WEM: Optimize Content for Your Web Presence

To optimize content marginally well, companies can choose to focus on SEO, keywords and meta data or how text, image and multimedia content is presented and organized on a site. Yet in order to be competitive in the marketplace, companies should instead focus on incorporating elements of each into their web engagement strategies.

What is Content Optimization?

Content is king, as they say. Therefore the words you use on your website, in brochures, via social media need to be tailored appropriately. The words content optimization can mean different things to different people. Some will say it’s all about SEO, others will say it’s about headers and tagging, while still others will maintain that it’s about the messages used. We at CMSWire say they are all correct, but to approach content optimization as a la carte is misguided. Like many web management strategies, it’s a process and in order to be most effective, all the pieces influence each other.

Your Customers

You might think that optimizing your website’s content is about words, but it’s actually about your customers and your brand. After all, even the most well-crafted sentences and marketing slogans won’t help sell your product if it’s not tailored to reach the right audience.

Before you can even think about choosing the right words for your customers, it’s essential that you know who your customer is. To do that, you’ll need to answer a few questions, first.

• Who are you trying to reach?
• How well do you understand your customers’ goals?
• What are your customers’ preferences when it comes to content discovery, consumption and sharing?
• What keywords do they associate with your products or services?
• By whom are they influenced?
• In what communities do they spend their time on the social web?

In addition to figuring out who your customers are, it’s also important to compare them to who you want your audience to be. They might not match up at first. If you want a specific segment to be a part of your consumer demographic, you’ll need to understand what their goals are and what kind of content resonates with them. You may need to draft content that various by demographic.

Your Communication Strategy

But wait, you’re still not ready to draft any actually words. Content optimization is also affected by your capacity to reach out and communicate.

• What is your strategy for connecting prospective customers with your content?
• Do you have a social media strategy?
• Who is writing, updating and managing your content?
• What is the publishing process?

Before words hit the page, it’s important to understand how to write appropriately for the type of media to which you are publishing. Writing for print is different than writing for blogs, which is different that publishing tweets and updates. Learning the key differences can help you steer your content without going off course.

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Tags: communication strategy, content strategy, keywords, search engine optimization, SEO, web content, web content optimization, web engagement, wem

To optimize content marginally well, companies can choose to focus on SEO, keywords and meta data or how text, image and multimedia content is presented and organized on a site. Yet in order to be competitive in the marketplace, companies should instead focus on incorporating elements of each into their web engagement strategies.