I'd Rather Be Writing » SEO

Trends in Search Engine Optimization — Shifting from Search to Social?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:35:13 +0000

In The Big Shift from Search to Social, Anne Gentle notes the growing problem with Google’s search and trends towards alternative search sources, such as social networks like Facebook. She links to an stirring NY Times article called The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, which I recommend reading.

The Dirty Little Secrets About Search, from the NYTimes

The NYTimes article exposes how search engines are gamed, and how search engines can also game consumers.

As the NYTimes article points out, the strategies for gaming search engines often involve buying links pointing to your site. I’ve encountered a bit of this myself. Last week a “reader” offered to write a “guest post” for me on Wikipedia’s credibility issue, and how Wikipedia manages this risk. The guest poster only requested that in exchange for the completely unique post, he be allowed to include a “personal link.” When I received the post, it turned out to contain a link to an online university site. I turned the article down, not only because it wasn’t relevant to my blog, but because I get at least one person a month pitching a guest post with a link to an online university.

I’ve had offers from other companies to run text ads in my blog. Several years ago I made about $1300 just adding text links to website companies on about 20 old posts. Recently the same person returned to pitch more text ads to an exam-answers site, which I turned down for obvious ethical reasons. But regardless of the site, running text ads isn’t a good practice — if Google finds out, they could penalize your Pagerank.

Pagerank is always a bit of a mystery, but ever since MindTouch came out with their 20 most influential bloggers, and showed Scott Abel’s The Content Wrangler with a Pagerank of 7, and my site with a Pagerank of 5, I started to worry about the effect of those text ads. I removed them (I think they expired anyway), and after several months my site’s Pagerank is now a 6. Part of Scott’s Pagerank is due to the longevity of his site, I believe. He’s been online probably longer than most any other technical communicator. Also, he does post excellent, in-depth content — rich with search engine keywords.

Although Anne notes that Facebook visits surpassed Google visits, I’m not sure if this is an apples versus oranges argument. Are people turning to Facebook and other social networks primarily to find information, or for social engagement? I occasionally search for keywords on search.twitter.com, especially if I’m looking for something occurring now. But as a general means of finding information, I almost never search social networks.

However, when I can’t find information, perhaps because the search engines are gamed with all kinds of J.C. Penney type schemes, then yes, turning to social networks is a good idea. For example, last Friday I googled how to create a screencast of an iPhone app, and not finding anything on Google, I turned to Twitter. But other than turning to social networks as a last resort, for me social networks primarily serve social purposes, and search engines primarily serve search purposes.

What does this all mean for technical writers? We keep hearing that technical writers have a goldmine of SEO-rich content, and that companies need to leverage the search engine results and financial benefits that will come from putting this content online in the realm of user search. SEO and web platforms should play a larger consideration in how we author help material — particularly if our audience is external. It’s usually more than enough, though, just worrying about accuracy, concision, and content approval. Now if you add good SEO practices to the mix, you have a lot going on in each topic.

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Search Engine Optimizing Your Help Content for Google [Organizing Content 11]

Tom Johnson — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:20:46 +0000

In my last post, I argued that making content findable in search engines requires you to understand how your search engine algorithm ranks and sorts the content it indexes. Not all search engines work the same. Some rank content through links, others by date, others include index keywords, and so on. You have to be familiar with the search algorithm so that you can maximize your content’s visibility in the search.

I touched briefly on Google’s search engine algorithm. Since Google is such an important search engine for content, including help content, I want to dive deeper into strategies for maximizing the visibility of help content on Google.

Putting Help Content on Google

Since many users turn directly to Google to find answers to questions, rather than turning to the help file, it makes sense to put your help content on Google.

Additionally, help files are rich in keyword density. An online help file with more than 200 topics adds hundreds of keywords to your company’s site, making your product more findable.

If you have optimized your help content with synonyms and other terms that people actually use, the help file can be a wealth of highly search-engine-optimized content that increases visibility of your product and company in Google’s search engine results, right?

Let’s Try a Test

Let’s try a test. Let’s say that I’m using a software application, Madcap Flare, and I want to know how to insert concept keywords. Using Google, I search for “insert concept keywords flare.”

Google search results for insert concept keywords in Flare

Why is it that the search results didn’t find the topic in Flare’s online help file, which is on the web? It did find a Madcap KB article, but not the topic in the webhelp file.

The exact topic in Flare’s help is titled Inserting Concepts into Topics. Even if I search for this phrase, the Flare help topic doesn’t appear in Google’s results. In fact, the results for this search aren’t even related to help authoring or Flare.

When I search for inserting concepts into topics flare, one of the results points to a topic in Flare’s online help: Creating Printed Output. But still not the webhelp topic I’m looking for.

