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Category: Core Concepts

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What is it?

The practice of targeting content to users based on one or more of the following: who they are; where they are; when, why, and how they access the content; and what device they use to access it.

Why is it important?

Enables a user to engage with contextual and relevant content. Effective personalization delivers the right content to the right user at the right time.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Personalization targets content to content consumers based on one or more of the following criteria:

  • Who they are

  • Where they are (geographically)

  • What they are doing or attempting to do

  • How they are doing it (on which device or technology)

  • When they are doing it

Personalization enables cross-sell or upsell of products, pertinent recommendations, and the ability to serve up content that a content consumer would like to see. Personalization aims to provide relevant content experiences specific to someone’s needs and preferences.

There are various ways to achieve personalization; some more frequently used methods include:

  • Leveraging knowledge gleaned by examining behavior on a website or in a clickstream, which might include how consumers arrive at the site (for example, via organic search) and what they do while on the site. Depending on the clickstream, specific content can be served up to a specific person. For example, a search for “kitty toy” could mean that various types of content relating to cats and cat toys follow a user around while he or she browses a website.

  • Using what is known about content consumers, such as information found in their profile, to customize their experience. For example, by marrying profile data with content, you can give customers calling your support center specific, relevant content about the products they have purchased, in their preferred language.

  • Harnessing the power of location-awareness. For example, if the content consumer is in Los Angeles, you can offer specific deals based on that geographical location.

About Kevin P. Nichols

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What is it?

The process of using best practices to design and create content that will rank well in organic search engine results.

Why is it important?

To get your content to rank as high as possible in organic, non-paid search engine listings to drive the maximum number of people to the content on your website.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique designed to drive customers to the content on your website. In 2013, almost 80% of unique searches used Google, which still sets the standard for SEO guidelines. Google uses multiple algorithms, which sometimes change daily. Google’s algorithms continue to become more comprehensive in fighting search spam (aka spamdexing) and ensuring high-quality content results in organic rankings. SEO best practices include the following:

  • Designing sites that support engaging and fresh content.

  • Developing sites that load quickly and use proper URL structures, unique page titles, header tags, and crawlable text.

  • Using an adaptive, responsive, or combined—Responsive Design with Server Side (RESS) components—approach when creating a website that will exist on multiple platforms. This will help ensure that search engines do not dilute your content authority or interpret the content as being duplicated, even though it is being published on more than one platform.

  • Establishing authority on the topic. This is not limited to inbound links, but also depends on the overall influence of the site, including reputation, trust, and quality.

  • Using keywords in domain names, page titles, H tags, images, and file names. Search engines no longer pay much attention to the keyword metatag. Avoid stuffing keywords, as this will have a negative effect.

Some other aspects of SEO that content strategists should consider are:

  • Mobile: Use location metatags for mobile sites and mobile-ready content.

  • Videos: Use a strong keyword for the file name, and include a text caption and text transcript.

  • Social media: Use social media. Search engines scan and list what’s happening in your social media channels. The more traffic you get, the more that search engines see you as a trusted resource, which will favorably impact the rankings of your primary site.

About Lisa L. Trager

Photo of Lisa L. Trager

For more than 15 years, Lisa L. Trager has worked in leadership roles developing content strategy and user experience design principles on both the agency and client sides. Her expertise in the health care, financial, and government sectors has resulted in developing digital projects that balance the needs of users with business objectives.

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Email: mailto:lisa@tragerstrategy.com

Website: tragerstrategy.com

Twitter: @Lisalt

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lisatrager

Facebook: facebook.com/lisalehman.trager

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What is it?

Attributes of content you can use to structure, semantically define, and target content.

Why is it important?

Extends the capabilities of content, making it more powerful and effecting efficient operation in a data-driven world.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Metadata can take many forms. In the simplest terms, metadata describes attributes or constraints of a content field. Metadata provides additional context or information that tells software how to handle content. Metadata should be used in conjunction with business rules to deploy and design content appropriately.

For example, a headline field might allow 64 characters, and a short headline field might allow 32. Defining those constraints in metadata can help editors and designers craft the right kind of content and use the right containers to ensure suitability for the channels that display the content.

Content may relate to one or more subjects, and you can use metadata to show those relationships. For instance, a fan magazine could use metadata to identify pop stars named in a given piece of content. If their website has a business rule calling for all video content related to this year’s biggest pop star to be featured on the home page, the metadata can be used to find content that fits that requirement.

