“What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.” Samuel Johnson
First and foremost, allow me to thank Chris Spooner, designer and writer, for motivating me to write this post as, what I would like to call it, a follow up to his recent post: 10 Usability Crimes You Shouldn’t Commit. I highly appreciate the unintentional inspiration!
Content is the Key by www.all-sorts.biz
There are millions of posts out there that provide you with tips and know-how’s for appealing content; stressing how the post should be long sometimes while, at other times, advising you to keep it short. Telling you that you need to have clear headings yet highlighting that they should not be different.
For this post, we will spice it up a bit for you! We will address the 10 content crimes you should avoid committing in efforts to answer the following questions: What kind of content has the power to drive people away from your site? What content related flaws might cause visitors to disregard the mere thought of reading your posts? What are the most annoying mistakes you can do in content writing?
10 Content Crimes You Should Avoid Committing:
1. Avoid Cluttering!
Although you might feel the need to write long posts to convey and explain a certain idea or concept, and despite having to write pages of factual content as times, make sure that your page has a clean clutter-free look!
Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?
Below you will find our fifth specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing & Advertising, 3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.
I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript? Matt Cutts – Google
Google is re-writing a large chunk of the way they index web pages (a new algorithm called Caffeine); one of their major objectives is to make searching real fast. Fast web usage is one of the core principles that has always defined the way people perceive Google’s brand identity. It is Google’s culture to make things simple and fast, and now they want to spread it – doing what they believe to be the right thing for users – and push it all over the web.
While in an earlier interview, Matt Cutts pointed out that he doesn’t think there are going to be a lot of changes in the search list results, of the new Google speed algorithm news managed to trigger different reactions. On the good side, Google search would become much faster improving the web experience for all Google’s users, in addition to improving the experience of the web at large with sites paying extra attention to their load speed in order to improve their ranking. On the down side, some people believe that it is not fair that ranking sites is based on their load speed as big sites with more cash can invest more in improving their load speed by moving to better servers while smaller sites with good content won’t be able to compete! While speed may mean a better user experience, it doesn’t always mean a better content.
So at which side are you? Do you think that adding a weight to sites loading speed in Google’s ranking algorithm is a good idea? Do you think it would really impact our web experience? Would it give Google an edge over Bing? Let us know your opinion in the comments section.
The last couple of days, I was reading about how to get your site to rank higher in Google. There are many tweaks you can do to insure that your site is Google friendly. One of the controversial topics was whether having your pagesXHTML/HTML valid helps in SEO ranking or not. It’s clear that if your site has made a mess out of the HTML code, a search engine spider might have a tough time reading and parsing your page, which might lead to errors and in turn lower ranking. So, I decided that it’s better to be safe than sorry, and started converting the entire blog to XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid.
Thoughtpick Valid XHTML
Let’s start…
The main issues targeted by this post
On the Thoughtpick blog, we have a few plugins that were causing XHTML validation issues. Mainly:
DISQUS Commenting System: At least 4 or 5 XHTML validation errors were generated by this plugin. The solutions are listed below.
Wordpress 2.8+ “role” problem, and how to fix it.
Youtube and Vimeo embed object issues: the <embed> tag is invalid for XHTML 1.0, to fix the issue, I wrote a small function.
Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?
Below you will find our fourth specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing & Advertising, 3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.
Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?
Below you will find our third specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing& Advertising3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.
@contentmanagerArticle Marketing Tip: Never trust your ghostwriter to tell the story that needs to be told. Always fact check their work b4 publication.
Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?
Below you will find our second specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing& Advertising3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.
About 8 hours ago, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) tweeted about my post entitled “Reclaiming the Longest Tweet in History at 250 characters!”. I noticed a spike immediately, and the highest number of concurrent users surfing the site was 3000 users! This post is dedicated to show you what you can expect when someone as popular as @aplusk tweets about you.
Ashton Kutcher #1 on Twitter according to wefollow.com
Note: at the time of writing, Kutcher was the #1 on twitter.com based on the number of users following him: 2,780,274 followers.
45 minutes after the tweet…
As soon as I was able to think again, it occurred to me, with GetClicky, I can use the “Spy” mode to see how many visitors are surfing the blog in real-time. I was shocked to see that about 10 people where accessing the site per second! The concurrent number of visitors at this point was about 1500!
