App of the Week – Isn’t Really an “App”
While I discovered some cool iPhone and iPad apps this week, such as Reflekt, and Merriam Webster’s Scrabble Dictionary app, that I will talk about another time, I’ve been focusing on my business this week. The Done Nesting site is coming along nicely though you cannot see it from the page that currently displays. That will change soon. I wish I could tell you all about it, but it just isn’t quite time. What I can say is that much of the site will be free to access and use with a simple, no cost, registration. There will be other types of registration and offerings for private networking and services. I have plans to take care of my sage sistah’s needs better than those yucky old platforms that sell your info and bombard you with crap. Oh! I just can’t wait to share it all with you! Stay tuned, but in the mean time take care of YOUR needs using Google Plus, or Google+ –whatever lexical presentation you prefer.
I’m so excited! Why? Because the time is right for women of a certain age, and experience level, to move en masse to launch the cyber presence of the “old girl” network. Groups are launching all over the place, such as Facebook, dedicated to the Soccer Moms and Mommy Bloggers who are moving into a more versatile phase of life than the one dedicated to raising small children. We are stepping out from behind all those labels and doing for ourselves.
I wanted you to enjoy the Annie and Aretha tune of “Sistahs are Doing For Themselves” while you read on but I couldn’t find a legit copy to include so I’m including this legit awkward to use stream of interviews/music of Annie Lennox. To get to the video I whose message matches up with this post, hit play, then that you can get to that video by clicking the triangle at the bottom right side of the video inset which shows a play list and then select the EPK1 video in which Annie talks about the changes we women make to accomplish our goals and experience our joys. LOVE that woman. Whew. What a lot of work to get to this video. But hey, it is free and legit.
After you click play, click the triangle at the bottom right side of the video inset and select EPK1 video to get the video I mention in post.
In order to network effectively, all social media needs to be pulled together into a coherent stream of information coming from you. If you are an advocate for a group, a writer or blogger looking for readers, an entrepreneur or business owner you will want to effectively use each social media platform as best you can and focus on the ones that best support your goals. Twitter and Facebook awareness and use are fairly common place now. Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr are image heavy social media platforms that are also very popular.
Most people don’t really think of Google as social media, but Google+ is probably the most important social media platform. It integrates with all things Google. Google is the Goddess of search. Yes the internet is female, didn’t you know? Check out the Feminization of the Interwebs that I wrote in April. Google search partially bases its rank and relevancy search scores on the +1’s added. Adding a plus on a post is one of the most efficient and effrective ways to have your readership support your site. Google plus does everything all the other social media platforms do, and it taps into search. Now that most SEO is defunct and extremely difficult to game, use Google plus, Google+, to stay up on search, networking, and connecting in ways you define. For more basic info I recommend checking out this slideshow by Irina Shamaeva.
How To Build A Following
Follow, friend, retweet, link, circles, networks…. It gets confusing, doesn’t it? I get confused and off track all the time. But I also get back on track all the time. These following five subjects are what I’ve gleaned from tons of research on having a successful blog. Follow along with me to see if they work. I’m implementing them as strategies and in 6 weeks we will see how I did.
The Five Elements of Successful Blogs
Attitude
For the next 6 weeks or so, longer if my strategy works, I will be trying out these techniques for getting Twitter, Facebook, Triberr, BlogHer, and most of all Blog readers. “Some people call them followers, I call them readers.” (Do not think of Slingblade here!) You see I have been building up to this point for 5 years and I am ready to rock the social media world. Attitude is everything, I hear. Plus I have worked with information for a couple of decades and know a bit about what works and what I am willing, ethically, to do. Let’s watch it work!
Taxonomy
What you will see here on my blog at ReasonCreek.com will be more posts, shorter (for me), pithy posts with one category, but lots of tags. There will be quality links. Search engines will love me. Quality and real networks are the new SEO.
Quality
Posts will contain quality information, and will not just be hawking products like many sites fall into the trap of doing. Neither will I be filling up my side bars with badges. If it is on my site, I truly believe in it. Yowza. That is right – integrity will out! It isn’t about numbers. It is about having something to say.