Metadata describes the content itself, but not how that content should be displayed. Imagine the confusion if your metadata included the option to tag a video as “featured.” What happens when you tag more than one video in that way? What happens if you forget which one you tagged before? Much better for your metadata to include dates, times, subjects, content types, and constraints—and for you to build display and presentation rules that use that metadata.

A metadata standard like Dublin Core may simplify your work and make your content more extensible. However, many people create their own metadata, customized for internal use.

Metadata is sometimes revealed to users (in faceted search, for instance), but most often, it’s the behind-the-scenes workhorse that makes your life easier.

About Laura Creekmore

Photo of Laura Creekmore

Laura Creekmore is an experienced content strategist, project manager, information architect, editor, and writer. She is skilled in bridging the divide between business needs and technical realities and helping clients with content strategy and management, search application optimization, taxonomy and information architecture, and online communities, primarily in the health care field.

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Email: mailto:laura@creekcontent.com

Website: creekcontent.com

Twitter: @lauracreekmore

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauracreekmore

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What is it?

The quality of being able to be discovered and retrieved through searching or browsing.

Why is it important?

Content must be found to be consumed. Therefore, findability is critical in a world with a growing demand for fast, contextual retrieval of information.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

“The reason people hire content strategists is that people can’t find anything,” says content strategy expert, Rahel Anne Bailie.

Your organization can have the best content: simple, understandable technical documentation; elegant, cleverly crafted marketing prose; or viral-worthy videos. But if search engines cannot understand your content or consumers can’t find it, then no one will ever get to read that information or watch that video. Content is only as good as the consumer’s ability to find it quickly and easily. If they can’t find your content, they’ll look elsewhere.

Readers find information with a combination of two intentional methods: navigation and search. However, they also encounter information.

Navigation means using the available options and contextual clues to locate content. Buttons, tabs, tables of contents, menus, links, and indexes are common navigation options online. In print, readers navigate with the help of tables of content, indices, and page numbers.

Search is the act of looking for specific content by entering a query in a search engine or application. Users form queries with keywords or search terms, and the search engine displays the query results based on its index and understanding of the request.

Increasing the findability of content means ensuring that content has appropriate metadata and structure so that search engines and consumers can locate and retrieve relevant content as needed—as well as making it more likely consumers will encounter the information they need. Well-designed navigation and content designed for search help serve up the content consumers want, when they want it.

About Cheryl Landes

Photo of Cheryl Landes

Cheryl Landes founded Tabby Cat Communications in Seattle in 1995. She has 22 years of experience as a technical communicator in computer software, HVAC/energy savings, marine transportation, manufacturing, and retail. She specializes as a findability strategist, helping businesses organize content to flow logically and make content easier to retrieve.

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Email: mailto:clandes407@aol.com

Website: tabbycatco.com

Twitter: @landesc

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/clandes

Facebook: facebook.com/cheryl.landes.58

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What is it?

A systematic process to ensure that content meets specified requirements before publishing.

Why is it important?

To measure the quality of the content creation process and ensure that content deliverables are completed with an acceptable level of quality.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Content quality assurance is a key component of content quality management. Quality assurance focuses on the processes you use to develop content, ensuring that your content creation processes produce quality deliverables. Content quality assurance comprises:

  • Content creation processes: For example, authoring and page building processes.

  • Quality standards and stakeholder expectations: For example, tone and voice compliance, style guide compliance, link standards, and content accuracy.

  • Quality assurance activities that monitor content creation: For example, quality audits, reviews against authoring guidelines, peer reviews, subject matter expert reviews, page load time tests, link tests, and usability tests.

  • Quality assurance scheduling: For example, schedules for how often and when quality assurance activities will be performed.

Quality targets depend on the project, and you need to identify targets for each content deliverable. You can create a content quality scorecard, which could indicate fail/pass or a way to rank the issues. This will help you prioritize and identify improvement opportunities.

About Laurence Dansokho

Photo of Laurence Dansokho

Laurence Dansokho is Tools and Process Manager at eBay, responsible for global content process optimization and quality control. She graduated in journalism at the University of Leipzig, has quality management experience, including a Six Sigma Yellow Belt and certification in ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management, and is also a certified Usability Practitioner.

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Email: mailto:fazut@web.de

Website:

Twitter: @LaurenceFD

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pub/laurence-dansokho/8/344/a22

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What is it?

The process of refining language to improve its readability, accuracy, clarity, consistency, translatability, findability, extensibility, linguistic correctness, and tone and voice.

Why is it important?

Ultimately, optimized content benefits content consumers; good quality content allows readers to focus on the message without editorial distractions.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Successful content optimization means understanding your audiences and designing your language rules around the capabilities, needs, and desires that will make content consumption most effective. Content optimization involves more than just tone and voice.

