Last month I gave a talk at the Independent Publishers’ Guild Spring Conference titled Smart Search: How to apply search engine data in publishing. Based on that talk, here are some thoughts on:
On the web people rarely read things carefully, if they read them at all. Jakob Nielsen identified the now familiar F-shaped scanning pattern decades ago, and many writers for the web employ some version of his advice for adapting content to this behaviour.
As content takes a more prominent role in marketing and SEO in particular, what are some key considerations and techniques in approaching content production?
Continue reading Writing better content for usability and SEO
Dan Petrovic’s recent Whiteboard Friday at Moz got me thinking. The premise of his talk is his own recent finding that only 16% of people he surveyed read all of an article word-for-word, which just happens to be the exact same statistic Jakob Nielsen came up with in 1997.
But is he focussing on “engagement” at the expense of comprehension?
Continue reading Writing For The Web: Comprehension & Engagement
I’ve been tinkering with Freebase and structured data for so long I can’t be sure exactly how this happened, but it turns out I’ve got a Knowledge Graph result. Which isn’t bad going since Knowledge Graph describes entities and I am, well, a nonentity.
Continue reading How I (Think) I Got a Knowledge Graph Result
Some months ago I wrote a post titled “Google Doesn’t Owe You a Living”. I later felt it was a little too harshly sardonic, even by my standards, and in any case it didn’t articulate my thoughts terribly well, so I took it down.
Continue reading When’s a Blogging Assignment a Link Scheme?