(Churchill, writing like him could see your blog hits go up. – distributed under the Creative Commons Licence)
Writing for online you have a whole new set of rules to guide your expression. It has been discussed in the mag lab and in our online lectures and boils down to that dreaded TLA: SEO.
Search engine optimisation has so far been explained with little more than a comparison between two now infamous headlines ‘Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious’ and ‘Freddy Star Ate My Hamster’. Useful, but so far not developed on so I’ll attempt to elaborate here.
Winston Churchill has been mentioned on a number of occasions. It may have something to do with this little quote “short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”A trained journalist he knew the value of tight writing, and as Jacob Neilson explains on his blog calling a spade a spade is an important step in internet marketing.
Adam Tinworth blogged on search engine optimisation in 2006 when reporting on the RBI conference. He made a number of key points, separating them into on page and off page tips. First of all he suggested using words and phrases that readers would use and to avoid puns and metaphors. He also goes on to say that putting the most important information first in the headline and first sentance and paragraph is important for SEO.
His off page recommendations are not particuarly controversial but make the point people should not be scared to send people to other sites via their linking.
Timeliness is one of the most crucial aspects of writing for online. 36 hours is the recommended maximum time frame for covering an event. Sure, the news chain can be observed after that but initial analysis needs to take place pretty soon after news becomes news.
Looking at my own blog stats has become a bit of a geeky hobby, as the guest lecturers discuss their own massive traffic flows making mine look paltry in comparison. Plus Jeff Jarvis mentioned on Twitter earlier this week that by placing audio on his blog he had 17,000 hits. I got about 13.
But some lessons can be learnt. My most active day came last week when a kindly soul responded to a comment I had posted on someone’s blog asking if they could offer me any tips and comment on my attempts on embedding audio. That day saw a whopping 36 hits. Phew!
The front page of my WordPress account tells me today that my post from last week, featuring stylista Gok Wan’s latest foray into making women ‘feel good about themselves’ is the most active out of all of my posts. So after blogging relatively seriously about…blogging, it turns out all anyone wants to read about is a Channel 4 show called Miss Naked Beauty. I feel a bit dupped and also horribly tempted to ignore all warnings about not tagging everything with ‘David Beckham’ to direct unwitting tweenagers to my non-David obsessed blog…
Women's Health Base 