What Aspects Of A Blog Have The Greatest Impact On Search?

Survey most blogs and you will find the same kinds of design elements: logo – banner art – main navigation – right-column and/or left-column navigation – call-out areas – contact info – images and captions – content blocks – sitemaps – comments – footer info. Because these elements are so prevalent, they’re often adopted and/or visually transformed without really understanding how blogs work or how to make blogs work better.

Anyone who has landed on a blog knows that the most recent post is the first one you see at the top of the page. Older blog posts are found below the newest post and on the following pages. Most blogs force the visitor to experiment with menu offerings to find what they want or rely on search features within the blog itself. In order to optimize the design and the experience of the blog for visitors and for search, a designer must ask: What do the search engines see on a blog and how do they assign value?

Search engine optimization practitioners generally agree that when a new post lands on the blog’s home page, that post’s value for search is at its highest point. Because of the way search engines index each page with their robotic algorithms, as each new post lands and pushes the older posts down the page, the older posts have less and less value. Most SEOs think that, as a post pushes off the home page and into archives, eventually the search value all but disappears. This makes the SEO attributes of a blog and of each individual blog post all important.

A simple way to counteract the decreasing SEO value would be to increase the overall page volume of the blog by adding content. There can be no doubt that this helps a blog attain critical mass and keeps it fresh. But adding content without developing an SEO-friendly strategy based on keywords and keyphrases will never produce the results most of us want from our blogs.

Keywords and keyphrases are the structure on which everything else is predicated – from search-friendly post titles and matching URLs, to permalinks, to the naming of categories and tags, to the search-friendly blog content, and should even extend to paid search, landing page development, and, further, to social media campaigns. Strategizing for search is really surveying how visitors understand your key topics linguistically and then framing the site’s design and content around these terms. This is done by researching user’s search patterns on the web. By testing what search engines return for results on important terms and modeling competitors and like-organizations, determinations can be made for mapping these your terms across the whole website.

So now the question is; what aspects of blogs should designers (and developers) focus on to insure the greatest impact on search engine-friendliness, now and in the future? For a list of must-haves for blogs from a search engine perspective, go to the designforseo blog post entitled, 18 SEO-Friendly Blog Tactics For Designers. Don’t hesitate to join the discussion if you have something salient to add.

Content Strategy Is A Cross-Discipline Practice

As a term, content strategy is a relatively new one to the production of interactive experiences; in particular, website redesigns and new-builds. Too often in the past, the process of creating a content strategy has been to draw a roadmap for content development. As a result of strong editorial practice or from well-meaning search engine optimization practices, many websites have lots of content, but little of it is effective for the visitor nor well-managed structurally. The phrase, “content is king” has echoed through the years, but this has produced content on the web more notable for it’s quantity than it’s quality or experience.

Content strategy, as it is beginning to be known, is a cross-discipline practice that seeks to strike a balance between user experience and SEO, persona development and site architecture, meta-data and editorial calendars, keyword research and traffic analysis. The concepts and protocols are being defined by key practitioners like Kristina Halvorson and Erin Scime and are expanding the definition of content strategy at a key moment when the web is also diversifying both in terms of platforms and applications, and in terms of standardization and conventions.

In her insightful essay on content strategy for A List Apart in December of 2009, Erin Scime lays out the conceptual overview of the content strategist as a digital curator. For me the term “digital curator” is a bit too academic. While it is true that curators, “use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message,” there seems to be room in the new definition to include the role of the environmental designer and the exhibition designer as well. It is not just the contextual thread that runs through the exhibit that interests the visitor in a website, but the ebb and flow of the content, the container of the exhibit itself, and the development of visual cohesion.

Still, Scime lays out a number of elegant, competent arguments for this expanded definition of the content strategist starting with defining and assessing the current content and needs of a project, and ending with editorial strategies and the establishment of organizational guidelines and protocols. As she says, “…content strategy engagement is site-level and long-term…” and she is right. Content strategists need to work with stakeholders and marketing people to understand the trajectory of the project and its place within the larger brand and message. They need to work directly with SEO and SEM departments or vendors to uncover searchable terms and incorporate them into every aspect of the website’s development and digital marketing. Likewise, content strategy will directly effect UX and IxD and the kinds of visual structures and cues they will create for the visitor. And now, content strategists must also navigate social media and be responsive to both external audience and internal needs.

The new content strategist is involved in every conversation surrounding an interactive project; if not in the actual development and production of the interactive experience, then certainly in the mapping of the content and the structuring of it within the larger framework. Content is not just king, but it is the map and the territory.