The hottest trend these days in web design is Content Strategy. It has a certain buzz to it like how search engine optimization (SEO) was like in years past. But what role does it play in our web projects. I’ll try to uncover how Content Strategy combines SEO and copywriting techniques and why web designers should practice it.
What Exactly Is Content Strategy?
Whats so important about Content Strategy? Effectively, Content Strategy is the planning, management and delivery of a website’s content formats such as text, images, videos and anything else you put on a it. It is closely related to SEO and copywriting.
How SEO and Copywriting Play Into Content Strategy
SEO is the art of designing a structured page meaning clean HTML markup that can be easily interpreted by search engines but filled with content that is helpful to people. A single web page is not very useful but a combination of pages that relate to each other so people using search engines can find a site based on keywords provided within each page and topic to help generate topical authority for a site.
By planning ahead what topics will be on the site, what headlines will be written and the supporting text and images prepared it’ll make our lives as web designers much easier.
Copywriting relates to SEO because effective writing highlights the topic, the web pages intention and is able to attract search engines algorithms and peoples’ search terms. With our content strategy plan, we have the blue print to stay focused on these topics.
Implementing SEO and Copywriting Techniques
By planning and organizing your content first such as declaring your marketing message, business purpose or goals; you’ll create pieces of content that help support the website. Each section of text will support a topic and these category topics will support the main topical theme of your site or micro-site. Other supporting contents are images with proper tags, internal links to pages so information architecture and site navigation has a good flow and well written copy to attract people and search engines’ attention.
As web designers, we should know and understand a combination of skills so we can create better sites that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional as well as being able to educate our clients. We already know basics to SEO and how to effectively write copy content for websites. We can create and prepare graphic images and photos. Most likely you have a blog and write to it regularly on your website as well.
Incorporating these skills together and planning a client’s or your own content for the web is how content strategy becomes part of the design process. Its a control mechanism to ensure that no task is left behind so we can minimize delays on our web design projects.
Further Reading On Content Strategy
Discipline On Content Strategy – From A List Apart, this article describes the discipline of practicing Content Strategy and why as web designers we should incorporate it into our design process. There are several other great articles on this subject at A List Apart and I recommend you reading them.
Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data – From Boxes and Arrows offers how Content Strategy is not just about text but all data that pertains to a site. It is a great article to learn more about this topic.
Content Strategy For The Web Professional – From Lucid Plot gives a great summary for Content Strategy and how we should, as web professionals, practice this discipline and use them in our projects.
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