Content strategy means jotting down everything about what your copy is, can or will be – before you start creating it. A well documented content strategy works like a shiny but very useful add on to your project reports/ propositions that your clients eagerly await every month.

Having said that, content strategy is more about sharpening your craft as a wirter than adding some bling to a client proposition. With a content strategy in mind, it is hard for anyone to lead astray into irrelevance while creating content for various web pages.

The key elements of any content strategy are:

• Objective
• Design
• Measurement
• Time-lines, creation
• Optimization, proof-reading and
• Presentation

Also, creating a content strategy involves answering three relevant questions:

• Why to write?
• What to write? &
• Who to write it for?

When strategizing content creation for any website, particularly, eCommerce stores, keep the following in mind:

Usability
You write content to enhance the usability of the website. This includes directions, instructions, guidelines and even 404 error pages. Remember those buttons saying ‘Click here to read more’ or a ‘quick four step guide’. Explain how to place your order, or what can a user do if not buy immediately. These will enhance the usability of your website manifold.

Communication
Each word on your website represents you (the brand). Unless you are operating in a monopoly, you very much need to devise a message that your content should carry. Bringing forward the values that you as a business adhere to or offer, is and can be communicated through content.

Search Engines
Your content can make your website search-engine friendly. All the web pages that rank top for certain keywords should be optimized for that keyword. Placing the keywords repeatedly in your content, makes your web pages optimized for search engines which further lends visibility to your website.

Content refers to everything that conveys meaning. Build your content strategy with usability, communication and search engines as key elements and see your website where you want it to be – ranking top, right?

Bing is a greatly packaged replacement for the Live Search! It has a fancy and (indeed) a searcher friendly interface. The Bing team says that it lets you overcome information overload and helps you make decision faster and easier. Bing’s new features help the searcher save time and make an informed decision.

Microsoft recently published a PDF about Search Engine Optimization called Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. The PDF primarily describes the user interface changes launched with Bing, and how those might impact site owners, but also touches on search engine optimization. Numerous researches carried out on how searchers read and use the search engine result pages have demonstrated a constant pattern.

The pattern has been defined as the “Golden Triangle pattern”. The Golden triangle pattern suggest that in a SERP containing a single threaded results for a query, the searchers generally scan the length of the first result and then they scan lesser amount of information for the second result and follow this ever decreasing pattern for seeking information until they mostly stop at the result # 5.

Studies also suggest that over 50% the searchers refine their search query by going back to the SERP, from a non-helpful SE result. In most cases they opt abandoning the result altogether!
The Bing interface design comes to the rescue! With categorized result pages and organized explore pane – quick tabs, related searches, search history contents of the explore pane, make it highly dynamic.

Result Type Improvements - Bing brings to you the standard “blue ink” exposing deep links within a website. When possible Bing also represents related information about the result such as, with books or movies, user ratings and links to reviews directly in the caption.

Best Match – top ranking result for any query is listed under the best match result.  A searcher can easily find related information in forms of deep links without having to go to the website and look for the information that he requires.

Instant Answers – These now offer more comprehensive information and richer results than the traditional result.

Caption improvements in Bing:

Document Preview – Document preview allows searchers to instantly preview the content from the deep link without having to go to the website.  All the searchers need to do is move the mouse pointer over the caption and they can preview a sample of the actual content on the page of the website instantly and make an informed decision about visiting the website or otherwise.

They say this helps increase qualified traffic, but some webmasters might  not want to expose the content present on the page and would like to have the visitors visit their site and get all the information that they are looking for. For them, Microsoft provides a way to opt-out of the feature.

Just add the following to the <head> section of each page:
<meta name=“msnbot”, content=“nopreview”>

Or generically for all robots:

<meta name=“robots”, content=“nopreview”>

If you don’t want this feature used on any page of the site, it might be easier to return the directive in the server HTTP header as follows:
x-robots-tag: nopreview

Flash Extraction – Microsoft says that Flash-based sites are responsible for 21% of all empty descriptions in their index. They say that Bing has implemented new technologies that can perform “limited data extraction” and has now been able to generate descriptions for one-third of those formerly empty tagged, flash based websites. Skip Flash introduction link in result feature on applicable flash based websites help the searcher get right to the content of the website.

Local Listings – It is the new Bing feature for local business searches.

With all these features that Bing offers its searchers, they say that a well done SEO expands opportunities with Bing!!

Download Bing–New Features For Webmasters.pdf and read more if you wanna Bing!