Foot In Mouth Disease, Content Writing for the People

Back to basics:

It’s been a while since I went back to the fundamentals on my blog and talked about certain principles of content writing that I find to be fundamental advice for every site builder to follow.

Be Centered:

Kung Fu is about finding your center…I just have very large center- Sammo Hung

Like kung fu, your website is something that should be built over time, with patience and dedication. Find that central theme to keep your site tied together and keep practicing the fundamentals. Use your header tags properly, create proper meta titles and descriptions, and actually use your keywords correctly in context on the page.

I checked on my twtter this morning to find that Rae Hoffman and Lisa Barone were going at it tooth and nail over the concept of “Live Blogging” and it’s impact on conference attendance and value. If you aren’t clear, live bloggin is done by conference attendees who have their laptops going and are transcribing and interpretting the panel into a blog post. They also link up mentioned resources the speakers throw out.

Sugar Rae came out in full force against Live blogging conferences for several reasons.

I don’t think live bloggers should be allowed - why pay for a conf if you can get me transcribed for free? It also hurts quality of information - earlier days, speakers gave away more goods because it was shared with less people they give away less now, because you’re blogging it to the world… - Rae Hoffman

On the other hand, Lisa Barone wonders what the fuss is about, it’s just extended coverage.

What’s the difference between liveblogging and what WebProNews does? Press has always been allowed into shows - Lisa Barone

Having been to SES New York, I beleive that anyone worth their SEO salt will attend conferences regardless of live blogging because of the following reasons:

1. The face to face time and opportunity to participate in the Q&A portion of the conference
2. Live blogging is not totally accurate, as it is from one perspective and they may interpret something differently
3. Live bloggers don’t cover all panels
4. Live bloggers add the links to the resources and people mentioned by the speaker- As an attendee, my notes were sparse in comparison
5. I posted a blog article based off a SES panel a few days later…so since Bloggers post articles after hearing conferences, so should all bloggers be banned from conferences too?
6. You’re at the conference to speak to the public, if you didn’t want that info to go out into the world, then why would you go speak in the first place?

“You add value to the freeloaders at home - NOT paying conference attendees or speakers - Rae Hoffman

As a “freeloader” and as a conference attendee, I say Freedom of the press! The better the flow of information from cnferences to a broader audience, the more interested they are in getting into those conferences!

What do you say, free loaders? Should live blogging be banned or should the information flow?

I saw an article that was Twittered by oilman this morning, about the BBC creating a facebook application that stole information from other users accounts. I know that it may be a good idea to get this issue fixed, but this information could EASILY be abused very rapidly,

We wrote an evil data mining application called Miner, which, if we wanted, could masquerade as a game, a test, or a joke of the day. It took us less than three hours.

This just reminds me of local TV stunts where they say “Look how easily we gained access to this nuclear silo. At 3:00 am the guard changes, and someone with 1.4 lbs. of c4 could kill 1 million people.”

I think it’s pretty irresponsible, but I don’t know…Am I over Reacting?

charter fails copy

Originally uploaded by contentwritingadvice

All today and yesterday my modem has been restting, and it’s been cutting me off. Well once it got back in play, I went to get some help from Charter… Here is what happened.

I asked if there were any service issues in my area and… my connection was closed due to network problems.

Myspace has become known by popular culture as one of the fore runners of the Social Media website, and here they are again breaking ground. Video technology and profliferation is getting bigger as bandwidth becomes more readily available and video technology becomes heaper, and more accessible. SightSPeed is bringing Video Mail to Myspace.
Myspace is also known as one of the more glitchy websites in popular use. Regular errors are almost completely expected…The question is…Will video mail make Myspace even more glitchy and slow?

read more | digg story

In the recent Google Webmaster Help Chat session, they presented a very thorough discussion of how to optimize your images.

We all know that Google’s Universal search is altering the way that users interct with Google’s search interface. Instead of just links to websites, media clips, images, audio clips, new articles, maps, book reviews, restaurant reviews and more are showing up in the search results. The question at hand is whether or not those results will supplement the traditional sites, or actually replace those in the rankings.

I had the opportunity to pose this question directly to Google, at both the SES conference in New York in March, and the Google Webmaster Help Chat session.

At the SES conference in New York Jack Menzel director of the universal search program stated that currently Universal searches are only showing up for a limited number of searches, and while there are several versions out it has not been decided. This seems to be the company line, as you can see how Susan Moskwa fielded my concern.

Q: Will Universal Image search results REPLACE links to sites? I.e. Instead of 10 sites plus images, will we see 1 image, 1 video and 8 sites?

Susan Moskwa - 9:43 am

A: We’re constantly testing what works well in our search results, including whether differenty types of universal results are “additive” or will replace one of the 10 web results. For now I’d say, stay tuned.

Why does that relate to image optimization? Because images and multimedia will be showing up in the organic search results more often, so it is critical that you optimize your pictures as best as possible. Use these Guidlines for your images to make sure gets them placed according to their relevant topics.

