Pouring mustard onto your hot dog should be one of the easiest things in life. Unfortunately, as “Good Eats” host Alton Brown pointed out in a recent YouTube post, it’s often a terrible process. Condiments tend to coagulate in the bottle, which makes it exhausting to squeeze them out. And since the bottles are bulky by design, storing them in a refrigerator rack is difficult, awkward and messy.
But as Brown proved, there is an easier way to organize your favorite condiments. By simply cutting off the top of an egg carton and storing the bottles top-down, you can solve both problems at once. All of the bottles can be kept in one place, and all of the liquid sits near the top which means easy access.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUig9IAwggM]
This is also a valuable lesson for marketers. Imagine a customer is looking through a refrigerator for your content. Are your articles easy to find? Or is it a painful process to extract the information they need? Google now factors ease of use, design and coding into account when ranking Web pages. If customers are struggling to find valuable information on your site, your ranking will suffer.
Here are some ways that you can avoid this problem:
Keep track of what you posted: Just like forgotten condiments have a way of haunting the back of your refrigerator, it’s easy to forget that you’ve already posted about a particular topic. Try using the Blog Post tracker to streamline the process and repurpose old ideas. You can use it to see posts that have already been completed, are in progress or are on the back burner.
Include categories: Rummaging through the refrigerator is only fun when you are browsing for a snack—and the same goes for written content. Include easy to access categories on your website so that customers don’t have to scroll endlessly through pages or rack their brains entering random search queries when trying to find relevant material.
Tag your content: Think of that great feeling when you are looking for a bottle of ketchup, but you find a container of forgotten barbecue sauce instead. Tagging your content will inform readers about related articles on your blog, so you can let them know about other relevant posts without having to include too many links in your article. This will keep eyes on your site and will keep readers coming back for more.
Do you have any tips for keeping your content organized on your website? Let us know your strategies in the comments section below!