Optimizing your online help for Google

Tech­ni­cal writ­ers not post­ing their online help sys­tems to a serv­er that can be accessed and indexed by Google take the risk that their con­tent becomes over­shad­owed by a third-par­ty author­i­ty such as a sup­port forum, said Joe Welinske, pres­i­dent of WritersUA.

In the same way that mar­keters have employed Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) to improve the vis­i­bil­i­ty of cor­po­rate web sites, online help that can be indexed by the search engines can pro­vide faster answers to your cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers who are using Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Here are my thoughts on the advan­tages of adding online help to a pub­lic location:

* Your con­tent is giv­en a much wider audi­ence. Instead of lim­it­ing your read­ers to the peo­ple who have bought your prod­uct, your online help can be made avail­able to any­one on the Inter­net. If a cus­tomer is strug­gling with a fea­ture of your prod­uct, he or she could find the answer using Google’s search.

* The rules of sup­port have changed. Peo­ple expect quick and rel­e­vant answers with the wide­spread use of Google. Even with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of social media sites super­sed­ing search engines, 92 per­cent of us still use search engines reg­u­lar­ly. For exam­ple, when I have a prob­lem with some­thing I own, such as a DVD play­er, I might look up the prob­lem in the print­ed user guide (if I still have it!), go to the manufacturer’s web site, or just type the name and mod­el of the DVD play­er in Google. From my expe­ri­ence, Google often pro­vides results that are as use­ful as the manufacturer’s sup­port web site.

* Adding online help to a pub­lic serv­er may ben­e­fit the company’s brand. For exam­ple, tech­ni­cal writer Sarah Mad­dox of Atlass­ian said that the company’s doc­u­men­ta­tion web site attracts more traf­fic than the company’s cor­po­rate web site.

Why are writ­ers not adding con­tent to a pub­lic serv­er? A few reasons:

* We are strapped for time. We don’t have the time to move our con­tent to a serv­er that can be accessed by Google’s webcrawlers that troll and index mil­lions of web pages.

* Com­pa­nies are reluc­tant to post detailed infor­ma­tion to a pub­lic serv­er. Con­ceiv­ably, com­peti­tors could read the details of a fea­ture in your online help and emu­late it. Oth­er com­pa­nies may be wor­ried of secu­ri­ty breach­es. But, in many cas­es, an exter­nal source may already be writ­ing about a company’s prod­uct or ser­vice, said Welinske, who pre­sent­ed at the Jan. 17th meet­ing of the STC West Coast chapter.

* We lack the inter­est or knowl­edge. We may lack the inter­est or the know-how to port the con­tent to a pub­lic-fac­ing serv­er. You need to con­sid­er the type of help you’re gen­er­at­ing, the HTML tags that are embed­ded in each web page, and the for­mat­ting of your help.

Here are some best practices:

* Types of help. If you’re plan­ning to post your help, cer­tain file for­mats work well, such as web pages, Web­Help, and PDFs. Old­er file for­mats such as Microsoft Help (i.e. CHM files) or Flash are not the best choices.

* Opti­miz­ing meta-tags. To help webcrawlers index the con­tent in your help, spend some time adding HTML tags to each top­ic. You need to dou­ble-check the title tags, review your key­words, and add rel­e­vant hyper­links to your help. See my ear­li­er blog post Mak­ing Online Help SEO Friend­ly.

* Social media. Incor­po­rat­ing social media in your online help is a way to fos­ter an online com­mu­ni­ty of users. See my ear­li­er arti­cle on Mar­ry­ing Twit­ter with User Doc­u­men­ta­tion.

* For­mat­ting and pre­sen­ta­tion. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Welinske sug­gest­ed you need to add nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments and com­pa­ny brand­ing on all pages so that users know that the con­tent is the company’s mate­r­i­al. When you search for con­tent using a search engine, it strips out the table of con­tents and index so that each page should iden­ti­fy that the con­tent is the company’s doc­u­men­ta­tion. In addi­tion, include the last date that the con­tent was updat­ed and which ver­sion the doc­u­men­ta­tion addresses.

* Reg­is­ter your online help with the search engines. It’s worth­while reg­is­ter­ing your online help with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can reg­is­ter Google using Google Web­mas­ter Tools. It’s also valu­able to sub­mit a XML sitemap of your online help to search engines. Sitemaps are a way to tell search engines about all of the pages in your online help.

Writ­er­sUA pro­vides train­ing to tech­ni­cal writ­ers and hosts an annu­al conference.

Good pre­sen­ta­tion!