Why didn’t Inserting Concepts into Topics, the topic from Flare’s help file, appear in any of my Google searches, even when the topic is online and apparently indexed by Google? Why is it that Eddie Van Arsdall’s post, Madcap Flare Tip: Helping Users Find Related Information, appears at the top of the list for both of my Google searches?

What Is PageRank?

Eddie’s post itself has just a couple of inlinks, that is, links pointing to it from other sites. But to Eddie Van Arsdall’s domain, Simplifying Complexity, there are a lot of links pointing to it. These incoming links give Eddie something called PageRank, which helps his topic dominate the search engine results.

PageRank is a trademarked term created by Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, that describes a ranking of a website’s credibility and authority. Every time you link to a site, Google interprets that link as a vote of confidence for the site. You’re vouching for the site’s credibility when you link to it.

For Google, PageRank is a major variable that determines what sites appear in the search engine results (SERPs). Sites with a high PageRank get more visibility in SERPs. If a site has 1,000 links pointing to it, Google knows that it must be a credible and worthwhile site. Therefore the site appears higher in the results.

Each site on the web is assigned a PageRank between 0 and 10. You can check PageRank here or more powerfully with the SearchStatus Firefox extension.

The New York Times and Wikipedia have a PageRank of 9. TC.Eserver.org and my site have a PageRank of 6. Simplifying Complexity has a PageRank of 4.

In contrast, the webhelp for Flare has no page rank at all. Ouch.

Help Content and PageRank

Help content on the web will always be at a disadvantage with PageRank, because people are less inclined to link to webhelp topics than to blogs or other user-created sites. Why is that?

One reason is that it’s hard to link to a webhelp topic. Webhelp files use frames, so even if you’re looking at the Inserting Concepts into Topics topic, you can’t grab the link to it unless you click the TOC accordion tab at the bottom, find the topic in the TOC, right-click the topic, and copy the link address. It’s non-intuitive to see the link.

Additionally, it’s just not common to link to help files. We tend to link to content created by people like us, especially when the content includes unique insight and perspective from a person’s point of view. Plain procedural topics are boring. We don’t have cause to link to them.

Frames and SEO

Another reason the Flare webhelp topic doesn’t appear in the SERPs is because Flare’s webhelp uses frames. Using frames in general is a poor practice for SEO on web. Many people point out that frames aren’t good for search engine optimization. For example, Webconfs.com: SEO Tools and Webmaster Utilities says ”Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.” Almost every HAT’s webhelp output I’ve seen uses frames, unfortunately.

Index Keywords and 2% Keyword Density

Not only do webhelp files lack PageRank and use frames, they also run into problems with index keywords. Google dislikes repetition of the same keyword over and over in the topic because Google thinks the site is trying to trick it.

The optimal keyword density is about 2%, meaning that if you have 300 words in your article, about 6 of them should be the keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for. If you have a keyword density of 20%, Google sees this as trying to game the system. The excessive keyword density works against you.

If I were to include my string of sample keywords that I referenced in my last post, would Google interpret this list of keywords as an attempt to game keyword density? Here’s that list:

burn notice
deliver burn notice
drop off burn notices
burn notices sending
how to present a burn notice
cutting off undercover agents
severing ties with field agents
burn notice protocol
best way to handle burn notice
give burn notice to operatives

Assuming Google even sees this content (questionable since the index keywords are tagged using Madcap’s unique markup in the code), would Google penalize me for overusing the keyword “burn notice”? I’m not sure.

Moving Towards a Dangerous Conclusion

As the importance of visibility on Google grows, and as companies recognize and treat their help content as an SEO asset for the online visibility and ranking (not to mention marketing) of their products, shouldn’t we put our help content on web-friendly platforms that will maximize their visibility in Google’s search engine results? Are traditional help authoring tools holding us back from realizing the SEO power of our help content?

Jing, TechSmith’s quick image and video capture tool, has their help on a blog platform (Movable Type). When I search for capture video with Jing, the help appears in the top five results.

Are blog platforms the future of help authoring?

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The Seven Sins of Blogging, Sin #6, Being Unfindable

Tom Johnson — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:56:20 +0000

Download MP3
Length: 25 min.

The sixth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging is being unfindable. (The other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and inattentive). Admittedly, lack of findability seems more a sin of omission than commission. Being unfindable seems like a sin bloggers commit against themselves.

I’ve written more than 1,000 posts on my blog, but usually the posts on my home page are the only posts people read. In this sense, blogs are like the news. A newspaper that’s several days old lines bird cages. Reading blog archives is like reading yesterday’s news — there’s no appeal.

