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Multiplatform Publishing Strategy

Notes & Quotes from Mequoda Summit Boston 2009: Titling, Targeting and Tagging Online Content

Content marketing tips for online editors on tagging, targeting and titling online content

“Each information product in your brand portfolio can be used to supply content and drive traffic to your Internet hub. In return, your hub and its companion email newsletters can drive transactions for all of your information products. This concept makes your Internet

Content marketing tips for online editors on tagging, targeting and titling online content

“Each information product in your brand portfolio can be used to supply content and drive traffic to your Internet hub. In return, your hub and its companion email newsletters can drive transactions for all of your information products. This concept makes your Internet hub the marketing nexus of your brand portfolio,” said Don Nicholas, opening the session Titling, Targeting and Tagging Online Content.

What Nicholas noted, was that most editors don’t think that optimizing content is part of their job. What editors are learning quickly (or should be) is that tagging and search engine optimizing titles and content should be the number one priority as an online editor.

To help out with this, we came up with a checklist that all publishers can follow:

  • Every title must include at least one primary keyword phrase or secondary keyword phrase
  • Every description must include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase
  • Every subhead must include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase
  • Primary and secondary keyword phrases for all of the above should most often be chosen from a single keyword cluster
  • Assign posts to one category only for internal linking control
  • Every post must contain a text include
  • Assign all applicable primary and secondary keyword phrases as tags
  • Assign an author to every post

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Why should you care about titling, targeting and tagging your online content?

Because search engines should account for a large majority of your website traffic. If it’s not, then you’re only targeting your existing audience and completely missing the opportunity to attract a new audience.

During the Summit, we’ve found talked to publishers who’s traffic from search only accounted for 10% of their traffic. In comparison, our website gets 60% of our traffic from search.

So even if you already have a large online audience, consider how much larger it would be if your articles were getting found more frequently in search engines. Nicholas noted that magazines have years of back-content, that if properly optimized, can create an arsenal of new inbound links from search engines.

As for the debate on whether old content can be evergreen? “If they haven’t seen it before, it’s new to them”, says Nicholas.

By Amanda MacArthur

Research Director & Managing Editor

Amanda is responsible for all the articles you read on the Mequoda Daily portal and every email newsletter delivered to your inbox from us. She is also our in-house social media expert and would love to chat with you over on @Mequoda. She has worked with Mequoda for almost a decade, helping to evolve the Mequoda Method through research, testing and developing new best practices in digital publishing, editorial strategy, email marketing and audience development. Amanda is a co-author of our four digital publishing handbooks.

Co-authored handbooks:

Contact Amanda:

Contact Amanda via email at amanda (at) mequoda (dot) com, @amaaanda, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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