Senior staff and experts from across the organisation use this blog to talk about what's happening to the Royal Society of Chemistry's web presence. We recognise that there are changes that could make our online offering more discoverable, easier to use and quicker to navigate. While carrying out this work we hope to explain the rationale behind the enhancements to get your feedback and valued input. Thank you for your help with this work.

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

 

What did you do on the web yesterday?

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:

  • Ordering a book as quickly and easily as possible
  • Posting on Facebook to share photos with friends
  • Getting a journal article to find the steps in an experiment
  • Reading a blog to be challenged, engaged and entertained by opinion
  • Looking for the latest chemistry news

 

What does that mean for me?

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!

 

How do I produce quality content?

Before you put together your article, blog, tweet, etc, consider the following:

  • Goal: What goal will the visitor to your content complete?
  • Audience: Is the content appropriate for your audience?
    (Think language, tone, and education level)
  • Type: What’s the best format: an image, video, webinar, article, FAQ, PDF or webpage? Could you reuse someone else’s content after checking with them? Could you ask a famous blogger to write it on your behalf? Could you ask visitors to create the content on our site?
  • Persuasion: Would the content you’re creating persuade you to complete the task?

     

How will visitors find my content?

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:

  • Push: Sending content out to customers who have to make a bit of effort to receive it.
    e.g. Email, direct mail and rss feeds
  • Pull: Persuading customers to use your content when they are actively seeking it.
    e.g. through search engines when content is in web pages, blogs, videos and pictures
  • Social (Twitter, FB, etc): This can also be used as a channel but you should think of the communication as a dialogue or conversation with a customer. Listen to what other people are saying before exposing them to your related content.

     

How do I get to page 1 on Google?

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:
 

  • Keywords:

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:
 

  1. Page Title
  2. URL
  3. Header


 

  • Links in:

    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.

     

  • History & Authority:

    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

 

What happens before and after my content is launched?

As the content writer you are also the content owner so it is down to you to make sure that it is high performing.

  • Measure:

    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.

  • Promote:

    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.

  • Review:
    Google now check to see how accurate and fresh content is so you should have an idea of the length of time your content stays on the web before it is updated or deleted.

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

Posted by James Stevens on Apr 4, 2012 11:34 AM Europe/London

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