Posts tagged Readers
SEO Book Gives Readers a Visual Step-by-Step Marketing Blueprint
May 13th
“Search Engine Optimization: The One Visual SEO Book You’ll Really Ever Need” (Third Edition) by Kristopher Jones is out now and covers everything from SEO basics to technical, social, and local search. Learn how you can win your own signed copy.
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SEO Book Gives Readers a Visual Step-by-Step Marketing Blueprint – Search Engine Watch
May 13th
 PR Web |
SEO Book Gives Readers a Visual Step-by-Step Marketing Blueprint
Search Engine Watch The third edition of his "Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing" is fabulous for budding SEOs, and still proves to be a great reference guide for SEO professionals of all levels. Perhaps you focus on … SEARCHEN NETWORKS® Announces Placement on Independent Search … Search Placement Marketing Has Moved To A New Location Marketing Webinar: How the Convergence of Public Relations and Search … |
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Losing Traffic (and Sleep) Over Google Reader’s Death? Here’s What You Can Do About It
Apr 16th
Mourning the death of Google Reader? You are not alone. When the search giant announced that it would be retiring the news aggregator on July 1st, several news junkies wasted no time conveying their dismay and the interwebs really did its part to spread the word; petitions to stop Google from killing the service were [...]
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The post Losing Traffic (and Sleep) Over Google Reader’s Death? Here’s What You Can Do About It appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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6 Feed Readers to Replace the Google Reader Void
Mar 28th
So July 1st is looming in the distance with gray clouds hanging heavy and your anxiety is building as to what you’re going to do the day the Reader dies. No one really knows why. Well, you have options! Everything is going to be okay! Here are the top 6 best ways to get your [...]
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[Video] How Tech PR Can Work Better With Journalists & How Readers Can Benefit
Oct 11th
Brian, Dan, Fruzsina and Jon are joined by tech PR consultants Zach Servideo and Jocelyn Johnson to talk about what’s right and wrong with the relationship between PR reps and journalists covering technology. It’s a big conversation, and this is just the start.
Please chime in with feedback. The topic that’s directly about tech, but it is about getting people who love tech the best information possible. Your views on this stuff are the most important, so share them in the comments!
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Sites With Social Reading Apps Sacrifice Readers to Facebook
May 9th
There’s wonderful news this week. Facebook’s frictionless “social reading” apps have seen a devastating decline in traffic. It was tempting to just blame it on how much they suck, but as Josh Constine rightly pointed out, the real story is that Facebook turned off the traffic hose. The lack of control should be reason enough for publishers to abandon them. But the better reason is that they throw readers under the bus.
Anti-Social Reader Apps
Facebook has been tinkering with the presentation of stories from Open Graph reading apps over the past month or so. The most noticeable change is that they’ve moved from the ticker in the sidebar to a big, ugly blob in the News Feed called “Trending Articles.” Of course, these aren’t really the most popular articles on Facebook, just the ones people shared passively through social reader apps.
Here’s a typical example of what the Trending Articles box looks like:
Do you think Bill is glad Facebook broadcasted the fact that he clicked on that story?
Facebook Has The Power
In the wake of some easy blog posts about the decline of social reader apps, their defenders (read: the publications who use them) began explaining publicly that this was all due to Facebook’s manipulation of its interface. Storify co-founder Burt Herman collected this conversation in an interesting Storify post.
In the mother of all annoying Internet ironies, I learned by clicking on this link from Twitter that Storify had become a social reader app itself.
What a shame! I had given Storify permission to post to my Timeline before, back when I had to share to Facebook intentionally, and it used that permission to share my reading habits automatically.
“Just An Experiment”
Herman tells me that the feature has been there for a while, and it’s “just an experiment” to try and draw more attention to the great work of Storify’s authors, which, in Storify’s case, are its users. But what about the readers? Why should they have to opt out of broadcasting information about themselves, especially on a site like Storify, where people read politically sensitive stories?
The question gives Herman pause. “It’s interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I’m not sure I always do,” Herman says. “Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it’s not something I want to share.” Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step?
And what’s the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? “I mean, clearly it’s more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something,” Herman says. “It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared.”
If that were the case, Facebook would fill News Feeds with passively shared stories as if they were equally important as intentional shares. It is indeed fortunate that Facebook doesn’t currently work that way. So should publishers leave that choice up to Facebook and its indifferent algorithms?
In Storify’s defense, it’s pretty easy to turn off the frictionless sharing, and it’s just one part of an otherwise useful set of Facebook integrations. If you’re quick, you can even cancel a share from the top nav bar before it goes out to Facebook. But you still have to opt out yourself. It’s disappointing to see so many great publishers turn over so much of their user experience to Facebook.
The Attention Paywall
“Social reader” apps are just like paywalls, except instead of money, readers pay with their friends’ attention. It’s a feature built to benefit Facebook first and publishers second. There’s not much left for the user after that.
Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, “This matters to me,” frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There’s no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there’s very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.