And yet, many times archive posts have more substance that news commentary. The posts incorporate research and get into issues in depth. They don’t deserve to go into the garbage can once they slide off the home page.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com compares blogging to reaching down and grabbing a handful of sand. The sand slowly slips through your fingers. You have to reach down and grab another handful of sand, and another, and another. In the metaphor, your readers are the sand; your reaching and scooping — those are the new posts. Perhaps if the content were more findable, you wouldn’t have to do so much reaching.

How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about.

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, wants to move toward a world “in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” He admits we might never achieve it, but it’s the direction we’re moving. To start, Morville says to ask three questions of your content:

1. Can people find your website?
2. Can they find their way around your website?
3. Can they find your content, products and services despite your website?

Aggregation Techniques

You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way.

Tags function similarly to categories. You usually add tags as you would index keywords, including as many as you want to describe your content. Categories, on the other hand, are more like folders. You usually have only about a dozen categories on your site.

You can display your categories in a list on your sidebar, which could be helpful except that hardly anyone reads this way. And you can aggregate your tags into one of those jumbled masses of words called tag clouds. But like the list of categories, tag clouds don’t seem that useful to readers. At least I never use them. They’re merely a visual novelty.

Another way to increase the findability of your content is to add a string of related posts below each post. A variety of WordPress plugins do this for you (for example, the Contextual Related Posts plugin). Their matching algorithms vary a bit — some match by tag, others by keyword, others by custom keywords. Mostly, I think lists of related posts help searchers who land on your site from search engine results. These searchers are usually looking for information and sometimes prefer to drill into additional content on the same topic.

You can also aggregate your content through plugins that compile your most popular posts, such as the Popularity Contest plugin. Popularity is defined by hits, links, and comments. Your most popular posts may not be the posts you want to showcase, though. This is why I chose not to implement the Popularity Contest. My most popular posts are apparently posts on grasshoppers that look like aliens, a WordPress image gallery plugin, and notes from a keynote on WordPress 2.7.

You can also manually pull together your best posts. I recommend using the links feature in WordPress to manage your lists. You can also use the Section Widget (a tabbed widget) to show various lists in a compact way. Note that the tabbed section widget slows down your site’s loading time a little (I was intrigued by it earlier, but I removed it). It also seems to consume a lot of memory on the backend.

SEO

Let’s recognize a basic fact about websites. The majority of your readers — anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of visitors — find you through search engines. The web is mainly used for research, so these stats make sense.

But if visitors mainly find you through search engines, shouldn’t your content be optimized to rank high in search engine results? Search engine optimization (or SEO) should be a key influence in the way you write your posts, right?

Jakob Nielsen agrees. He says,

Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.

Yes, you must write to be found. To do this, to make your posts SEO rich, you have to integrate the right keywords into your title, first paragraphs, headings, image alt tags, and other places (without going overboard).

However, in Google’s search engine results algorithm, links pointing to your content from other sites matter more than anything you can do alone. So more than anything, write compelling content. Compelling content invites links back to your site.

One trick that allows you to get the best of both worlds is the All in One SEO plugin (if you have a WordPress blog). This plugin allows you to make two titles: a title that Google sees and a titles that readers see.

For me, I sometimes don’t bother with SEO because I’m not sure my content would rank for a specific topic. I’m not necessarily writing just to attract more hits. Maybe with some posts, sure. With other posts, not so much.

Formats

Another technique for increasing findability is to push your content across as many formats as possible. Recognize that readers have a variety of preferences. Some like Facebook, others Twitter, others email, others RSS readers.

You can automate all of this so that when you publish a post, notification of the new post is syndicated across each of the formats. The RSS feed is automatically pushed out (if you’re using any standard blog platform). Twitterfeed allows you to hook up your RSS feed with a Twitter account. Facebook allows you to pull in a Twitter feed. And Feedburner allows you to create email subscriptions for RSS feeds.

Audio and Text

One challenge that still remains with formats is the interchangeability of audio and text. I regularly publish podcasts, and people who don’t listen to podcasts often request transcripts of the podcasts. It can take hours, however, to record and produce a podcast, and 5+ hours to render a transcript of the audio. It’s a tall order to fill just to make the content more accessible.

I believe Adobe Sound Booth will transcribe audio (though this is application isn’t free). You can also outsource transcription for about $1 a minute (and a two-week turnaround). A direct transcription of the audio, however, often sounds incoherent and unreadable.

Going from text to audio is much easier. Services like Odiogo will automatically read your post. For an example, see Todd O’Neill’s Doing Media blog. The problem with these text-to-audio services is that they’re read by a machine, so it sounds like robot. Additionally, people who are blind probably already have screen readers that perform with similar functionality. Odiogo is really designed for people who want to listen to your content on the go, while they run or drive or work in the yard.

