New website & content strategy for a photography magazine

This work on building an SEO-friendly website for a photography blog was completed in 2014 but Iforgot to add it to the portfolio. Better late than never!

Defining meaningful and SEO-friendly categories and tags:

• Keyword research to evaluate the online demand and how to discover content gaps and new untapped opportunities for the blog.
• Topics with large demand and competition will become categories. They are redefining the site structure, only inasmuch as they suit the site's focus. This is the long-term investment.
• Topics with lower demand but even lower competition (easier to win) make up a list of tags and keywords to use in headings and sub-headings on the blog posts. This is the short- to medium-term investment.
• Additional list of broader and specific keywords to use in alt text and captions.

A suitable content management system

Requirements:

• A user-friendly system, not too flexible but enough for the user to add embed codes and make changes site-wide easily
• Low-budget
• Easy to maintain (client asked for integrated hosting and CMS)
• Suited to photography
• Large imagery
• Fast delivery on all platforms
• Multiple options for displaying captions and alt text customisation
• Multi-language platform: English, French & Chinese.
• Choice: Squarespace. A bit of a learning curve but offered the flexibility and ease-of-use wanted by the user. Each content block is SEO-friendly and defined by a content type (content block, photo block, video block, etc) and not in a WYSIWYG editor which confuses all content types into one big blurb, which isn't very future-proof.
• Squarespace also provides a developer platform which allowed for the necessary theme customisation to make it unique and build a multilingual website.

Layout and content types

• Defining content types best suited for the website: interviews and reviews mostly, but also specific content pages.
• Review and improvement of site structure to cater for the different content types, with use of photo galleries stored on the CMS to be uploaded into the content.
• Designing the right page layout for all content types.

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