Getting Creative with Content for Universal Search - Take Stock of What You Have
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Like a general preparing for battle, the first thing you need to do is take stock. What do you have on your web site in the way of content? What format(s) is it in? Are you mainly focused on text? Or do you have quality images as well? Perhaps you have audio and/or video content with possibilities?
Be prepared to look at your content with new eyes. Perhaps you have images of all your products on your site with descriptions under them, and you can’t imagine them out of that context. Or maybe you publish articles and all of your images are used to highlight those stories. That’s not the only way to look at an image however.
Let me give you an example, with a nod to Lee Odden for presenting it in one of his articles. You don’t necessarily think of a jewelry store as a place to shop for holiday ornaments, but online jewelry retailer Adler’s offers a nice selection. To meet the holiday shopping season head-on, they optimized the web pages that displayed ornaments with keywords. They also put images of their ornaments on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites, with links back to their product pages. You can still find the ornaments on Flickr; here’s a screen shot showing the results of a search:
And what was the result of this unconventional approach? According to Odden, “By not relying solely on search engines to send traffic, Adler’s realized more than an additional 750 unique visitors via image search within the first few weeks of implementation.”
I’ll talk more about branching out from the search engines later. But the point of this example is to get you thinking about the kind of content you have, apart from its current context. Don’t be afraid to brainstorm a little; in fact, you’d better be prepared to do just that, because you may want (and need) to make new content in different formats to deal with the search engines’ changing approach.
Next: Optimize What You Have >>
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