Nevertheless, if you want to make your blog perceivable, a conversion to other formats is what Glenda Watson Hyatt recommends. In her book How POUR Is Your Blog, she writes,

Content must be perceivable through sight, hearing or touch. Since not everyone has the same abilities or equal use of the same senses, one of the main keys to accessibility is ensuring that content is transformable from one format into another, enabling your blog readers to perceive it in multiple ways. (p.6)

(POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.)

Apart from making your content findable for the disabled, rendering your content into text and audio increases your reach. An hour long podcast transcribed into text theoretically gives you rich SEO keywords that will bring in many more search results from Google. (Of course, the extra time you spend transcribing the content means less time to produce new content, so perhaps it balances out.)

Mobile Platforms

Finally, as you design for different formats, make sure your content is visible on mobile platforms. Mobile browsers are getting to the point that they can display many websites well regardless of whether you have a mobile stylesheet, but it’s still a good idea to add a mobile plugin.

Hyatt recommends going to http://ready.mobi to test how your blog displays in a mobile browser. If you receive a poor rating from MobiReady, try installing Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and rerun the test.

MobiReady also has several emulators that show you how your blog looks on various phones.

Other Findability Tips

To wrap up findability, I suggest adding a few more simple, commonsense practices.

Let your URL match your blog title. This helps readers remember how to get to your site without having to google it each time.
Include an About page. Your About page is one of the most visited pages on a blog because people want to see information about the person whose opinions and advice they’re reading.
Use Feedburner to route your RSS feed. If you ever change platforms (for example, from Expression Engine to WordPress), you can update your RSS feed on your new site so you don’t lose all your readers who subscribed to your old RSS feed.

To conclude, remember that the goal of findability is to help your audience connect with your content. On A List Apart, Aarron Walter writes,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message. A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. (A List Apart)

Don’t whisper to the wind. Don’t let your content blow around aimlessly. Make it findable. When it’s findable, you get to keep it forever. When it’s not, it disappears into the wind.

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My STC Summit Blogging Presentation Is Free

Tom Johnson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:30:16 +0000

As you know, the sessions at the STC Summit in Atlanta last year were recorded. My blogging presentation, Introduction to Blogging: A New Technical Communicator Role, is the only recorded session you can listen to for free. It’s labeled as the “Featured session – free of charge.”

I didn’t even realize this until someone tweeted it this afternoon. I figure it means one of two things — either my presentation was so lame they couldn’t fathom actually charging for it. Or it was so cool they decided to use it to try to get people to buy the entire recorded Summit package. Either way, it’s a good hour and a half discussion of blogging. I talk about how “writing a product blog can help you connect and communicate with your users while simultaneously helping them move up to a more advanced level of product knowledge.”

To view the audio synced with PowerPoint, click the View button at the link above. To download the MP3, click the drop-down arrow in the upper-left and choose Downloads. To include this in my iTunes podcast feed, I also included the MP3 file here.

My blogging presentation at STC Atlanta

By the way, I’ve been listening to other recorded Summit sessions. There’s a ton of informative content available. Of course recorded presentations aren’t always as engaging as a podcast recording, especially when someone is clicking through 200+ slides and answering audience questions (that you can’t hear), but still, by and large the content is highly worthwhile. If it’s available to you, definitely listen to it. I’ve already listened to about 7-8 sessions. Just 80 more to go.

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Moving Towards a Manifesto About Online Versus Print Formats

Tom Johnson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:40:23 +0000

As part of the solution to STC’s financial situation, some members have talked about making Intercom an online magazine only, removing the printed version that is mailed out to thousands of members each month. Many people think the move from paper to online would be a tremendous blow to the STC, one that would significantly decrease member value towards one of STC’s most attractive assets.

Sometimes people talk about this potential move, from print to an online format, with a doom and gloom that would make you think they’re foreclosing on a house or planning a funeral for a close relative or giving up their children for adoption.

When I hear these discussions, it blows me away because I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. I admit, the look and feel of paper can provide a comfortable reading experience if you’re immersed in a 200 page novel lying on your bed on a rainy day. But the Intercom and other professional magazines or journals are not novels. With professional publications like these, the online format better matches the reading behavior of the audience. In fact, online formats provide more than a dozen advantages that print formats lack, including everything from interactivity to portability, feeds, metrics, multimedia, and more.

I’ve had some thoughts brewing all week about how people read online, not just online versus print. It’s somewhat of a collage of assertions I’m relaying here. The gist of it is that any organization or company would be crazy not to convert their paper-based magazine, journal, or newsletter into an interactive online format.