Sharing
I will share my own posts. I will ask others to share. I will share things I truly find interesting and let people know I shared their thing. Simple, no? No. But that will provide info too, info that I can share. I will cross-post, but the posts will vary – Google punishes you for identical content.
Promo
I have my elevator pitch about my blog, my book, and my writing on a train trip, and business cards with differing info on the back. Have pitch, and takeaways, will travel.
Come back and see how I have done!
These are the essential ingredients for the ways I will improve my blog, twitter, and network presence. in the next month to 6 weeks. And yes, I will post about this and how it worked mid-August. So set a calendar reminder for say, um, Monday, August 20th to check out my evaluation of how my experiment using these 5 components went. I will title the post How To Build A Following, Follow-Up. You can copy this and put the url on your calendar now even though the actual content will appear on August 20th, then when the reminder pops up, you can see how I did.
Women May Be the Winners of the Google SEO Wars
For those of use who watch the web search industry develop, the recent transformations within it have created excitement to say the least. Everything has changed. Or at least that is the current buzz. Major changes have been made to how Google does search over the last year. That is true. Search is always evolving, so do not panic and simply inform yourself about what is happening to the information process that bloggers count on to fairly index and refer to their blogs.
I remember being heavily penalized by a subject area reviewer volunteering for DMOZ for having a page on one of my earliest websites that had a list of books of particular interest to Late Boomers that linked to Amazon.com. The editor trashed the whole site because of the page. I was livid. I saw many other sites that were far more commercial than mine do well. Links were where it was at way back in the early adolescence of the internet. If you didn’t link properly, properly according to whom I never did figure out, your site could nose dive. Even though it was a directory and not a search engine with which I had trouble, that is when I started paying some attention to what came to be known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
Google rose to prominence and finally dominated the market a couple of years into the new millennium. Checking your page rank on Google became as common place for individuals with web pages as checking the number of hits your website received. Almost immediately search engine “professionals” emerged from the primordial info slime and the 21st Century’s first group of snake oil sales persons integrated themselves in amongst the few real SEO professionals. Lots of people who pass themselves off as experts are con artists, but most SEO sellers are just well-intentioned people who do not know as much as they think they know. Real SEO requires staying on top of what are essentially trade secrets – the proprietary algorithms that are used to fuel web search.
What are called ink farms and content farms were some of the major problems for the search engine companies. Link farming attempted to create higher rank or search page result listings by trading or selling links that would increase a site’s supposed credibility or authority as at one time incoming links were treated as valid reflections of the authority and influence of the site. Linking just to increase links inflated the number of links while decreasing the worth of a link.
Search engines, such as Google, began to do battle with link farms mid-decade into the ’00s. Link farming slowly withered as search engines began to cut the weight links had in search, and content was declared king. Then sites had to have content or articles or blog posts to rank highly in search results. Content rather than links then began to be farmed, or more accurately ranched, as major content farms used two main strategies to produce content for sites that would fake out the search engines.
One type of farm hired individuals to write lots of stuff for very little money, so the quality was not that great, but the quantity of the content was enough to feed lots of sites, many actually used regurgitated content. The content farms then sold to sites so that the sites would have lots of fiber for the search engines to digest.
Another type of farm hired people to write posts and articles that seeded keywords at just the right frequency in pieces that did not even have to make much sense. This was done because keywords are used in meta tags and should be reflected in the content that the meta-tags describe. This was the juncture at which content became confused with key words.
Now we seems to be entering a new focus phase for search engines. I like to think that while content is still king but the but the power behind the thrown has been recognized and is queen in all of her contextual glory. It is good to be the queen, in the Mary Englebreit sense of the word., because all those cherries and patterns, color, attitude and relationships are what matter in the process of getting the searcher connected to the information he or she wants. Social authority is the new buzzword for search. To rank well in the brave new world of search you need have quality content and that translates, according to the word on the street, to often updated, non-keyword seeded content that is accessed by important people.