Consider these aspects of content:

  • Reading grade level: Ensure that the vocabulary and sentence construction match the reading grade level of the audience.

  • Grammar: Strike a balance between grammatical perfection and engaging content. The audience may not care whether a term is “fewer” rather than “less.” They may care about confusing text full of dangling participles and split verbs. Optimization makes language livelier, more interesting, and more appropriate to the audience.

  • Non-native readers: The text may be written in English, but your audience often includes readers who aren’t native speakers. Optimize the content for them, too, by using short words, short sentences, and simple sentence construction.

  • Translatability: Audiences include both human translators and machine translation systems. Clear, unambiguous language eases translation and improves overall quality—and that’s good for everyone.

  • Consistency: Creativity can go too far. Practices such as using multiple terms to refer to the same object run the risk of confusing the audience.

  • Findability: Content is a waste if you can’t find it. Know the search terms that are most appropriate for your content and ensure that those terms are placed prominently within your content.

You can optimize content manually during or after the content creation process. However, for larger bodies of content, you may want to consider an automated process for some optimization tasks.

About PG Bartlett

Photo of PG Bartlett

As Senior Vice President of Product Management for Acrolinx, PG Bartlett has been helping companies use technology to improve how they communicate for almost twenty years. Formerly Head of Product Strategy and Product Management at Arbortext, PG joined Acrolinx in 2012 because he wanted to be part of a group that loves helping their customers create high-quality language.

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Email: mailto:pg.bartlett@acrolinx.com

Website: acrolinx.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pgbartlett/

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What is it?

The extent to which content is available, understandable, and usable by all, regardless of disabilities or impairments such as sensory, physical, cognitive, intellectual, or situational.

Why is it important?

Accessibility is a W3C Web standard and, in many countries, is the law. Accessible content is easier to use and maintain, more search-engine friendly, and increases usability and understanding.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

One of the main tenets of technical communication is to know your audience, but this has not always been valued on web projects. When developers only tested sites in Internet Explorer on large monitors at small resolutions, their audiences suffered a less-than-stellar experience when using another browser, a mobile device, or larger fonts.

While you may want to create content that is available, understandable, and usable, the chances are good that you’re ignoring as much as 20% of your audience.

How can you make content more available to people with disabilities? Accessibility happens during design, development, and delivery. Many content strategy best practices already address accessibility:

  • Use headings (with tags or styles, not manual formatting)

  • Use short sentences (fewer than 25 words) and short paragraphs (no more than three sentences)

  • Write in second person, active voice, and present tense

  • Use the best word, not the longest

Take these additional steps to create accessible formatting and markup:

  • Left-justify text for left-to-right languages and right-justify for right-to-left languages

  • Use the correct color contrast (3:1 for large text and 4.5:1 for other text and images)

  • Use relative font sizes

  • Restrict the number of font families to three

  • Size all images consistently

  • Make sure that online deliverables have full keyboard functionality

  • Add the alt attribute to images (unless they’re only decorative)

  • Add captions and transcripts to videos

  • Define the :focus pseudo-class in the cascading style sheet (CSS)

Creating accessible content starts with the initial design and continues through the development process. If you wait until the project is finished, it costs more. Roughly speaking, making a change during development costs $25 USD; during QA, $500 USD; after release, $15,000 USD.

About Char James-Tanny

Photo of Char James-Tanny

Char James-Tanny speaks around the world on topics including help authoring concepts, accessibility, social media, web standards, collaboration, and technology. She is the primary coordinator for the annual Boston Accessibility Conference, a member of the Boston Accessibility Group, and an Invited Expert for the W3C HTML Working Group (AAPI Task Force).

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Email: mailto:char@jtfassociates.com

Website: jtfassociates.com

Twitter: @CharJTF

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charjtf/

Facebook: facebook.com/CharJTF

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What is it?

A design or definition (expressed in a modeling language) considered by an authority as an approved model. Standards include structural and semantic models, processes, and presentation semantics models.

Why is it important?

Provides a normative language that facilitates exchange between systems, process automation, and process integration. Enables search, retrieval, sorting, content management, workflow, and publishing.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

The goal of a content standard is to facilitate the implementation of a content strategy and the creation and publication of content. Through the course of the content lifecycle, multiple humans and systems may need to access and affect content. A content standard facilitates this by providing a common technical language so that content elements, metadata, and processes are consistent and predictable. When content is standards-based, interoperability between content, humans, and systems is possible.

