Content is King, even the little tiny things
The Art of Content Population
Too often I start populating a super lovely brilliantly designed website with brand new content that either a copywriter or a client spent long hours perfecting and it doesn't quite work.
Firstly things like meta descriptions are rarely included in the content, so ordinary populator will just resort to using some paragraph from the main content. Meta descriptions should always be handcrafted. You wouldn't put a random paragraph of a book on the back to tell the reader what he is about to purchase or read, would you?!
But even if the meta descriptions are magically included in the copy a lot if stuff is not.
Think URLs, page titles, link titles, alt and titles for images being some of the more important ones. So again the regular content populator just uses the anchor text i.e. the text you click on (often the anchor text is something dreadful like "click here") or some random word for these. But this stuff needs to be thought through. A lot of potential is wasted in these areas. These should all be things that are addressed as the other regular content as it is just as important, not just for SEO but for the general user experience and accessibility.
That's why we here at Base Creative run a check of the site after it has been populated, to make sure that all is being made best use of. We also take pride in doing the populating ourselves. Not only do I run our SEO projects, I also populate. So when I get this brilliant but unpolished content, I make sure it fits and all the missing links (literally) get found and added with utmost care.
The problem is, even if a site is populated perfectly, any new content added by the website owner needs to meet the same standard. So it is important to educate the client when 'handing over' the website. In our training sessions we always make sure that we get clients to understand the importance if having well rounded and thought out content.