• Add Alt Text to your Images
• Don’t Stuff the keywords with anything other than an accurate description of your picture. Around 80-100 characters is a good rule of thumb
• Have relevant text surrounding your image
• provide quality photos, Google does pay attention to image quality when possible
• name the file something that relates to it’s subject matter

For Example if I were optimizing this image here of a Domo Kun Penguin, then I would place it close to the text that talks about the Domo Kun Penguin and apply the tips above.

Listen to the Domo Kun Penguin and your images will be optimized!

Update: I am please to say that Google sees my blog as #1 for Domo kun Penguin Now just waiting to see if the image gets picked up in image search as well. (for editoral purposes it should be noted that the picture and page were added to mixx.com and stumble upon).

This also reinforces my previous post about how quickly blogs are ranking for new keywords, since that post was made less than 24 hours and already is #1 for that keyword.

Peach and Bowser Elope!

Originally uploaded by contentwritingadvice

Oh Noes Mario!
Bowser and Princess Peach have eloped to another castle!

( This was part of the pranks pulled in my office today. All of my desktop toys*and car keys* disapeared leaving just this note and my Hogwards Card Castle…. Fortunately they turned up later …HIDDEN IN THE CEILING!

Happy April Fools Day!

Google Webmaster chat help was a blast! The web ex seminar ran through A discussion of 1 specific site, then critiqued several others. We were given a presentation on optimizing for image search and then had an open Q & A section. The team at google actually stayed overtime on the system to keep answering questions. Additionally, you could ask questions in the Q&A panel and participate in the chat.

I will be posting several mini threads stemming from these topics, so see you later!

Blog Vs Static, blogs in the lead?

Over the past few months I have been working with clients who had a static traditional website for just over a year, and we decided to mix things up and add a blog on a 3rd level domain to their site.They posted just 4 articles, and within 3 weeks they were ranking on the first page of Google, just 2 placements behind the clients site itself!

This upset my client, but I made me wonder about the role of the blog in the search engines. Fortunately, I got the opportunity to bring this subject up at the SES conference and have a panel of professional SEOers weigh in on the subject.

SES New York was a great venue, and right off the bat they lined up a forum with some heavy hitters in the organic SEO world to field current questions. This won’t go through the full transcripts of the organic panel, but go over a key point.

The panelists for the organic listings panel were Greg Boser, Jill Whalen, Dave Naylor, moderated by Mike Grehan.

I was fortunate to be given the second question to the organic listings panel.

“Is there a current trend where blogs are outpacing static websites, and can that continue since everyone and their mother has a blog?”.

Dave Naylor: The thing about blogs is the platform they’re published on. Blogs are not the silver bullet, they’re a supplement, Same as news feeds and social media exposure. Those kinds of things will give you benefits besides human traffic.

Dave hits on a point about blogs, in that their goal and delivery are very different from a static site. Web sites are intended to remain relevant over time, and usually have their own objective( e-commerce, etc) so the search engines are not going to look for much change in their content on a consistent basis. Once a page is laid out, it very rarely changes, aside from minor tweaking now and again. However, blogs are a different media. They are a “flash in the pan”, bearing extreme relevance to a topic for a short period of time, but then fading into an archive after time passes.

Greg: Sites with RSS feeds are outpacing sites without feeds. Blogs are about a distribution chain for content. That distribution attracts links.

The more authoritative your site is, the more on page factors are used.

Greg hits on two separate points that further explain why blogs get ranked quicker. First and foremost, blogs are on an “RSS feed” this send new data out to subscribed users. Most blog platforms have this RSS feed distributed to a central location, which is then tapped by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Essentially, blogs export their content to Google who no longer has to send a crawler out to find the information to check for new information on the page. Now it makes sense to me that this does have an impact on how Google uses the data gathered from blogs because they have the data sent to them. My hypothesis is that this timestamped data gets entered into Google’s database in a separate index or method that causes the posts to be treated differently than a static site.

The second point that Greg hit on, is that blogs are a distribution system for content. Blog posts get exported to RSS feeders. Quite often this is snagged by Technorati, gets posted to Digg, gets stumbled, and spreads this particular subject quickly across the internet. If you are a blog owner, make sure you have profiles on the social blog sites, to gain the benefit from the links that come in from this process. You gain authority as the source of that distributed content, which helps your rankings.

Dave: Note the number of laptops being used by audience. Web site owners don’t come to a conference and write articles. Bloggers don’t care so much about keeping people on the site, but more about expressing opinions.

The final thought for this post is about the transitive nature of blog posts. Dave Naylor is right, Blogs are in the moment in a way that static sites can never achieve. Take advantage of that flexibility and post about current topics, because there is a downside to blogs. It is much more difficult to keep your blog focused on a particular topic, unless you are keeping up with new articles on that topic. So keep posting on a consistant basis around your central theme.

Good luck on your blogging, there is more to come from the SES Conference!

 SES Conference Coverage March 2008

The Search Engine Strategies conference in New York was a blast. I will be posting up detailed analysis from the panels that I attended, and share the responses to the questions I asked during the Q & A portions of the conference.

 Topics Covered by SES New York

 There was a wide swath of topics covered, from basic link building and content writing tips, into advanced analytics programs, Google Universal search, and local search. There was also a large chunk of information related to Search engine marketing strategies, so I’ll do my best to relay that information as well.