Processes help implement a content strategy and the phases of the content lifecycle. These processes may be manual or automated. Standards-based content is predictable to both humans and machines, which supports functionality such as searching, retrieval, sorting, filtering, indexing, tracking, and reporting. These functions are then available to processes and to systems such as content management, workflow, and publishing.

Standards also help facilitate a content strategy through validation, transformation, and adaptation. Standards-based content can be tested against the defined model to ensure that the content conforms to the rules established to support the content strategy. Content in one standard can be more readily transformed or converted to another standard. This is necessary for publishing and also allows content to be future proofed and adaptive. Content that is format free, device independent, and scalable is future proof and can adapt to new strategies, global strategies, standards, and display devices that haven’t been designed yet.

When a standard is adopted, it allows humans and machines to play well with each other in the content sandbox.

About Mark Lewis

Photo of Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis is the author of DITA Metrics 101 and is a contributing author of DITA 101: Fundamentals of the Darwin Information Architecture for Authors and Managers, second edition. He manages the DITA Metrics LinkedIn group and is a presenter at content industry events. Mark is a Content Engineer and DITA Educator for Quark.

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Email: mailto:mlewis@ditametrics.com

Website: ditametrics.com

Twitter: @LewisDITAMetric

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marklewisflorida/

Facebook:

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What is it?

The process that defines the series of changes in the life of any piece of content, including reproduction, from creation onward.

Why is it important?

Content creates meaning; the content lifecycle creates a repeatable process that defines how meaningful communication will be managed.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

The content lifecycle includes five general stages:

  • Strategic analysis

  • Content collection

  • Content management

  • Publication and post-publication maintenance

  • Preservation or re-purposing of content and a loop back to analysis for the next cycle

Content is a business asset that should be managed as carefully as any product or differentiating intellectual property. An organization’s ability to have efficient and effective management of its content through the entire lifecycle can mean the difference between success and failure.

The stages within the content lifecycle can have sub-stages that depend on the origins, purposes, and governance models of the content. These may include sub-stages that support specific channels such as web content, print, or email or specific formats of content such as spoken word, video, text, or images.

It is less important what the stages are called and more important that the practitioner have a unified process for managing the entirety of the lifecycle. As Ann Rockley wrote in her seminal work, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, to counter content silos, the practitioner should create “a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customer’s needs.”

About Robert Rose

Photo of Robert Rose

Robert Rose helps marketers become stellar storytellers. He is the Chief Strategist for the Content Marketing Institute, and Senior Contributing Analyst for Digital Clarity Group. Robert is the author of the industry-leading book Managing Content Marketing, which spent two weeks as a top 10 marketing book on Amazon.com.

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Email: mailto:robert@bigbluemoose.net

Website: robert-rose.com

Twitter: @Robert_Rose

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robrose

Facebook: Facebook.com/TheRobertRose

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What is it?

The analysis and planning to develop a repeatable system that governs the management of content throughout the entire content lifecycle.

Why is it important?

Provides context, so that the organization’s vision can be implemented in an integrated way, to meet business goals and project objectives.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Strategy is defined as “alternatives chosen to make happen a desired future, such as achievement of a goal or solution to a problem.” A content strategy, then, is the analysis phase of a business problem that determines how content can be improved, either on the editorial or technical sides, to contribute to corporate success.

To understand what content strategy is, we need to eliminate what it is not. A content strategy does not include activities that lead to project deliverables, such as an audit—those are tactical-level aspects of implementation. The strategy is the phase that comes before any of these activities, and it determines what activities are needed to achieve success.

Content strategy is the practice of helping organizations improve their content performance, primarily through the analysis of existing content problems and development of plans for improvement. A content strategy will assess an organization’s current state, understand the ideal future state, recognize where the gaps are, and develop an implementation roadmap.

The roadmap defines a content lifecycle specific to an organization’s needs, so that the content can meet business goals. Even when a project or contract addresses only a portion of the overall need, the strategy should be designed to allow future projects to become part of a unified strategy.

About Rahel Anne Bailie

Photo of Rahel Anne Bailie

Rahel Anne Bailie is an integrator of content strategy, requirements analysis, information architecture, and content management to increase ROI of product lifecycle content. She is also a supporter of content structure and standards. She is founder of Intentional Design, Fellow of STC, co-author of Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits, and co-producer of Content Strategy Workshops.

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Email: mailto:rabailie@intentionaldesign.ca

Website: intentionaldesign.ca

Twitter: @rahelab

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rahelannebailie

Facebook: facebook.com/pages/Intentional-Design/208164155867779