Ten quick wins to make most out of CIAT’s Web publishing
Mar 14th, 2011 | By Simone Staiger | Category: Knowledge Management, Tools & MethodsLast week our Capacity Initiative invited John Oliver Coffey from the Cali based Net Midas (http://netmidas.com) company to give a three hour workshop on tools and tips to optimize CIAT’s Web traffic, including social media, and optimize search engines, among others . Participants came from our IT department, Communications unit, and the DAPA team.
The amount of information and insights were overwhelming and it seems that we have to take this issue seriously, and invest some time for exploration and action in order to make more out of the content that we publish. That was precisely one of John’s key messages: “Today, it is not enough to publish content and leave it there”, which means that we need to know and target our audiences, we need to establish key performance indicators, analyze consequently the statistics, and do “reputation management”.
Even if we are all aware of it, last week John helped us with some eye-opener tips on how to take action. Here is a very quick list of 10 best bets which is only a selection of all the suggestions we received (many thanks to all the colleagues who shared their notes):
- Take advantage of the existing Google tools: Assure presence in reader’s tools like Google gadget to customize iGoogle, and use Google News site map formats
- Search via Google Alerts to quickly screen what others write about related topics or use Google Reader to follow related blogs and Web sites.
- Check out the Google Analytics report with more of a focus on repeat visits and whether our visitors are going beyond the front page. We should try to segment the Google analytics report in order to take out internal traffic and segment it by Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, North-South, etc. This will help us get a better idea of whether we are reaching our intended audience.
- For our blogs, we have to use always the latest versions of WordPress to prevent hackers and viruses.
- Be strategic when we decide the title of our blog post or news item: It should contain the keywords people are looking for. So a metaphor might not be a good title but perhaps a great subtitle.
- Do Link Building: First of all watch out for your link popularity using services like: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org or http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
- Use syndication tactics (syndication meaning: how to make it happen that our content is re-published). We specifically liked the advanced Google formula John uses to make specific searches to identify potential “syndicators”.
- We should look into http://hootsuite.com which John says is the best tool to screen our social media presence and networking potential.
- Take care of keywords. Many of the above tools can help to see how people search us and we should use related and specific tags, also for the images we insert.
- Use the social media listening tools mentioned above to identify potential partners and like-minded people and comment on their blogs and sites so they become readers of our content.
Makes sense, no? So let’s do it!
Although I agree with the starting point “Today, it is not enough to publish content and leave it there”, some words of caution, though.
According to me the priorities are slightly different, and should start from the base:
1. make sure you have good content: spellcheck posts, make them easy to read, structured, pictures to lighten things up. Weed through old and obsolete links and update dead links.
2. make sure people can find their way through your content: navigation, usability, presentation of related content
3. graphical presentation: make it appealing
4. speed: nobody likes a slow website. certainly search engines don’t like it. Optimize the pictures, cache the websites, use fast servers
5. basic SEO is easy to do. With just a few tricks, you can achieve 80% of what you want to achieve. Much of it can be automated.
6. Make it easy to subscribe (via RSS, Email subscriptions, Twitter,…)
7. community building: propagate your content (Twitter, Facebook, bookmarking), (as rightfully mentioned in your post:) build ‘networks’ with like-minded websites/tweeps by commenting, interacting,.. Follow up on the comments on the blog, entice comments, make it easy for people to subscribe to comments (so they don’t have to revisit the blog to see answers to their questions)
On specific points:
- WordPress updates: minor updates are often only catering for security issues on specific areas/scenarios/functionality. Before updating, check if all your plugins are compatible. Test the upgrade on a testblog (a mirror of your blog) first, to avoid surprises…
- differentiate between an SEO title and a blog title: use a blogtitle to attract readers’ attention. Use an SEO plugin to make a blog title/description which is appealing to search engines
- Google News sitemaps are only useful if the site is submitted to Google News, and accepted.
Very good summary Simone! And Peter’s addendums are spot on.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that CIAT is (also) a publisher and it is important to have a publishing plan that encompasses editorial, technological and promotional resources and strategies and that the messaging is consistent offline and online.
As with print publishing the foundation is having a very clear understanding of the audience, their information needs and information consumption habits. Having that understanding coupled with good web analytics and an editorial strategy will give you a guide on what to publish, how frequently and how well your publications are performing.
Lastly digital publishing is measurable to a large extent but measuring the actual engagement and impact of what is published is quite challenging.