple, keyword-based SEO leaves off. Content optimization includes additional factors, like how easy is the material to skim, how readable is it, how sharable is it and, most importantly, how relevant is it?
In terms of “skim ability”, people are in a hurry. They don’t have a lot of time and they don’t want to have to read every single word to get to what they want to know. The easiest way to make your site skim-friendly is to break information up into manageable chunks, use bullet-points and images, to avoid awkward and off-putting huge chunks of solid type.
Readability is another important factor. While you never want to “talk down” to a customer or prospect, you also don’t want your pages to be too laden with jargon or hard for a new visitor to understand. If you have a high-tech type of business, you may be able to work with about an 8th grade writing level. If you don’t, aim for about a 5th grade comprehension level. It may also be helpful to have someone not deeply involved in your industry to read over the content, just to verify its accessibility to a wide audience. A second set of eyes is a good idea for almost any content.
In this day of social media, you want to take advantage of the tendency of your site visitors to share what they find with their friends and family. Make your content interesting and easy to share. A good web designer can help you format pages and data into a configuration that’s easy to spread around to Facebook, Google+ or wherever else your customer wants to pass it on. Several studies strongly suggest that posts containing images, statistics and charts are considerably more likely to be shared than posts without. Make sure you have both content that will be relevant over time as well as timely updates that encourage sharing and updating.
The key to all this is relevance. If the content is easy to find, easy to understand and easy to share, but has little to do with your products, and with what the customer wants to know, your efforts are for naught. Relevant material has lasting value; it may show up in search results a year after originally being posted. To guarantee relevance, stay focused on your topic, make your pages information-rich and use links to other pages to address subtopics or related information. Make sure you state your main premise early and be certain all technical or industry terms are defined for clarity.
Helping you craft totally optimized content is what www.infintechdesigns.com is all about. We design websites, and we also design the content most relevant, with the most timeless appeal to keep both first-time visitors and long-time customers interested and coming back. We are equally dedicated to providing the kind of quality that will keep you satisfied and coming back to work with us for a very long time.
