Digital Content Creation Guide
This guide has been designed to help authors with the process of creating the Royal Society of Chemistry’s digital content. We hope that it will help our regular bloggers and part-time writers to produce content that is great for customers and ranks highly in a google search. It comes with an accompanying cut out and keep summary which you can get if you click on the cereal box or on the link below:
Quality content summary
Were you browsing around without a goal or were you looking for something specific? Most people say "something specific" as they have a goal in mind, like the following:
It means that your content has to be designed in such a way that it helps an online user complete a goal. Not only that, there are also millions of other content producers who you are competing with so your content has to be convincing, unique, engaging and the best!
Before you put together your article, blog, tweet, etc, consider the following:
After you’ve created your content you’ll need people to start using it so you have to balance your communication between push and pull techniques:
Unfortunately there is no simple answer, if there was everyone would be there! Google and other search engines have over a thousand ranking factors that they use to decide whose content should be on Page 1 and as such the most important thing you can do to rank is to make sure your content is quality (see question 1).
If you have fulfilled the quality criteria then you can begin to think about the following to further optimise your content for search:
Have you used words or phrases in your content that people will use to find it?
Two or three of the keywords you decide upon should appear in the following:
Did you know that the internet is essentially just lots and lots of connected pages. In 1996, a man called Larry Page realised that knowing which web pages linked to a given page would give valuable information about that page. The more links to a page there were then the more important that page was. Larry used this information to decide which site should be top of a search for a keyword and Google was born!
As said earlier, Google now has over 1,000 different factors that affect where a site ranks but always remember that the number of links to your pages from other pages is the foundation on which Google was built.
Equally if a site that Google thinks is important links to your pages that will also help your page to rank. Look at the top search results for a certain keyword – pages from the government, bbc, Wikipedia, and universities always rank well – if you can get a link from these pages to yours it will help your position.
Finally Google now also check social sites like Twitter for links and if well known scientists (@jimalkhalili, @profbriancox) share links to your content then that will help your pages to climb the listings.
While Larry Page was dreaming up his page rank formula our own IT team were busy launching www.rsc.org and it is worth remembering that it has been on the internet for 2 years longer than Google. Over this time lots of people have linked to our wonderful content and recommended us to friends so in Google’s eyes the RSC is great.
As such if you want your content to be found there is no better place to put it than right here on www.rsc.org
As the content writer you are also the content owner so it is down to you to make sure that it is high performing.
Once your pages are launched you will need to be able to measure whether the goal you have set for visitors is being completed. If you are a regular content creator for the RSC then please get in touch to ask about how you might go about getting this data.
Remember that actually writing the content is the hardest and longest part of the content strategy process so make sure that once you’ve launched it you continue the relatively simple promotion of it. For any content that you have live use the push and pull methods described above, link to it from any new and related content you create and talk about it with scientists so they link to it. Watch as you continue to reap the rewards.
We hope that you found this quality content guide useful, if you have any comments or suggestions for the guide then please feel free to leave a comment below.
Many thanks,
James Stevens - Web Manager
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