The “What is Content?” panel sought to provide information on creating content to help boost search engine visibility, in addition to enhancing the user experience. Despite being the first session on the last day of the conference, it was well attended by an enthusiastic audience.
Kent Lewis of Anvil Media kicked off the panel by presenting a case study of content creation for Melanoma.com. The primary objective of this website is to provide education on the medical condition of melanoma, with a secondary focus on providing information on treatment. Kent detailed how he undertook the following steps in creating the content:
Identify most common questions by interviewing patients
Organize the content into primary information categories with further organization within each category
Optimize the content and site for search engines, including creation of a good internal linking structure and developing custom meta tags
Kent also shared some of the challenges he faced in creating this content, such as the need to get approval from his client’s legal department and the Food & Drug Administration. He discussed the role of the sitemap in search engine optimization, as well as advised the audience to create custom 404 pages.
In addition, Kent stated that keyword research is important and the content needs to be created in such a way that it does not negatively influence the user experience. His takeaway for the audience was that “you can achieve Number 1 [position] without an optimized site if the content is good.”