Creating content for the sake of just creating content and stuffing paragraphs with keywords, doesn’t do anything for anyone that is coming to your website. You want to be able to educate, to create solutions, and to give a deeper understanding. You want to create an experience that resonates with the user and makes them want to act. Content creation, while constantly talked about in the industry, should be a priority for anyone with a digital presence, and should be done with extreme care and attention. It’s your voice, use it wisely.
Social Media
Humans are incredibly social creatures. We live for connection and we live to engage with others. Whether it is family, friends, coworkers, or acquaintances, people enjoy the presence and interaction of another person. Social media humanizes us on the digital landscape. Whether on a personal or professional platform, we are using social media at a level that has never been seen before, and now more than ever there are opportunities for companies to connect with their users on a more personal and in-depth level.
Communities respond when you participate in discussions and also when you respond personally. Social signals, while not clearly stated by search engines in how they are utilized, are giving hints to their importance through connecting your Google+ page to your website and authorship tagging and letting us know how search engines are guiding us all to humanize our brands and our voices. The more you put yourself out there, the more people respond and view you as an accessible authority in what you are saying and how you interact with the crowd.
Structured Data Markup
One thing people like to do for themselves is highlight specific qualities and make them more noticeable to those they interact with. It could be humor, knowledge, athleticism, or other such qualities. Search engines also like when you are highlighting information and qualities about your website as well. One way of doing this is through the process of structured data markup.
Structured data markup is simply tagging the most important information on your website for search engine crawlers to quickly index and crawl. This information can be anything from contact information, reviews, product information, prices, event information, and so on. Make sure that you are taking notes of the possible areas for markup tagging on your website. We prefer Schema.org as it is a collaborative effort by the major search engines, including Google.
Conclusion
Listen, we all aren’t victims in this. A lot of you tried playing Google and the search engines in your shortcuts and thought you’d never get caught. Unfortunately you did, and it’s time for us to start making this right again.
Remember, whenever you are going to try something new on your website, think about it as looking at your online character reflection. Is it honest? Is it of substance? Are you linking and accepting links from websites and people that you would want to be associated with? Ultimately, are you putting your best foot forward? If you can answer yes to all of this, then you probably didn’t need my article to begin with – good on you.