BRINGING SEO IN TO CONTENT CREATION PRACTICE
The WordTracer is a tool that
counts the keywords within an
article against an identified set
– keyword density and
relevance being essential for
content rich web pages to rank
higher on search result pages.
The task of Search Engine Optimization of content is peculiar to
the web where the search engine is the index for content. SEO
simply means making content “discoverable.” At the time, SEO
involved playing to the algorithmic nature of how search engines
judged relevance of a content piece by count of relevant words.
On one hand, the business impact of SEO for an online content
provider was high while the task overhead for a print editorial
team was also high due to the tedious nature of the task. This
called for an easy to use SEO tool to ease editorial woes.
Our client IDG, an IT focused publishing company with magazines like
Computer World, PC World and CIO was making its move at the time from print to digital. As part of a larger engagement to redesign
websites for all the magazines we looked to improve the success of the site engagement and discoverability online. Though
infrastructure for web presence was in place, the core editorial team was print focused and had to quickly learn to optimize their
articles for the web. They were already undergoing a change in
content cycles from once a month to daily content refreshes, so we
understood that the tool would have to be superbly simple to fit
into their already packed schedules.
We created a standalone tool that allowed editors to enter a list of
keywords that were identified or sourced for the topics being
written. Invariably these keywords reflected the most searched
terms for that topic and were updated in the tool. The writers in
the team would then fire up the tool and copy in their article’s
headline, body text and article tags. The tool would compare the
closest match on keywords and show the writer how many times
the keyword appeared in the article, and also the other related
keywords he could consider. The writer could make the change in
the article and send it through for approval from the editor. This
way the tool stood outside the content creation process while
adding SEO intelligence for maximum effect.
We set out to find a way to make a task less strenuous and
wound up with a tool that simply automated the CTRL+F
(find) and highlight function on the browser – a great lesson
in looking for simple solutions.