Publishing a knowledge base has many benefits. It doesn’t really matter what kind of business niche you’re in, because apart from helping your brand become stronger, it also enables you to establish a stronger bond with the target audience, encourages teamwork and boosts a more efficient business relationship overall.
However, for all of that to happen, you need to create a quality knowledge base first and make it actually usable. You should really put in some real effort into building it because wasting your time on creating poor content won’t serve any purpose.
You need to create quality textual content so that you don’t have to invest your time into correcting it later on besides making your knowledge base searchable. The whole point of having one is so that the users can access relevant data in seconds, and for that to be possible, you need to think in advance and organize your data accordingly which is something the next five tips are all about.
Keyword Optimization
Many businesses face this problem with their knowledge base, which is why I want to start by presenting it. First of all, you need to understand that there’s an important difference between making your database SEO friendly and keyword stuffing.
When creating textual content, you need to make it concise and relevant and this must be on the top of your priority list. If you put keywords first, the text you create will turn out to be dry, difficult to read and plain old boring.
Naturally, this is something you need to steer clear from and direct your efforts towards writing helpful articles that will be of service to your business and your target audience. However, in order to launch a knowledge base which is easy to navigate, you should also have keywords and relevant phrases in mind so that anyone who uses your database can access the information quickly.
Proper Formatting
Other than search optimization, you should also consider the view of your readers. It’s important to realize that an average reader isn’t interested in the whole article and that they are probably looking for one or two precise pieces of information.
You yourself know how tiring it is to read endless lines of dry text. No matter the style or its quality, you’ll probably end up looking for another article on the subject, something more visually appealing and easier to navigate.
Therefore, not only that your database needs to be filled with practical pieces of info, it also needs to be emphasized by accenting the relevant parts with the appliance of proper formatting that includes bulletins, subheadings, different chapters and, of course, bold and italic words. With all of this applied, any visitor will be able to access the required data in a matter of seconds.
Regular Updates
To ensure the success of an online knowledge base is a constant work and it will require from you to do occasional tweaks. First of all, you need to refresh it by uploading new content and make sure that its quality isn’t declining.
Second, with each upcoming article you plan on publishing, you need to make sure that enough research is invested into it and that writers pay special attention to the proper usage of keywords as we previously mentioned. However, it’s quite necessary that you keep yourself updated with current trends – search engines regularly change and get updated which is exactly what you need to do with your wiki software in order to make it searchable.
For this to happen, you need to be informed about the trending keywords relevant to your business niche. When a phrase loses its popularity, you should update your knowledge base by switching the existing ones for whatever’s currently relevant. This part of the maintenance process is quite mechanical and it won’t require from you to put in much effort – however, it will help your wiki software rank better.
Distribution of Access
As an administrator of a knowledge base, you have a very useful little option of distributing access to different types of visitors. Naturally, you shouldn’t enable everyone to have access to every piece of content that can be found on your wiki and you shouldn’t allow random visitors to edit articles.
This will allow you to maintain the quality of your knowledge base and thus enable your company’s reputation to grow. If something like this slips your mind and you don’t pay special attention to this issue, it’s just a matter of time before your wiki software turns into chaos which will make it impossible to use properly.
Diversity of Content
It’s important to realize that different visitors will search for different content as not everyone wants to read. In order to make your knowledge base software adaptable to a wider audience and thus meet the requirements of more people who visit your online wiki, make sure that you upload various types of content including videos and infographics. Not only is this content easy to find and simple to study, but it’s also shareable, which is a smart thing to have in mind when it comes to advertising.
The Parting Words
This probably sounds like a lot of work, but it’s only a matter of a healthy routine. Once you imprint all of these tips to the way you do work, they will become part of your daily tasks.
Author Bio:
Jason Grills is a technical writer. He enjoys writing about emerging knowledge management products,trends in customer support industry and the financial impacts of using such tools. He lives in Los Angeles, California. In his spare time, Jason enjoys long walks on beach, listening to blues and doing all things creative.