In this section, we are going to make a set of recommendations to optimize blogs or sites with news about the Companies or delegations.
| Design Recommendations
The corporate blog or site with news must incorporate the ULMA Company logo on the upper left corner of all blog pages. It is necessary to remember that when the user clicks on the logo, they should be redirected to the blog homepage.
It is recommended to incorporate the blog into the website of the Company or delegation, and that it is accessible by clicking a button on the homepage. In the example in the figure, you can see the ULMA Packaging news below the option on the Main Menu called “Company”. It is recommended to make them accessible from the homepage, in order to not overload the menu at the first level. In this case, it must be stated that the latest news is visible from the homepage.
If, for any reason, the blog is located outside the domain of the Company or the delegation, it is helpful to link to it from the official homepage of the Company or delegation. It is also recommended to make the web address friendly and easy to remember, for example:
| www.ulma.es/blog, www.ulma.es/noticias
| blog.ulma.es, noticias.ulma.es
It is also recommended that the blog or news site provides the possibility of subscribing to their content through RSS. Today, the majority of blogging platforms and content managers offer this option by default.
| Publishing Cycle
It is very important to maintain a constant publishing cycle. It is recommended to publish one article per week, and to choose and respect a specific time each week to publish the articles.
| Content to publish
The articles must follow an editorial line established by each Company or delegation, in accordance with the strategy that has been decided. It is very important, both for the readers and for the search engines, that the articles are coherent with regard to the topics they talk about. It is recommended to establish ahead of time (monthly, for example) a content plan to publish and who is going to be the person responsible for writing each article.
| Recommendations about how to write articles
The most critical part when publishing an article is deciding a good title. To the greatest degree possible, we recommend using titles that coincide with searches made by users on search engines. A good tool for selecting good titles is Google Suggest, which are suggestions made by Google. These are suggestions shown by Google when we insert terms in the search engine that come from the searches performed.
The title is fundamental because it is what the user who has performed a search is going to see in the search results. In this way, a good title is going to help us attract readers.
Both in the title, and in the article content, it is recommended to use appropriate keywords, that may contribute to attracting traffic to the blog. We recommend these two tools for choosing keywords that may attract traffic to our blog (or to our websites in general):
| Google Trends
| Tools for keywords from Google Adwords
The first of the tools, Google Trends, allows us to compare the relative evolution over time of searches for different terms that may be interesting to us. As an example, in the image, you can see a a comparison between the terms “packaging for foods” and “food packaging“:
The second tool that we recommend, Google Adwords, is complimentary to the Google Trends and provides us with specific data about the search terms that we are investigating. Following this example, this tool tells us how many times a term has been searched for over the course of a month, both at the global level and locally as well (in relation to the country we have selected). In addition, it provides us with keywords that may be of interest to the Company:
With the knowledge gained from these tools, we can optimize the content that we are writing. It is also very important to write the main message in the first paragraph of the article. It is helpful for retaining readers who have reached the article and to position it best to be seen on search engines. It is not recommended, when writing on the Internet, to leave the most important conclusions of the writing for the end, because it loses visibility. It is also recommended to use titles from the second and third level within the article.
Once the article has been written, it is important to categorize it so that search engines can get an idea about the content that the article deals with. The main blogging platforms allow assigning categories and labels to the articles.
As an example for attracting attention, we show the Google search for “hygiene for fresh products“, in which the first spots from the page results from the ULMA Packaging news section:
It is recommended to use plugins that help us improve the positioning of the article and that compliment the work we’ve done with the content. These plugins, of course, will depend on the platform that we have chosen for the blog. When using WordPress, there are recognized and recommendable plugins for this purpose, like Yoast or All in One SEO Pack.
| Managing Commentary
Blogs may be a good tool for gathering opinions, questions, recommendations, etc. from readers. To make this interactivity possible, enabling the option for readers to write comments about the articles is recommended. On the other hand, commentaries become a source for spam or inappropriate opinions (insults, unjustified criticism, etc.) on many occasions. Therefore, it is recommended that the authors of the articles moderate the commentary. Which is to say that we recommend that the authors approve the publication of commentary, when they reach the blog.
