Remember in grade school, when your teacher asked you to begin writing for two minutes; without stopping, and then forced you to pass this masterpiece over to a friend for editing? It was embarrassing and challenging as a young child to try something new and become an author in 2 minutes or less. Yeah, I believe that experience is to blame for why we fail at writing lengthy, descriptive, fun, colorful words today.
Designing a content generation strategy for your website is similar to this process. It begins with brainstorming through things to write about and then writing them out. If you’re doing it right, you’ve already completed your keyword research and your brainstorming session is focused around content centered on those keywords.
Once you’ve determined several great ideas to write about, you should organize them into sets of like information such as (vehicles, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, etc.). This allows you to create a taxonomy of information; the way scientists organize species of life. Remember this chart from middle school?
The purpose of this order system is to organize species and ensure that each species is assigned a family and not orphaned or incorrectly placed with more than one family. From an SEO perspective, this is how we avoid duplicate content and writing content that competes with ourselves. These building blocks of information stack up to a content-rich site, with interlinked pages of similar information. In other words, it’s the perfect recipe for search engine robots and visitors alike.
One simple example about a celebrity information site may stack up like this:
Now that you’ve structured the content for your site, you can easily write information and plug it into the right area of your site without duplicating content and causing your rankings to drop like a rock. As new keywords emerge, you can either place them into the architecture you’ve constructed or add on to your current strategy in an organized manner that doesn’t have you working against yourself.
As you create this content, remember the following rules to maximize your search ranking capabilities and tie all of your content components together. The basic necessities include:
- Keywords – each page should be mapped to a handful of keywords; a primary keyword and a couple of modified keywords. Make sure to include supporting keywords to enhance your message and uphold your primary keyword for the new page.
- Links – create links to related information pages within the vertical where your new content will live.
- Images – remember to include images with unique names using your keywords to image search optimization.
- Alt text – include brief alt text in your img tag to maximize your on-page optimization.
- Videos – embed videos uploaded to social media sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc.
- Audio – include podcasts or audio messages to help encourage your visitors to take the action you desire.
What else would you add for your content generation strategy?
Great article. Reminds me of back when I was trying to explain to my very first client how we could take their site from 5 pages to 50 to 500 to 5000 by just drilling down on various subtopics in their niche. Needless to say they had a hard time picturing it until we started drawing out a very similar diagram to the one you have above. I think I’ll bookmark this post for reference purposes and save my breath next time
. Thanks.
There is a lot of great information here. When I was a young pup, a mentor told me that a person is judged on the wisdom he shows and teaches to another within his existence. Most of us unless you’re in your twenties did not have a personal computer in the home, office or school. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s that the technology was affordable. Thus as adults in the computer age, we are constantly behind the younger generation but we only fail if we don’t learn. So I thank this site and many others on the web that publish great learning information to further our knowledge of computer science.