Reading Habits. When it comes to professional, job-related information, most people read on the job, during little breaks, when they’re tired of some task, or during the morning when they’re checking their e-mail and the news, or during lunch as they’re eating, or on the bus or train if they ride one. Some even read a bit in the evenings, but not as much, and rarely do they consume professional, job-related blogs on the weekends. With these reading habits, short online content that is easily accessible from a computer where most people are working better meets the reader’s needs.

Digestibility. With articles for online magazines, you can push articles out little by little, several times a week, rather than dumping 20+ articles on readers all at once and overwhelming them, as periodic print magazines do. Because you can push out articles in a more digestible rate, reader consumption of the content increases. Of course if you push out 20 articles at once through an RSS feed, the effect is the same as pushing them out all at once in print.

Portability. With online content accessible from portable mobile devices, you can read the content anywhere without forethought or preparation. For example, you can read it while you’re waiting in line, waiting for your computer to reboot, when you’re in a boring meeting, or alone in the cafeteria, or at church, or in the bathroom, or in the car while your spouse is picking up groceries. Of course you can read a print magazine in similar situations — if you’re always carrying a print magazine in your back pocket. The trouble is, opportunities for reading often sneak up on you at various times of the day. Having the content accessible at your fingertips through a BlackBerry, iPhone, or other device can mean the difference between reading and not reading.

Interactivity. With print content, you can rarely talk to the author. But with online articles, you can usually click the author’s name and find an e-mail address or contact form, or you can leave a comment below the article, or link to the author’s site (which often sends a pingback to the author’s email), and you can receive feedback from the author the next hour or day. The ability to interact with the author to share your thoughts and reactions makes reading more of a conversational, personal experience that is more engaging.

Selection. Because online forms can draw upon a global audience and stream content from hundreds of sources into a running list with thousands of titles to choose from, you’re more likely to find articles that meet your specific, niche interests. In contrast, print magazines usually have only about 10-20 articles and must keep the content at a general interest level. Because the online experience provides such a broad selection, you have greater chances of finding content that is relevant, focused, and applicable to your own interests than with print formats. I wrote about this principle previously in Damping Versus Selection.

Speed. Print magazines often require several months notice between the time you request an article, the time the author submits it, the time necessary to edit the article, lay the magazine out, proofread it, publish it, and distribute it. In contrast, online articles can omit most of these steps and publish content quickly and conveniently, even overnight. Because of this speed, online formats can tap into real-time news, stay current with the latest topics, and not worry about whether an article released months from now will still be relevant. Readers also like to know that they’re getting the absolute latest news, down to the week or even day.

Cost. Online content is usually laid out in a few standard templates with advertising in the sidebar or embedded within the article. The layout is inexpensive, and the distribution is even less expensive. Online content has almost no printing costs, and no need to outsource the content to a contract agency that creates the layout, draws dozens of accompanying illustrations, and mails the content to readers across the world. These reduced production costs generally compensate for the loss of revenue from print advertising. The result is that you can give more content away to readers for free. In this model, both the readers and publishers benefit.

Advertising Opportunities. Most advertisers don’t harness the full potential of advertising opportunities available to them in the web format. Rather than just use static images in banners and sidebars, advertisers can incorporate multimedia, including short videos, flash, audio, polls, and interactivity. Users are just a click away from entering the advertiser’s site and learning more about a product (whereas with print, users have to turn on a computer and manually type in a website). Advertisers also have an opportunity for guest posting, because space is not a limitation. If more advertisers took advantage of multimedia in the interactive web space, they would discover that online advertising can be more powerful than static print advertising.

Content Manipulation. Because online formats give you the ability to rate articles, and then sort by the most popular, or highest rated, and to automate the ratings based on page views, trackbacks, and emails, you can create compelling groupings of the most popular articles online. These lists can create more interest in the content, as they draw upon the curiosity of readers. Top 10 lists, most e-mailed articles, most clicked-on posts of the week, or lowest rated articles groupings simply aren’t possible with print.

Metrics. With print formats, you can’t rely on automated metrics tools apart from human surveys to calculate the degree to which each article is read. In contrast, online formats give you a suite of tools to track readership. Google Analytics, Woopra, Omniture, Performancing — you can use any of these tools to find detailed information about reader demographics, time per post, time on the site, most read articles, click paths, and more. Your metrics aren’t a guess.

Search Engine Optimization. With online formats, your content is findable by the whole world. People in remote countries can search and discover you. Open access and indexing of your content on Google gives you visibility, which increases your readership because it makes you discoverable. The more you search engine optimize your content, the more findable you are, which means you can actively grow your audience each day. Print formats, in contrast, aren’t easily discoverable by users unless they buy your magazine. If it’s a niche magazine, chances are it isn’t in the supermarket checkout line, so how do people find out about it? And without access to the content, how do they trust you enough to pay for a subscription?