In the worst cases, such as the Washington Post’s Facebook app, your friends have to install an app, giving the Washington Post access to their News Feeds, before they can even read the article! To call that a “social” app is just a cynical ploy.
These kinds of features are all about Facebook, because Facebook is where the easy eyeballs are. “Facebook has a lot of power,” Herman says. “You can’t deny that there’s hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, right?” When Facebook tweaked the interface for displaying social reader stories, it upended the strategy many publishers had relied on to reach those people with minimal effort. That’s not a sustainable way to build an audience.
“Clearly, [Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent,” Herman says. “I guess they’re realizing, you know, maybe these things aren’t as engaging as they thought they would be.”
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Best Practices For Writing For Online Readers
Mar 16th
I have less than 30 seconds to capture your attention with this post, so here goes: if you read some, most or all of the next 750 words or so, you will know how to write Web copy that is more useful to readers of your blog or Web site.
As we reported yesterday visual content is continuing its steady rise in dominance over written content. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on good writing: if anything, it means we need to think harder about how we write for online readers.
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Online Readers Are Different
Seems pretty obvious, right? But the fact is, many of us still write the same way online as we do for books, magazine articles and other long-form and traditional print mediums. Research hightighted in books like Reading In The Brain shows that online readers use vastly different sections of the brain than offline readers. In short, the brain is conditioned to skip around when online reading, as clicking on a link, for example, will reward the brain with new images and content.
With offline readers, we can take our time and develop points with long blocks of text and narrative, and with fewer visual elements. Offline reading rewards the brain that slips into a state of deeper concentration.
In Plain English, Please
Your writing – offline or online – is effective when readers take away your message. Writing effectively online doesn’t mean that every reader reads every single word that you write (and even if they done, Dale’s Cone of Experience argues they’ll ownly remember 10% of what they read). It means they can quickly and efficiently get the information that is most important to them and move on.
People who read our blog posts come from all over, and from a wide range of backgrounds. The reason they choose to read a particular post will vary from reader to reader. Your job as the writer is to make sure they can find the information that is most important to them and move on to using that information.
Best Practices
I’ve spent a good portion of the past two years researching reading habits of online readers and have been sharing that research with writers, bloggers and journalists, as I did during my presentation at BlogWorld East last May and as I continue to do with my students at the college where I teach.
I can talk for hours on the subject, but if asked for the most effective ways to get online readers to read what you write, I would offer these strategies as the most important, which are backed up by eye-track studies as being an effective way to get your message across to online readers:
- Write compelling but clear headlines: Don’t get cute. Online and in print, the headline is almost always the first thing readers look at. Make sure it is clear and gives a good idea of what the post is about, while still leaving the reader wanting more.
- Write in the active voice: Effective online writing is all about getting to the point, and on a line-by-line basis, the most effective way to do that is to use the active voice, which naturally lends a sense of urgency to your writing. The easiest way to do that is to start each sentence with the subject, immediately follow that with a strong, active verb, and then follow that with the direct object. Avoid adverbs: they’re a telling sign that you chose the wrong verb.
- Online writing is visual: Long, dense paragraphs turn off online readers. Create white space in your copy by keeping paragraphs short and using bulleted lists when appropriate. Use bold text to accent key information and use block or pull quotes to draw readers into the copy.
- One main idea per sentence: Keep sentences on point. Avoid multiple clauses and phrases, and lots of information stops and commas. Make sure each sentence has one idea, and not much more than that.
- No sentence without a fact: Every line you write needs to move the story forward. If a sentence doesn’t have a fact, cut it.
How long should it be?
I hate this question and always offer a smart-aleck answer: as long as it needs to be. If every sentence has a main idea and no sentence is without a fact, keep going. I do, however, recommend the 3-2-1 formula. For every 1,000 or so words that you write in an online article or blog post, be sure to include:
- Three subheads: Subheads are bold, one-line headlines that break up long chunks of text and organize information. Keep the same headline-writing rules in mind when you write subheads.
- Two links: Links offer additional information for readers who want to go deeper, and they also give your post authenticity and transparency about where you information came from without getting into long, narrative attributions.
- One graphical element: A photo, a chart or anything else visual helps readers. Whatever you use, make sure it advances the story: don’t just put a photo in the post for the sake of posting a photo.
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Dot Com Infoway Wins Readers’ Choice Award for SEO – PR.com (press release)
Feb 5th
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Dot Com Infoway Wins Readers' Choice Award for SEO
PR.com (press release) Chennai, India, February 05, 2012 –(PR.com)– Dot Com Infoway (DCI), a premier IT company in India, has been recognized by PromotionWorld for its cutting-edge SEO services with the Readers' Choice Award for the year 2011. |
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Dot Com Infoway Wins Readers’ Choice Award for SEO – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Feb 5th
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Dot Com Infoway Wins Readers' Choice Award for SEO
Virtual-Strategy Magazine Chennai, India, February 05, 2012 –(PR.com)– Dot Com Infoway (DCI), a premier IT company in India, has been recognized by PromotionWorld for its cutting-edge SEO services with the Readers' Choice Award for the year 2011. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
