Commentary

Peter Hagopian
 

Consistently Delivering High-Value Content

We're all painfully aware that making high-quality, relevant content easy to find on your site can be a challenge. Ultimately, consistently delivering high-value content takes a mix of high- and low-tech approaches.

We're all painfully aware that making high-quality, relevant content easy to find on your site can be a challenge. Ultimately, consistently delivering high-value content takes a mix of high- and low-tech approaches.The high-tech part is making sure that the enterprise search tools you provide are configured correctly and that the underlying content is being tagged and indexed properly. The low-tech part? Archiving or even deleting low-value, low-quality, and out-of-date content.

Gerry McGovern does a nice job of covering this topic in his New Thinking column this week titled "Low value content is destroying your Web site." His main point boils down to the following:


More Business Intelligence Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

"Poor quality, low grade, minor-interest content is choking the usefulness of the search engine....One reason intranets have become such dumping grounds is because a great many organizations have no clear strategy in relation to how they manage their content/data. Because there is no other place to put 'stuff', many people simply store it on the intranet, which of course bulges and bulges and bulges."

McGovern goes on to quote a few interesting statistics from Andrew Leung, a computer science researcher at the University of California:

• More than 90% of the files (in typical content management systems) were never accessed. • Of those files accessed, 65% were only opened once. • Most of the rest were opened five or fewer times. • About a dozen files were opened 100,000 times or more.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the issue:

First, make sure you understand what people are looking for, And what they are looking at. You can do this by looking at the search logs for your site as well as analyzing what pages and content are accessed most often. There are literally dozens of third-party tools that can help with this and chances are your content management system has some basic analysis features built in.

Second, work with content teams to take every opportunity to clear out old and and irrelevant content. You probably don't need the the 2003 corporate time off calendar on your site anymore, and you definitely don't want it coming up when people search for "time off calendar."

Third, make sure that the content teams are properly tagging relevant content, and making popular content easy to find.

Enterprise search walks a fine line between finding too much and finding too little. But understanding what people are looking for and clearing out the junk that they're not makes this process a lot easier.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links