Content Trends

Content Marketing, SEO and Digital Marketing

Style Guide – An Essential Tool to Your Web Content Strategy

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I shared this article with my LinkedIn group recently and was pleased and also a little amazed at how passionate the web content community’s reactions were to this topic. This post generated a lively discussion and some of the comments were the size of blog posts. Here is a screenshot:

If you are a content writer or blogger, you need to make these key editorial decisions everyday:

  • How will you treat every day web terms: website, web-site or web site? Email or e-mail?
  • How will you handle headlines? Will you capitalize every word or only the first word?
  • Will you address your audience in a conversational style or will you use a more formal approach?

    • At any given time, creating an editorial style guide will take the guess work out of all these decisions and will set the overall tone, look and feel of your site.

    Critical Benefits of Web Style Guides

    #1. Optimum User Experience

    Consistency is the number one rule for creating an awesome user experience on your site. The primary goal of all web disciplines from web design to web development, from site architecture to content strategy is to create a consistent look and feel. A style guide sets standards that can be seamlessly maintained across every page and post of your site.

    When I was consulting recently, for a large healthcare provider, I thought that it would set a friendly and helpful tone to the site if I followed the current trend of writing content in a conversational style. Upon further evaluation of all the client sites, I had to abandon that idea as it became clear to me that their multiple websites used a more formal approach. In order to maintain a consistent look and feel to my project, I had to use the same tone.

    #2. Content Creation and Maintenance are Quicker, Easier and More Efficient

    • A style guide reduces the amount of thought, time and effort you need to put into the same tiny details on an ongoing basis. I know from personal experience that time and effort are both at a premium in a blogger’s life. You could use that additional time and effort on other essential activities such as blog promotion, site improvements, seo and social media optimization.
    • It’s a lot easier to read and comprehend information that is uniformly presented.

    #3. Everyone Is on the Same Page

    • I think that my favorite reason to create a style guide is that it reduces confusion. If you are not sure how you handle even simple conventions such as naming files or dates, you could always go back and refer to your style guide.
    • From time to time, you could have different people working on your site or blog such as guest posters, freelancers, contractors or web designers. You will have a great resource guide that these multiple people could turn to for guidance.
    • A style guide serves as a tool for conflict resolution. As a rule, people are always more agreeable to follow a standard that’s already in place.

    What Must You Include in Your Style Guide?
    Your style guide’s primary function is to serve as a guide for anyone with web writing and editing responsibilities. At the macro level:

    • Your style guide must include the writing style you will use to set the overall tone of your site.
    • It must also contain a description of keywords that you are optimizing your site for and
    • It must include a quick overview of your content driven seo strategies.

    Your style guide could be a very basic document or you could make it more detailed and be as granular as you like. Ideally, at the very least a good style guide should contain:

    • Official Reference Guides – CMS (Chicago Manual of Style), AP Stylebook (Associated Press) or any other reference guide
    • Grammar conventions
    • Syntax
    • Punctuation
    • Capitalization
    • Treatment of industry specific terms
    • Copyright issues
    • Treatment of numbers and numerals:
      • Dates
      • Numbers
      • Measurements
      • Currency
      • Format for phone numbers

      The more details you include in your style guide, the more consistent your website/blog will look and feel.

      I hope that this primer is helpful. Stay tuned for my next post and a sample style guide that you could use on your website.

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5 Ideas for Creating Original, High Quality Content

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It’s no secret that the best way to attract traffic and achieve higher rankings is by creating high quality content. High value content is ultimately what separates you from the millions of other sites and blogs in cyberspace and in the blogosphere.

Yet, the internet is exploding with thousands of pages of low value content. Most content creators look at the content on other sites, and rewrite some of those ideas and throw in a few keywords. This rehash has resulted in the internet being flooded with pages of low quality content.

So what is high quality content?
High quality content:

  • Is original and involves creating new ideas
  • Is created when you share your unique experience, your fresh and unique perspective with your community of readers.
  • Is created when you use your voice to give new life to the same copywriting formulae that writers have been using for decades.

If you are an affiliate marketer, it means researching and personally experiencing the benefits of the product that you are selling. Your review will be of value to your customers as you have spent the time and effort required instead of simply copying ad copy right out of your vendor’s website.

If you are a real estate agent, it means writing an honest review on why you love the area where you sell and why you feel it would be an attractive place to live.

Benefits of Creating High Value Content:

  • Unique content will engage and delight your customers and will keep them coming to your site for more ideas. Quality content along with these content writing tips will ensure audience engagement on your site.
  • Search engines give higher rankings to original and high quality content. A higher ranking in turn will drive more traffic to your site. Google’s early 2011 algorithm updates were specifically designed to penalize short and shallow articles and reward high-quality content.
  • Fresh ideas get the maximum shares on social media.

Here are 5 content ideas that are tried and tested marketing strategies. Use them with your voice to create content of a high quality and value.

#1. Make Some Predictions

The New Year is always a perfect time to predict how 2012 will shape up for any number of industries such as the outlook for:

  • small businesses
  • cell phones
  • the economy
  • movies
  • web design
  • social media

The sky is the limit. Every product and industry lends itself to speculation, predictions and a future outlook. People love reading predictions. Make sure that the prediction that you make are purely from your perspective on the future of your market, service or product.