Feed Manipulation. Most online formats have RSS feeds, which you can manipulate in interesting ways. You can create mashups of feeds that integrate multiple sources, filtering, truncating, and outputting the feed titles according to what you want to see. You can display one RSS feed on multiple sites (for example, a “What We’re Reading” type of feed from Writer River). Most importantly, readers can pull in hundreds of feeds into a single feedreader and actually stay updated with all the content (at least the content that interests them). You can’t do any feed manipulation with print formats. Nor can readers keep up with hundreds of sources. At most, you may subscribe to five or six magazines and a journal or two.

Community. Perhaps the coolest thing about online formats is the community that develops in the comments. It’s not just a one-on-one type of experience between you and the author, but rather a community of readers interacting with each other. It’s a truism that many times the comments below an article are more interesting than the article itself. Articles with a lot of comments also increase your site’s search engine visibility, drawing more readers who can find you through keyword searches. Comments are user-generated content that increases your site’s findability and value. Again, print formats lack this advantage.

Concision. Although the quality of well-researched, thought-out, and carefully structured book material is on a level above what you usually find online, I frequently find that books carry on and on about ideas they could wrap up in 20 pages. Typically, a book author must write at least 200 pages to publish a book, whether the content merits the entire length of a book or not. In contrast, online authors give you the information in short, powerful bursts. The online author gets quickly to the point, without wasting your time or padding the content with fluff to fill the pages of a book. You don’t have to slog through 35 pages before the author gets to the core of the message. For more on this, see “How the Web and Weblog Have Changing Writing.”

Niche content. In a world that is trending more and more toward specialization, we need niche content. Even in a field such as technical communication, which some might feel is already niche, really isn’t. The field has at least a dozen subfields, including information architecture, usability, content management, single sourcing, design, video, technical writing, DITA, and more. We want to learn about what we want to learn about. Online magazines and blogs provide niche content in ways that print magazines can’t. Print magazines must rely on general industry interest. According to the Long Tail, the global audience available online allows niche products to survive and even dominate mainstream products in revenue.

Completion. I recently listened to an interview with Heather Armstrong (Dooce) about her experience writing a book versus writing blog posts. She compared writing a book to pulling her brain out through the top of her skull. A book is almost never finished. It drags on for years. Books require you to structure an arc throughout hundreds of pages. In contrast, a blog post is something you can finish in an evening. You can feel completion. And you receive feedback immediately after publishing it. You get the whole writing experience in a much quicker, painless way. You don’t have to wait for years to experience it all (if what you’re working on for years even gets published). The same might be said of readers: they can completely consume your content in one sitting, rather than chipping away at it for weeks.

Shareability. Content online is immediately shareable. When you read a post you like, you can retweet it, and chances are someone else will share it, and so on until you’ve suddenly reached dozens of potential new subscribers. When content is online, readers have a quick mechanism for sharing through Twitter, blogs, email messages, Facebook, social bookmarks, or other online technologies. Because the content is more immediately shareable, you can grow your audience more quickly and increase your influence. In contrast, with print, about the only thing readers can do is cut out the article and mail it through the postal service.

Multimedia. If you look at the New York Times or the New Yorker, they incorporate a lot of multimedia into their content. The online experience isn’t just about inserting a few Youtube videos here and there. Many times you see podcasts or videos that you can subscribe to, such as discussions with the author or conversations about the latest articles. These multimedia formats provide a whole new dimension to the content. In contrast, print is one-dimensional.

Wrapping It Up

Overall, I prefer to be online is for the whole web experience. It’s not just about interactivity, immediacy, or multimedia but rather all of these components working together to provide an experience that makes that the print magazine sitting in my mailbox, or the 300 page book on my shelf, or even the newsletter PDF waiting in my inbox so much less inviting than opening up Google Reader.

If you’re interested in getting involved in a collaborating reading project, I invite you to become a link journalist on Writer River. Writer River is a social news site for sharing information about the latest news in technical communication. I’m currently revamping the site with more tools and ways to share and discover content — tools not possible in the print world. If you aren’t already registered as an author, sign up now and stay tuned for new announcements later this week.

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Podcast — Blogging for Technical Communicators Webinar (Part 1)

Tom Johnson — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:55:47 +0000

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 30 min.

