How Content Strategy and Guidelines Helps in Creating Engaging Content

For a portal to become successful, it is important that the portal sets a certain standard for the content that will go on the website. This will help it maintain the quality on the daily basis by creating engaging content. To this end, media houses get their style guides prepared which talk about every aspect of the content that go on their portals. The style guide is then followed by all the writers/contributors of the portal. This helps the portal carve a distinct niche for itself, and form a definite image in the mind of the readers.

Benefit of having a standardized content guidelines

1. It makes it easy to convey to new and old writers about what kind of articles they have to write.
2. It builds and maintains quality.
3. By consistently providing articles written from a certain point of view, the guidelines will help audience build realistic expectation from the portal. Thus, meeting the standard will not be difficult, and nor will be keeping audience engaged.
4. New writers will find it easy to understand the tone of the portal.
5. Readership of the portal will not get affected if establish writers leave, as new ones can easily take their place.

What all should be there in the content guidelines?

1. Profile of an ideal reader.
2. The tone of articles
3. Mood an article should create.
4. Writers’ guidelines to bring consistency to the article published on the website.
   1. Guidelines for topic selection.
   2. Guidelines for research and source identification
   3. Guidelines for grammar consistency
   4. Guidelines of keyword usage
5. Image inclusion guidelines and sources from where we can take images for articles without dragging the website in any legal suit.

1. Style guide for all the articles that will deal with the following issues.
   1. Grammar
   2. Sentence structure
   3. Viability of idea
   4. How informative the article is.
   5. Originality
2. See if proper keyword has been used at right places

1. Check the structure of the articles.

1. Article formatting guidelines

1. Tag selection guidelines

1. HTML tag usage guidelines

1. Headlines and Title tag usage guidelines

1. SEO tag usage guidelines.

1. Keyword usage guidelines

1. Publishing guidelines

Along with that a portal should also have a content strategy which should include the following:

1. What kind of articles will go in which section and what will be the tone of voice.
2. What will be the length of each article? Lengths of the article should be varied to get SEO edge and to improve the engagement.
3. What time the article should be published? Timing of publication is very critical. There are studies that suggest that at certain time people in certain age-group are more active on the internet. If a perfect timing is matched, the readership will increase.
4. Which piece of content will go live on which day and in which section? This depends largely on who is being targeted. TA will be aligned with the timing and day of publication
5. Social bookmarking guidelines for maximum visibility.

Creating an engaging content is not very difficult once you have your content strategy and content guidelines in place. The style guide you will create will help you keep your readers engaged by providing them the content they need, in the manner they understand best.

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