To share this experience, I took a video screen capture. Watch it below:
The stats 8 hours later…
As expected from a real-time messaging platform like Twitter, the life span of a tweet is not too long. The good thing about twitter is that people Retweet what they like, that definitely gave the traffic a bump up and kept the traffic coming for a longer time.
If you have a self-hosted blog and you’re trying to get loads of traffic via Digg, Reddit, Twitter or any other social medium, you need to make sure your blog can survive the spike in traffic. In our case, we got 2% failure rate due to database configuration issues (see #3 below):
Make sure you have a powerful server hosting your blog – I’m using MediaTemple Grid Service, it’s quite good in handling traffic, but gives me some weird glitches every once in a while. Upgrading to a dedicated server soon!
Make sure you have the WP Super Cache plugin installed. This plugin serves static copies of your posts without running PHP or connecting to the database, in turn saving your precious CPU cycles and memory usage.
Make sure you have the MySQL my.cnf file variable “max_connections” set to 100 or more. We had it set to 60, but that was not enough!
Consider testing how your blog loads on iPhone, Blackberry, iPod, Android and other phones. We received 12% of the traffic from mobile users!
I’m now considering using CSS Sprites for the blog, which reduces load on the Apache server by delivering all the small images in one image file.
Make sure you have a big and clear retweet button. I don’t need to explain why that’s important. Wordpress blog administrators have 2 options that I’m aware of: TweetMeme or BackType Tweetcount.
Always keep an eye on your log files!
Did I miss any points for surviving The Kuther Effect? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.
Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?
Well, I for one would love to have such a collection of valuable information at my disposal, not TweetMeme or Twitturly style, rather ThoughtPick style!
Below you will find a specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: Social Media & Marketing, Design, SEO & AdSense, Writing and Motivational.
Interview 140 Brief: During our research and while looking into different profiles on Twitter, we stumbled upon a certain trend being carried out by a few great Twitter lovers who have the ability to use Twitter in a way that makes the world a better place! Thus, the idea of Interview in 140 characters came into play! We decided to pick one Twitter user every once in a while and interview him/her about different topics of interest to the whole Twitter community and us as well.
Thoughtpick's twitter interviews...
A line about the interviewee:
Matt Sawyer is a search engine optimization and a social media expert. He works at Datadial, a London based web design and marketing agency. He is in charge of the company’s blog where he constantly delivers insightful information regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media (SM).
With a staggering 26,771 followers on Twitter and more than 2,900 quality tweets, one can figure out that @MattUK is an excellent source for SEO and SM advice.
He participated in the Search Marketing Expo that took place last month and summarized the outcome in a – must read – blog post. Search Marketing Expo is an event where SEO experts gather in one place to discuss the latest trends and issues regarding internet search and current Web marketing trends.
@MattUK: "For me social media is less about delivering visitors, more about delivering influencers..."
Interview140 Analysis and Lessons:
The internet is a very competitive medium; we all know that there is no use of a web site if no one visits it. We all aspire to get our web pages to the top of Google results. We work hard trying to master every possible technique to make our pages easier to be found and accessed.
Social media has revolutionized the way we perceive web today. Google is no longer solely monopolizing your web site visitors. Social bookmarking and networking sites can be a very big source of traffic today. We have experienced this first hand here on Thoughtpick Blog through our stats, with websites like Stumble Upon, Mixx, Reddit, Digg and Twitter forming a significant portion of our blog visitors.
10 Content Crimes You Should Avoid Committing!
First and foremost, allow me to thank Chris Spooner, designer and writer, for motivating me to write this post as, what I would like to call it, a follow up to his recent post: 10 Usability Crimes You Shouldn’t Commit. I highly appreciate the unintentional inspiration!
Content is the Key by www.all-sorts.biz
There are millions of posts out there that provide you with tips and know-how’s for appealing content; stressing how the post should be long sometimes while, at other times, advising you to keep it short. Telling you that you need to have clear headings yet highlighting that they should not be different.
For this post, we will spice it up a bit for you! We will address the 10 content crimes you should avoid committing in efforts to answer the following questions: What kind of content has the power to drive people away from your site? What content related flaws might cause visitors to disregard the mere thought of reading your posts? What are the most annoying mistakes you can do in content writing?
10 Content Crimes You Should Avoid Committing:
1. Avoid Cluttering!
Although you might feel the need to write long posts to convey and explain a certain idea or concept, and despite having to write pages of factual content as times, make sure that your page has a clean clutter-free look!
Cluttered Text!
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