This podcast is a recording of the Blogging for Technical Communicators webinar that I gave to the STC-Rocky Mountain chapter on February 19, 2009. I split the recording into two parts due to length. This first half covers the following four topics:

The Blog as an Expected Format
Why Bother to Blog?
Search Engine Optimization: The #1 Perceived Value of Blogging
The Most Difficult Part of Blogging: Generating Content Regularly

Here’s the accompanying PowerPoint visual.

Note: After you listen to Part 1, be sure to continue to Part 2.

Links Mentioned in the Webinar

At some point during the webinar (either first or second part) I mentioned the following sites. Here are links to each:

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WordCamp 2008: WordPress SEO Mistakes We All Make

Tom Johnson — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:40:41 +0000

WordCamp 2008: WordPress SEO Mistakes We All Make.

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SEO Tips for Your Blog — Wordcamp Utah

Tom Johnson — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:40:09 +0000

Ash Buckles presented on “SEO tips for Your Blog” at Wordcamp Utah. Here are my notes from Ash’s presentation.

Strategy and Purpose

Ash says, You need a strategy with search engine optimization (SEO); otherwise you’re just pinging content all over the place. Everyone has an agenda, a strategy, or a reason – or should. If you don’t have a reason, you should shut your blog down and walk away.

(He later took some criticism for this comment.)

Content

You don’t need a ton of content on your posts (300 to 700 words is fine), but avoid posts shorter than that. You can’t create a call to action based on a single paragraph. If you run out of words, cover the journalistic Who-What-When-Why-Where.
Ensure keyword density in your posts. Use keywords in your title and content. (He didn’t mention much about placement, but I’d say definitely include keywords in the title and first paragraph.)
Focus your posts on how to solve a problem.
Hone your copywriting skills. You need to lead a reader down a path gracefully.

Search Engine Marketing

Create link bait with your content (make it enticing for others to link back to you).
Keep linkbacks varied. Google is suspicious about linkbacks that all have the same anchor text.
The more linkbacks you have, the greater SEO.
Add comments on other blogs.
Partner with other bloggers, such as by going to events such as Wordcamp.
Write guest posts (this can introduce you to a new audience).
Add your URL to blog directories.
Send your latest post links across Twitter. (Ash uses Twitter to follow links more than Google Reader.)

Recommended Plugins

Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Comment Luv, Contextual Related Posts, DoFollow, Easy Inline SWF, Easy Tube, FeedBurner, FeedSmith, flickrRSS, Google Analytics, Google XML Sitemaps, Keyword Luv, Make Clickable, Rewtweet, SEO Post Link, ShareThis, Subscribe to Comments, Twitter Tools, What Would Seth Godin Do, WordPress Mobile Edition, WP Auto Tagger, SEO slugs

Tips

Avoid static links that are spread across every page of your site, such as a blogroll. Google looks at these types of links suspiciously. Put your blogroll on just one page. (This is the first time I’ve heard this advice.)
Avoid duplicate content. The content duplicated between your category archives and your single posts is undesirable. Ash recommends using excerpts or titles on your category page instead.
Avoid thinking instead of doing. Don’t sit around contemplating hypotheticals all day.

Ash asked people to submit questions via Twitter. Interesting social phenomenon — he received tons of questions, but people felt free to heckle him playfully with tweets.

Tip: Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Posts to Increase Your Readership

Tom Johnson — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:46:34 +0000

When you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, you can increase your blog’s subscribers in a long-term way. You don’t have to stiffen your prose to apply search engine optimization — you just have to apply keywords in the right places.

For example, my post on “Technical Writing Careers — Answering 13 Questions About Technical Writing Jobs” targeted searches for “technical writing careers.”

My post on “How I Create Video Tutorials” targeted searches for “create video tutorials.”

I don’t always search-engine-optimize my posts, but when I do, the post has a lot more hits. Ideally, I should search-engine-optimize all my posts.

I think we underestimate the importance of search engine optimization. I’d even say that SEO is one of the most important techniques for writing blog posts. For example, today I received an email from someone who wrote,

I found your website while searching “podcast” and “Technical Writing”.

I was invisible to this reader until he found me in the search engines. Sure you have your regular readers who occasionally look at your RSS feed and visit your site. But 75% of the time, your visitors come from people searching for specific keywords using search engines. If you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, many more people will find you. Your readership will steadily increase. Neglect SEO and your posts only live until they pass from your blog’s home page.

Right now, I have 1436 subscribers — about 100 more subscribers than attendees at the last STC annual conference. Of course I’ve been blogging for two and a half years, and I have close to 500 posts. But I know applying the right keywords to my posts in a search-engine-optimized way has helped me attract as many readers as I have.

One plugin that helps is the WordPress All in One SEO pack plugin. It allows me to create a search-engine-optimized title for Google, and a different title for my readers.

