CMS Tip: Organizing Content

Your site may have a lot of great information, but are people able to easily find it? This CMS Tip will give you some ideas on how to organize the structure of your site, the structure of your content, and increase browseability of your site. 

Below I will outline how to place your content in logical categories, an outline of heading tags, when to list items, and when to split up content.

Place Content in Logical Categories

The first step in optimizing your content for usability is to place it in a logical location.  More than likely you have a predetermined set of “top level”, or parent, categories on your site, which provide drop downs to “sub level”, or child, categories.  In some cases your content may even break off into lower subsections within those child categories, but for the purpose of this tip, I’m going to be focusing on the top level categories and their child pages.

Organizing your content, or pages, can be as simple as taking a moment to figure out which top level category an item best fits under. If you need to add a new page about the history of your company, it would obviously fall under a “company overview” or “about us” section. 

What about something not as obvious?  There are a lot of examples of where content doesn’t quite fit into a specific category.  This makes it tricky for you, the person organizing it, and for the viewer, who may need to find it.

If you find yourself wondering where some content should fall on your site, ask yourself first if the content even belongs on the site.  If content is out of the scope of the site's purpose, people most likely won’t be looking for it in the first place.  However, if it is vital to the site and falls under multiple categories... why not put it under all of them?

Our GearsCMS offers a feature called Symlinking.  This allows you to place the same page under multiple sections of your site.  That way you only have to maintain one instance of it.  An example would be if you have “Contact Us” as a top level item, but also place a symlink to it under “About Us.”  This way it appears in multiple places, and people can find it easily.  If you aren’t sure if symlinking is offered on your site, give us a call.

Once you have your content sorted into logical sections, you’ll want to organize the order it appears within those sections.  At IdeaBank Marketing, we often turn to the website’s analytics for this.  We track your site’s overal performance, and what pages are most visited.  By determining what people are looking for, we are able to order how they appear on the menu. We will place items people are looking for first, and items we want them to find close by. If your website was built by us, we will have access to a performance report.  If you are interested in receiving updates on your site’s analytics, sign up for a Google Analytics account, and contact your account representative.

Understanding Head Tags

In your site’s content editor, there is a drop menu of formatting options available.  If you haven’t used this before, it’s not too late to start.  Properly formatting content with head tags is a crucial step in readability, and searchability.

A large block of text is unnerving to the average reader. If you break that text up into bite sized bits, it becomes less daunting.  This is where head tags come in.

Head tags are offered in Heading 1-6, with the lower number being larger and more predominant. We generally reserve the Heading 1 as the page title, and this is usually what search engines look for when knowing what the page is about.  There should only ever be one Heading 1 element on a page.

Heading 2 is usually an encompassing of an idea, or a subhead to support the Heading 1.  A page can have more than one Heading 2 element, but we recommend only using it a second or third time to separate key ideas that don’t fall under the idea of the first Heading 2 element.

Heading 3 is used to break up supporting ideas of the Heading 2 statement.  Heading 3 can be used without a Heading 2 element.  This is a common practice to maintain visual consistency between pages.  A general rule of thumb is if all sections on your page go together and support the main concept of the page, just use Heading 3 to break them up.  Better yet, you can go back and add a Heading 2 as a subhead.

Heading 4 and beyond are generally used to further break up content within a section.  I also like to use Heading 4 when I need a title for a list.  A list isn’t necessarily a strong supporting component, but is great for pointing out key ideas.  Let’s talk more about lists.

List It!

An easy search engine optimization tactic is to properly list items. This is a fairly basic concept, so we won’t spend much time.  The two basic rules are:

1. If it is a list, list it!
2. If it isn’t a list, don’t list it! (Or expand it)

Simple right?  Unfortunately, this rule is often broken.  For the sake of clarity I will provide two examples.

Example 1: Use lists for a string of items 

Wrong:
Our farm offers fresh eggs, beets, corn, carrots, and onions.

Correct:
Our farm offers:

• Beets
• Carrots
• Corn
• Fresh Eggs
• Onions

Example 2: Don't use lists for one item

Wrong:
 Our deli offers:

• Fish

Correct:
Our deli offers a wide variety of fish, including:

• Halibut
• Orange Roughy
• Sword Fish
• Tilapia

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do 

One thing that makes for a very hard to navigate site is too much content.  Sometimes you need to decide when a page has lost its focus, and needs to be cut into sub pages.

Essentially, and for search engines especially, you only want one topic per page.  You want each page solely devoted to one topic, and you want to be the authority on that topic.  Unfortunately, if your page is so authoritative it starts looking like an encyclopedia you may lose the interest of readers.  Once again, only feed the viewer bites, but make them easy to find.

So how much content does a page need?  This is a big question, and really varies based on the reader.  The average that Google likes to see is 500 words.  Too little and the page isn’t an authority; too much and no one will read it. 

You can break pages up into subsections, or use horizontal rules coupled with anchor tags to visually separate elements.  Anchor tags are essentially links within a page.  To create one, simply select a part of the page you want to link to, and click the anchor button on your content editor.  You will then be asked to name it (E.g. categories).  Then you will create a link to that page and end it with “#categories”, or whatever you named your anchor tag.  You can also create an anchor at the top of a page to add a “Back to Top” button at the bottom of each section. 

Now the final step again is play.  Review the organization of your site, and see if it makes sense.  If you can’t figure it out, others might not either.  Remember to keep your content fresh, easy to understand and searchable!