The “important people” aspect of the new search is reflects the increasing awareness of the heavy hitting nature of social media. The recommendations of people you trust, as measured by your info stream with them more than whether you actually know them or not, is the “new” and secret ingredient of Google search.
Some folks, such as the women who started the BlogHer network, Lisa, Elise, and Jory, were paying attention long before Google began to pay attention and these savvy women had launched conferences and networks based on a feminized understanding of information in the digital age. Sites that foreshadowed the coming changes, which some people are only now “getting,” and all the concomitant changes to search that have resulted reflect what I like to think of as the feminization of the internet. (I am writing more about this topic this week in what may or may not become a series of articles.)
To restate this succinctly, what has happened recently with Google stems from search engine companies trying to outmaneuver scam artists whose sole purpose in life is to get you to look at stuff in which you have absolutely no interest. Deceptive ads, promises of free prizes, and manipulation of search engine results are three of the most common ways such “marketers” do this. This practice gives real marketers who work to deliver a good product a bad name, but be that as it may, everyone does want your attention on the web. So while some of us may be expressing concern as we mull over the whole Google privacy hoo-haa, at the very same time, some things Google is doing are very much in our interest as women, household managers, content creators, and savvy private and public consumers of information. Google appears to be using relationships and networks (of both creators and consumers) in the algorithms that determine what the authority is of individual chunks of information on the web. And women are the mavens of communication and relationship networks.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that build most our culture. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.
10 Things Lists – Should Content Be Organized This Way?
A “10 Things” List is a popular structure for online content and print magazine articles. But why 10? The Arabic number system we use is based on units of 10. We have 10 fingers. These are the answers I’ve most often gotten in response to this question. But when we organize content, is there a better structure to use?
Many experts in how the brain and language work have stated over the last many decades that George Miller’s research from 50 years ago that was published as “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” offers a handy way to organize information that maps onto how our brain works. Over the decades there have been many misapplications, over-extensions, and misinterpretations of Miller’s basic findings that there are fairly well defined limits on the number of items we can manipulate while in short term memory. Miller found 5 to 9 items are the standard limits for list item recall. There are other constraints that other researchers have found. This fact doesn’t invalidate Miller’s findings. Neural systems are among the most complex systems in our world. There can be more more than one generalized rule teased from a complex system.
So far there isn’t one that involves the number 10. So convention appears to be the only real determining factor for using the number 10 in top ten lists, ten worst lists, ten things to know about articles, ten new items or products lists. So should you produce or procure ten-based lists for your content needs? Sure. Why not. But you will join a gah-zillion other ten-based lists floating around out there.
Why not make your lists stand out a bit and possibly make them more memorable by finding coherent groupings of your content subject and presenting them as linked sets that can be easily remembered? I can’t think of a single reason not to go with numbers smaller than 10.
My own preference is to combine the memory magic of the number seven plus or minus two with another magic numeric principle hinged on the number four as discussed by researcher Nelson Cowan in his work. The “magic” associated with four of anything is that we can know (rapid enumeration of small numbers of objects) the number of a group of objects instantly if we see a group of four or less things. More than four requires counting.
You don’t want your reader to have to count, you want them to be able to remember your salient points, and you want them to be able to recall examples of each point you make too, if at all possible. So how do you do it? Well logical grouping of the points you make, and keeping those points to as few as possible, to the fewest that are truly central to your topic is the best way. Delivering a good product that hangs together is always better than padding your list to get to 10 components.
Some techniques you might employ to manage weighty lists containing more than 7 – 9 items would be to use sub-groupings. For example if you had a listing of 100 color names you could organize them by their closest primary color, by the ROY G. BIV rainbow schema (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet,) by pastels and brights, by how well they render online (web safe colors,) or even by order they are added to languages (if the language names only two colors the two words mean wet/dark and dry/light, if it has three then red is added, and so on.) Clever sub-groupings will help the reader remember groups of details. Experiment and keep track of returning visitors to articles that have incorporated this technique. A successful pairing with bring return visitors and referrals from those return visitors.
Happy organizing!