Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Creating the Perfect Content Strategy through Optimization

While your website may have tons of viewers, your efforts will definitely fail without good content strategy. Proper planning and optimization of your pages are essential in letting your website reach its maximum potential. Reader engagement and optimization can be achieved in various ways. Below are effective ways on how to do so.
 
                              Image From: http://www.richardingram.co.uk/downloads/content_strategy_app_2038.png


•    Determine the appropriate strategy to use

Before you can go ahead and apply any technique, you have to know your audience so you can provide content that’s suited for them. These may come in the form of guides, videos, infographics or articles. Knowing which is most effective will help you draw and build more site visitors.

•    Incorporate blogs into your site

Studies show that sites which contain blogs tend to be indexed more by Google than those who don’t have one - up to 434% pages more.

When writing a blog entry, start by drafting a catchy and interesting headline. Your titles and meta description tags should be highly optimized as well. Publish posts consistently, if possible at the same time or day every week. If you can’t, schedule your posts beforehand via CMS. When a reader leaves a comment, respond, and swiftly if you can. This keeps the interest going. Lastly, remember to include social media sharing buttons like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and others.

•    Include videos in your pages

Did you know that more than 700 YouTube videos are shared every minute on Twitter alone? That’s how vital videos are to your marketing.

Whenever you are sharing videos on Youtube or other similar platforms, remember to keep the length at an average of two minutes. Anything longer might bore your audience. Put appropriate titles, tags and descriptive phrases, and embed them within blog entries. Follow up on viewer questions as well.

•    Offer free guides

Definitive guides have over 60 percent chance of being shared and utilized in the workplace. You should include backlinks to your site and your social pages, as well as short forms where you can solicit the reader’s name and e-mail for future reference.

•    Develop referential infographics

Web-based infographics allow your readers to better visualize complex information and share these easily with their connections.

When working with infographics, be sure to source them from reliable sites or individuals. To engage readers better, publish it as a blog post with social sharing buttons (embedding functions, if possible).

•    Encourage newsletter sign-up

One of the most effective call-to-action techniques for spreading your content is to encourage viewers to sign-up for an e-mail newsletter. Always remember to incorporate information into your promotions so that they don’t look like they’re created just to sell. Also include backlinks to your site and social media pages. Keep the newsletter succinct and regular, although not too frequently to avoid annoying your audience.

There are other strategies that you can incorporate to your existing ones in order to widen your reach and ensure better pitching of content. Always remember that when developing written material, you have your best reader’s interest in mind.