I love content, but nothing gets me pumped more than cutting it. Crop. Delete. Remove. Archive. Why? Because the road to clear communication often leads to less content, not more. The purpose of content is to communicate. For higher ed web professionals, it's easy to lose sight of this. Many people are responsible for constantly creating content — new blog posts, twitter updates, event descriptions, landing pages, "related links." But … [Read more...]
SEO Copywriting for Content Contributors
Search engines such as Google are one of the primary ways people find our websites and the content they seek. As such, it's very important to be mindful of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices so that we enable search engines — and the people using them — to find and discover our web content. People often consider SEO to be a content editing task — something you hand-off to a specialist. The reality is that SEO is an important part of … [Read more...]
Back to Basics
Picture this: fresh haircut, new outfit, big date... and you’ve got spinach caught between your teeth. Kind of ruins the mood, doesn’t it? That’s what it’s like when a typo or other grammatical miscue ruins otherwise well-planned and well-executed content. Davina Y. Gould, director of publications and online communications at Stetson University College of Law, reminds us of some common errors—and the value of a sharp editor. What other … [Read more...]
Elements of Editorial Style for the Web
Last week, while sitting at Starbucks, I overheard a guy tell his friend, "Making websites is so easy these days. You just buy a template and move text around." I joked with Georgy about asking the guy to do a Meet Content guest post on "Cut-and-Paste Content Strategy." Although most people don't describe the process as being that easy, many do have an oversimplified understanding of what is involved in creating effective … [Read more...]
On-Brand SEO Keywords for Meaningful Search
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential component of content strategy. If audiences can't easily find or discover your content through search, its value and usefulness is diminished. We need to understand the words our audiences associate with our content so that we can cater to their search habits with relevant keywords. This is a fundamental task for SEO. However, people often confuse valuable SEO keywords with the right SEO … [Read more...]