How Spoke Cleans Up Web Presence

What if people could see every relevant reference to you (or your company) online, all on one page?

You could put it all at your website, but that’s not usually the best solution. It’s hard to fit numerous varied links into your company site in a meaningful way, so they tend to get pushed onto a Press page. There’s a reason that those pages are identified as being for the Press – your customers have other goals, so they don’t usually visit those Press pages and scroll through dozens of links to articles and podcasts. They’re at your website for answers to specific questions related to their needs.

Press pages or About pages may not work with all the materials you have, anyway. They’re not really designed to accommodate every kind of link, so you can easily end up with a random scrapbook effect.

Typical Press pages also don’t work with the tone of every website. Your company’s website is designed to give a particular impression. If you’re laid back, modest, and friendly, a page of your awards and accomplishments makes the down-home flavor of the rest of the site look false. If you’re high powered and upmarket, typical videos of your presentations will add an amateur touch.

Trying to reformat all that content and present it directly in your website leads to more than just design problems – you can end up slapped with duplicate content penalties which lower your search engine rankings.

And yet you don’t want to lose all those articles, videos, slide presentations, and social profiles.

Here’s where Spoke comes in.

Company content curation

Spoke is designed to aggregate your social media, your company (or personal /professional) timeline, your videos, pictures, and links, and all the other stuff you have roaming around the web. You can pull it all together on Spoke and it ends up looking good. One tidy link from your website to your Spoke page and you’ve made it all available to visitors without compromising on your design. Spoke isn’t designed to be a sales page, so you have a link from Spoke to your website, too. Your Spoke page is a nice third person collection which can make your company look good to browsers –and it can also make clear which website is your own official presentation of your company. There’s more. Spoke may be stronger in search than your website, especially when you’re starting out. They’re almost sure to have more visitors than your company site does on a typical day, too. So Spoke not only gives you an attractive way to curate a far-flung web presence, but it can also help you show up better in search than you currently can on your own. Spoke’s clout has another advantage, too.  The links you create to content outside of your homepage is considered a citation by the search engines. That means that Google and Bing get the message that there is a connection between you or your company (and your company website) and that Slideshare page or news photo. Leave out anything you don’t want to reinforce, and you’re sending a message about that content as well. SEO is all about communicating well with the search engines, and Spoke can help you do that. Of course, conversion is all about communicating well with your human visitors, and Spoke can help you do that, too. Find your company’s listing at Spoke, or create one if you’re not already listed, and use Spoke’s simple tools to improve that page and make it a good source of traffic to your company website. Include links not only to your homepage, but to articles and other assets at your site. Keep it informative, not sales-oriented, and you’ll be building useful support for your website and a more beneficial web presence. [This is a guest post written for Spoke's company newsletter. Thanks to Matt Maurer for allowing me to share it here, too.]