Content Strategy Archives - Cosmic Whispers Design

Tags for Posts: Best Practices

I covered how to use the broader idea of categories for your blog posts in this article.

Now, I’d like to contrast that with a bit on the use of tags. To me (having originally been a book indexer by trade), tags are more like an index, while categories are more like a table of contents. Unlike a book index, though, tags don’t have to be in alphabetical order or in a list at all; they can be unordered because they are accessible by using a search tool. The computer doesn’t need all the terms in order to complete the search quickly for you. One of the advantages of computers over humans is their ability to use “brute force” speed to find terms, where we humans need an ordered list to scan efficiently.

Significance for Tags

On the other hand, the computer can’t always tell which mentions of a term are important enough to give you results for, so human indexers continue to create value by choosing significant topics for indexes. Search engines and indexes can actually complement each other.

But I digress. 🙂 Tags in your posts allow folks to use the search feature on your site (I do hope you have one) to more easily find any articles that mention topics or names, or that aren’t part of the site’s categories.

In the spirit of good book indexing (and to keep search engines like Google’s from downgrading your site), though, you don’t want to just tag every noun in your post, or even get carried away with more than, say six, tags for a post. Google has definitely taken to downgrading sites that use tags unrelated to content at all, and I know you all won’t be trying to play that game. But even with subjects and names that are in or related to your post, keep your tags restricted to names and subjects that you spend some verbiage discussing. For example, just because Bill Gates shows up in your post on how to use Microsoft Windows 10 doesn’t mean his name should be in your list of tags. If you were writing about the Gates’s education foundation, then his name might be appropriate as a tag. It’s all about what we indexers call “significance.” Do your blog readers a favor and make the quality of your site better for Google by sticking to the few most relevant terms for each post.

In this age of information overload, quality of information is of crucial importance; be a purveyor of quality. 🙂

Post Categories: Best Practices

Content Strategy

If you are a professional content strategist, you probably know the latest about how to use this feature of WordPress blog posts, but many great writers are just a little clueless about the most efficient and effective way to use categories. In addition, Google’s search engine has changed the way it evaluates tags in particular in its cataloging of pages.

Categories as Browsing Tools

Categories provide you, the writer, with an opportunity to collect different blog posts into one or more general categories that reveal the posts’ relationship to the major topics or offerings on your site. They help browsing readers who’ve read one post on love, for example, to find other posts that are primarily on that same subject. Categories are not designed to help people search for specific names or topics in a post that are not themes of your blog as a whole. Categories are like a table of contents for your entire site.

So, choose your categories, which should be a much smaller list than the one for your tags, based on what major subjects you want to group your posts under. Then you can post this short list in your blog’s sidebar or even link to some or all of them in your menu.

Here’s an example of categories for a site where a fairly wide range of topics and more than one type of writing are covered:

Cosmology
Inspiration
Mythology
Poetry

My publishing services website has these categories, which reflect my services and the biz in general:

Book Design
Book Indexing
Editing & Proofreading
Freelance Biz
Publishing
Writing

Both lists are short, and they do not include specific topics of posts. I don’t have a category for grammar, for example. Those posts would go in the Editing & Proofreading category. I might have a poem about my teddy bear, but it would just go in Poetry with all the poetry posts.

For more specific, index-like search terms for your post, you need to use the tags section that’s available on the right side of your post editor. I’ll cover best practices for those in a future post.

Content Redesign

Content Strategy

A redesign of a website is not just about colors and layout; the most important thing to start with is organizing the content itself.

I’ve had more than one experience so far with clients looking to redo the visible design (pictures, colors, layout, etc.) of their site, thinking that fixing that would create more visitors. I also had one person with an established site ask for just a landing page to get folks to take action on making contact.

I started by listening to what the client said they wanted, and then looked at the site.

It was soon evident that what they needed even more than a visual redesign was a refocus and re-organization of their page content, along with some purging of information about activities and services that they no longer found value in.

I ended up using my “indexer mind” that I’ve used for book indexing over the years to do an evaluation of the scattered information in the menus and on the front page of the site to recommend a re-organization.

There were lots of elements to organize so that the client’s main current interests would be at the forefront and easy to find, with opportunities to make contact clearly visible near the top of the site.

It was a fascinating experience to discover that my indexing skills (general thinking skills, not building an actual index) could be applied to this idea of content redesign.

I really loved helping these clients get refocused and have their site content match where they wanted to go next in their business. Do let me know if you’d like to corral your content into a new field of offerings. 🙂

SEO: Why Should I Care?

Content Strategy

Good question. I’m learning as I build my skill set in the web design field of the twenty-first century that we actually have two audiences for our websites in our online visibility world: humans and algorithms (specifically search engine algorithms).

Humans we know pretty well, and many of us know how to write stories or product descriptions or instructions in our native natural languages. Quality writing with valuable advice or information on how to solve human problems or inspiration for humans; yep, most of us learned the basics here.

But why do we need to write for an algorithm? Well, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is designed to get the attention of a search engine’s algorithm (= instruction for how to solve a problem—in this case how to index your site to make it come up in searches).

Trouble is, the complex language we use to create wonderful posts and pages for humans doesn’t really suit the search engine algorithm. It wants just the substantive keywords (like the index terms in the back of a book) in a string and hyperlinked web addresses (URLs) it can pick up easily and spit out in a search result. All those extra words just take longer to process (I know, it’s just milliseconds or maybe faster, but it adds up).

So, in addition to writing kick-ass posts on great subjects to make your site more visible, SEO is a good idea. My problem with many of the current plugins or services that promise to enhance your SEO is that taking their advice can often turn your prose into a chain of mindless keywords (or close) just to make the SEO rating happy.I hate being told that I didn’t get my main keyword into the first paragraph, or didn’t use it enough times (ugh!). I prefer to give precedence to making the human reader happy, with SEO in the background, not the foreground of my composition.

I do think I’ve found a happy medium that uses four tools: An automatically generated sitemap, tags on all my blog posts, permalink modifications, and basic metadata information.

Sitemap

Lovely little tool, the sitemap. It lists all the hyperlinks for the pages and posts in your website so the web crawlers can find them more easily and make sure they don’t miss any. If you have the suite of features called Jetpack from WordPress’s company, Automattic, you can check the Jetpack settings’ Traffic tab and scroll down to see if the sitemap feature is turned on. That’s easy!

If you don’t like Jetpack or want to control the sitemap a bit more, try the Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress For more on sitemaps, check out this tutorial over at SEO Hacker.

Tags on Posts

When you are composing and editing your blog posts in WordPress, you should see a Tags widget over in the sidebar that gives you the option to add keywords to your post. Do be nice and only add keywords that actually apply to the content of your post; Google looks down on folks who engage in “tag packing.” It’s also rude for folks who search on your tags looking for a subject and then find that you didn’t write about that at all. So, take a few seconds to decide what your article is really about and use tag keywords that directly reflect the main topic and maybe three more subtopics or synonymous terms.