April 23, 2008
Keywording as an Editorial Function at Magazine Publishers
DPCI does a great deal of work for business-to-business, enthusiast media, and consumer magazine publishers that deliver content across print, Web, and mobile channels. One consistent challenge I see at these companies is that writers and editors create stories that first appear in the print publication. Those stories are then extracted out of the print file format (usually InDesign but sometimes also QuarkXPress) into a format that is usable for Web publishing, which requires additional work downsteam to make it truly Web-ready.
Many magazine publishers are happy enough that they are able to put processes in place to convert the content out at the end of the print editorial process. Most monthly magazines are not as concerned about the latency period for conversion at the end of the final page release stage in the workflow. However, weekly publishers and those that are in highly competitive markets need to post the content to their Websites more immediately, so the post-conversion process approach is vexing to them.
One best practice publishers could be implementing right now is implementing their SEO strategy earlier in the editorial process. The usual approach that we see at many of our publishing customers is that the print article is delivered in XML format, then imported into the Web content management system. At that point, a Web producer then opens the article and manipulates it as follows:
- Creates a more Web-friendly title with a keyword or keyphrase in mind (keyword sweet spot to align with the brand's SEO strategy)
- Manipulates the URL so that the selected keyword or keyphrase within the title is represented 'cleanly'
- Applies additional tags from a list of brand keywords or keyphrases
- Adds links internal to the site or to other related brand sites
A few words about these keywords and keyphrases: These are known to the Web producer if he or she is a subject matter expert. However, what we find is that Web producers -- at least at publishers -- are hard to keep on the job for very long. The challenge is that the Web producers at a given brand are in fact NOT usually subject matter experts, but need keyword suggestion tools like WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery.com, or even Google. To address this issue, compliance departments are cropping up at some publishers in order to spot-check the tagging work of these producers to ensure that they are properly optimizing content for the Website.
I think there's a better approach for print-to-Web publishing that might not be difficult to implement.
Typically editors and contributors on the print side of the magazine business -- certainly in B2B and enthusiast media -- are without question subject matter experts. In fact, most of them are brand leaders in the sense that they actually can drive vision and direction for the particular subject matter. These brand stewards practically breathe the unique vocabularies of their publications. In essence, the print editor is better suited to apply taxonomic terms to article content.
The question is: How can they achieve that without having to crack open a box of XMetal or some other XML authoring tool, which has repulsed them for years? I am not suggesting that print editors should avoid getting involved with preparing editorial content for any media (independent of presentation), but what I am pointing out here is the reality of the situation, namely that authoring tools they are using -- MS Word, Adobe InCopy, even InDesign or QuarkXPress, are not out-of-the box candidates for metatagging.
Having said that, it is completely possible for the editor or contributor to use keywords or keyphrases that have been identified as best suited for a brand's SEO strategy. Those search term sweet spots can easily be worked into the body of an article. Additionally, while print magazine editors like catchy article headlines, the editor can create an alternative headline that is more in line with the SEO strategy. If the editor is using MS Word or InCopy, a special stylesheet could be applied to the alternate headline so that when the file is converted to XML, the processing application will identify the context for that element.
Character and paragraph styles can be applied throughout an MS Word or Adobe InCopy article that may not apply typographical values to the text but only serve to tag that string of content to be picked up by the XSLT processor.
If your magazine uses a product like K4 Publishing System or SmartConnection, you can actually apply additional metadata keywords into the header of the article file. This is of great benefit since it alleviates the need to tag body text. Another approach that companies take with these kinds of editorial workflow systems is that they create InCopy components for different elements or 'chunks' of content. Then, non-printing components can be created with any type of metadata descriptions or keywords or even rights information -- all of which can be picked up by a Web content management system once the content has been processed from the MS Word or Adobe InCopy format.
Still another approach that we are seeing more often -- which represents a great consulting opportunity for DPCI, by the way -- is that instead of editors tagging content within an article, if they have been good about using those kinds of terms, then an entity extraction appliance -- commonly associated with text mining engine technologies like that from Nstein -- can index those search term sweet spots that appertain to a specific taxonomy or taxonomies.
The opportunity that I'm trying to point out here is that this can all start with the print editors and the original contributors -- even freelance writers. As publishers sort out the print vs. digital issue and as the software companies improve the authoring tools to make them truly media-independent, having content originators involved in tagging and enriching article content with search term sweet spots, and also having those originators creating elements of an article that would appear in Web or mobile only but not in print -- will add a miniscule amount of work effort to their plates. What the publishers will get in return are enriched articles, since nobody downstream is going to 'breathe' the brand taxonomy like the subject matter expert that authored or edited that content. Another benefit to this approach is an improved 'manufacturing' process of article content.
The Web producers are ostensibly doing double-work by trying to figure out what the best tags, URLs, titles, and heads are for a given piece. I am not suggesting that the 'prep' work of the Web producer will be eliminated entirely, but if we could mitigate this rework by bringing some of the tagging upstream, then those producers could be focused on other important work around the Website -- whatever that may be for the given brand.
In sum, I believe that in the case of print-originated content, tagging in order to optimize placement on major search engines is an editorial function, not a technical or production one. Nobody knows a brand better than the print editor or contributor, and anyone downstream is either going to have to guess, follow somebody else's playbook, or use some kind of search term tool and hope for the best. In all cases that is a waste of time and human effort.
Posted at 12:00 am by Joseph Bachana
More Blogs From Author:
< About "Intrusive Information Overload"
Addendum to my Keywording BLOG from the other day >
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