In addition to that SEO plugin, I try to add the keywords as the first words in my title, as the first words in my first paragraph, and then mention the keywords about 6 times throughout the first 3 paragraphs. That’s it.

Of course figuring out what the right keywords are (using a tool like Wordtracker) is another task, which I usually skip. It takes too long. I usually just ask myself how I would search for the topic and use that phrase.

Notes from My First WordPress Meetup

Tom Johnson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:22:32 +0000

I attended my first WordPress meetup yesterday. Here’s a 20-second video that Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices took at the event. My wife and I appear at the very end, engaged in conversation with a couple of seasoned bloggers who make their living from a quotations page that gets 200,000 hits a day. (By the way, I found this video on Janet Meiners’ site (aka Newspaper Girl), who wrote an excellent post about the event.)

Click To Play

I learned a few interesting things at this meetup:

You can make a living from the ad revenue from your site. Laura and Michael Moncur run a Quotations Page site, which gets 200,000 hits a day and provides their primary income. They started it in 1994 and use TribalFusion for the ads. You’d think they feverishly add dozens of quotes a day to keep up the rankings, but Laura said they add maybe half a dozen new quotes a week. The key is that they started so early.
The most profitable readers are those who don’t find what they want on your site. They click the ads because your content doesn’t provide the answers. This provides an interesting irony about writing: to make money with ads, stack up your content with SEO qualities to attract searchers, and then leave them wanting more. (Of course, it’s a double-edged sword: if you don’t write useful content, no one will link to you, and your SEO rank will drop.)
Sometimes the ads displayed on your site contradict the actual recommendations of your post. Sure you want readers to click the ads, but … oh the ethics of making money.
Joseph Scott, one of the Automaticc employees behind WordPress, says WordPress 2.4 will offer a total redesign of the administrative panel, a complete UI overhaul that will make strides in usability.
We talked about WordPress’s ability to attract volunteer forum moderators who feel their calling is to help users solve their problems, and they work all hours of the day in this calling. None of us understood the motivations of forum volunteers, but we all appreciated their help. Laura said that people even send her quotes all the time to add to their site.
Text-link ads can hurt your SEO because Google penalizes you for your link relationship with spammy sites. You might make a few bucks from the ad, but it will hurt your rankings, and then your site will lose traffic.
We talked about the dangers of syndicating your content to other sites, such as corporatewebsite.com. If you do a search for your post title, and their site appears higher than yours, you’re losing valuable traffic. (Because of this, I decided to stop allowing corporatewebsite to occasionally post content from my site, even with attributions.)
We asked Joseph why WordPress doesn’t provide more attractive themes. Everyone agreed that most WordPress themes are visually amateur, and some are embarrassing. Joseph said WordPress doesn’t provide more themes in the default install because including themes also means excluding themes. Whenever they make a decision to include/exclude a theme, hundreds of upset people write in angrily complaining about the unfairness of not including their theme. I believe he said WP.themes.net is dying for the same reason.
I recommended that WordPress include the Alex King’s Popularity Contest as a Top 10 Posts widget built into the core, but Joseph said the same thing happens with plugins as with themes: people go crazy when they realize their plugin was excluded. My wife and I were still in favor of the reality check.
Rather than going to all the trouble to customize themes manually, someone recommended just buying a professional one for $50 to $100. It’s well-worth the hours you will spend trying to customize a free one. In fact, the guy I was talking to (Thom Allen), says he often builds sites for clients from themes he buys. About all he has to do, then, is set up the site, install the theme, and input the client’s content. I totally agree with this idea. I’m not a graphic designer, and it takes me a long time to customize a theme. So today I started surfing around for premium WordPress themes and saw one I like here: WordPress Magazine theme. My wife hasn’t given me permission to buy it, and it’s too magazine-ish for me anyway, but I’m on the lookout.
We really appreciated the people who came up to talk to us. We arrived late (and the incorrect address didn’t help — like Newspaper Girl, we also used Goog-411 to find where the restaurant was). When we got there, the two big round tables were packed, especially the one where Matt Mullenweg was sitting. But some outgoing people pulled their chairs up next to our table and were extremely friendly to us, including Thom Allen, who is organizing the upcoming podcamp in SLC, and also Michael Moncur, Laura Moncur, and Joseph Scott.
As a final note, I was really glad my wife joined me for this event, because otherwise I would have felt too nerdy alone.

By the way, if you’re local to SLC and want to get on the blogger mailing list, contact Laura Moncur and she’ll add you.

Feb 5 Update:

Rocky Mountain Voices posted an interview with Matt Mullenweg here (at the same restaurant, I believe). Matt talks about how they monetize WordPress and their new 29.5 million dollar funding.