#2. Common Problems in Your Profession and Their Resolution:

Almost 60% of respondents to a recent Pew (Project for Excellence in Journalism) survey said that they used internet search as a way to solve problems. In fact, more people turn to the internet as a source or solution than consult experts, family members or friends to provide information and resources.

I came across a number of small technical issues while I was creating this blog. I kept a track of these issues knowing that other people who faced similar problems will be able to benefit from my experience. These problems and their solutions, I have no doubt, will turn out to be original, high quality blog posts.

#3. Before and After

People love to read about before and after stories, and the more dramatic the transformation the greater is the level of engagement; the more it gets shared on social media. Besides, before and after projects are also extremely well illustrated with some nifty graphics. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Every product and service has a before and after story in terms of why the product/service was created and the value it added to customers’ lives. Every client project, sales pitch, marketing effort has a before and after project story with: lessons learned; value created; and income earned. Other classic examples of before and after projects include:

  • before and after a makeover
  • a complete site redesign
  • before and after a social media strategy
  • before and after a home design project
  • before and after slimming diet or product
  • sales figures before and after a marketing campaign

    • #4. Write a Review

    Early in 2011, Derek Halpern used this strategy by writing blog reviews of popular sites such as Chris Brogan and Think Traffic.

    Review any product or service that is making waves in your industry that you have personally tried or experienced. Better yet, be among the first to review a new product or service.

    #5. Do a Comparison

    Give your unique perspective on 2-3 products or services in your industry. You could list the pros and cons and why you would recommend one over the other.

    You could do side by side comparisons of any product or service under the sun: Cars; cell phone plans; tablet pcs; Digital cameras; and laptops are perfect niche markets for comparison tables that work wonders for ratings.

    What are you doing to create original, high quality content? Please share your thoughts and ideas.

How To Write Quality Content that is Search Engine Friendly

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Certain golden rules when applied can transform anybody into a web content guru. That is the ongoing purpose of this blog.

Web content writing is an exciting and constantly evolving field. It is all at once challenging, educational and exciting to write quality content that is fresh, consistently engaging and informative.

A genuine love, passion and involvement with your topic will shine through and will keep visitors engaged and involved with your site.

Writing quality content however is only part of the job. The more challenging job is to ascertain that the content is found, indexed and ranked by most browsers so that you get the maximum traffic.

Here are some ideas and tips which will equip you in no time at all to write quality content that is found easily by most search engines and which will in turn build and increase traffic to your site.

 

Use a writing style that grabs interest

  • Use the inverted pyramid style of writing which places the most important information first. If visitors don’t find the info. they are looking for in the first couple of minutes they will go to another site where they can.
  • Break up large blocks of text with bullet lists for ease of reading.
  • Use meaningful headlines and subheads that explain key points at a glance as well as help optimize the page
  • Focus on the best keywords for your business. There are several tools such as Wordtracker that will get you started with keyword research.

    • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques

    SEO is the science of increasing your web rankings by improving factors that influence browser search results. In layman’s terms it involves making your content relevant to the google bots so that they know how to index and rank your page. Here is a previous post that is dedicated to Seo and free tools that you can use to optimize your content.
    Search engines also look for the following information among other parameters:

    • Focus on keyword density which involves repeating select, target keywords so that search engines find your site more relevant and give you a higher ranking in search results. Experts recommend that the ideal keyword density is between 2-5 percent.
    • Use effective titles and headings. The titles and headings must not only grab attention but must also have keywords.
    • Build links. Muster all your efforts in making your content so useful that other sites link to you. The more links you receive the higher your page will rank in search results. Always link to internal content and articles that relate to your current post.

    Search engines love fresh content

    • Content is really king and fresh, compelling, useful, relevant and quality content is of utmost importance especially in these days of rapidly changing technologies and instant news updates.
    • Search engines penalize websites that have static content. Fresh content makes for higher search rankings.
    • Research before writing as info these days becomes obsolete at the bat of an eyelid.

    Use Social Media and Comments to Define Content

    • According to the latest Google updates, content that is shared most on social media is ranked higher.
    • Web Marketing experts recommend you use a variety of tools (such as bit.ly, HootSuite, TweetMeme) to find out which subjects are hot, what’s new and what gets shared most on social media. Focus on a topic that is going viral or at the very least being talked about extensively.
    • Use Google Analytics and Clicky (real time analytics) to discern what gets shared most, which piece of content is talked and tweeted about and then create more of that content
    • Visitor interaction will help you understand what’s working. Use comments to engage visitors and understand their needs and which piece of content is popular with them.
    • Send regular white papers and newsletters to your customers via email. It’s important that the content is both beneficial and useful as this strategy will not only enhance your relationship with your visitors but will convert them into customers who regularly visit your site.

    Ultimately, the purpose of writing content is to provide valuable and useful information to your visitors. But by keeping these techniques in mind, you can also cater to the Google bots that are constantly crawling the internet in search of fresh, relevant and quality content.