Seth Godin recently blogged the article “Powerpoint makes us stupid” – these bullets can kill.   See, the Powerpoint revolutions has created some casualties, not the least of which are organizations (like the US Army) bogged down with ambiguous and overcomplicated presentations and, possibly worst of all, the common trend to write content using bullet points.

People like bullets (not all people, but more on that shortly).  They like bullets because:

• Bullets are an effective way of organizing content.
• Bullets summarize important points for quick and easy understanding.
• Bullets are easy, reading online is hard.
• Content developers can use bullets to explain key points rather than explain them with language.

It didn’t escape me that I used a bulleted list, I did it to make a point.  The list above is easy to read and it gets a point across, but it’s cold and impersonal.  It conveys information, but my tone of voice is completely lost.

So, like, think of it this way.  When I write for this blog, I tend to write  – more or less – how I actually speak.  If we were talking about bullet points over coffee (because bullets are cool), the conversation would be a lot like the one I’ve started above – though the live version would be decidedly less one-sided.  If I were writing for a rack card or brochure I might change my tone to sound more poetic.  If I were writing for a corporation I’d use formal language and speech.  This is all tone of voice, matching the language of the reader.

Using bullets is the absence of tone.  Bulleted lists are to writing what paint-by-numbers are to art, the effect without the inspiration. So why are they still used so frequently?  The answer, not surprisingly, lies in the problem of a slightly misogynist web.  Stay with me while I ponder…

The internet was and still is a field where men hold most of the key positions (That’s why cracked always makes the front page of Digg).  I’m not suggesting that women haven’t contributed as much, quite the contrary, but I’m suggesting that the web wasn’t (and isn’t) built for women.  This doesn’t jive with modern marketing ideas, we know that women make most of the household buying decisions – well over 90%, so why don’t websites target that?

There are rules that govern design and communication, most of those rules defined by previous theories.  Phrases like “above the fold”, “bullet points” and “call to action” are all things to look for in “effective” web content.  Not so plainly, notice how they all have a decidedly military feel to them?  It’s all very manly, the web, or at least it was.

Social media is about sharing and connecting, and in this – women rule.  They are more likely to share content and connect with other people like themselves, (men are more interested in creating content).   Women want to connect, to hear stories and to get long term value, men just want glory and status.  Some companies are successfully marketing to women, but most are still failing and it’s because while their design and brand has changed, they’re still writing and building for men.

I have some theories about how some old rules are dying, or should die, and they lead to how to write better content.

The first old rule I want gone is bullets.  No more, please?  We all have big monitors now, nobody is surfing in 800 x 600 and, unless there’s something we won’t understand unless you explain it in point form, or your audience is exclusively men, we just don’t need them anymore.  Women don’t like bullet lists, I don’t like them either.

Then I want to see people craft content to make the most of new resolutions.  Turn to the website on your left.  Now turn to the website on your right.  Both of them were likely designed for 1024 x 768 resolution or less.  Did you know that ol’ 1024 x 768 (finally) is the third most used resolution with 1600 widths topping the charts?   Well, it is, and it’s a great landscape to craft awesome content.

Once I’ve knocked that small feat out, I want the whole world to start using contractions.  This rule of formal language (sans casual commentary) is old and I’m really tired of people writing “did not”, “was not”,  “is not”, etc…  Remember the old Star Trek: TNG Episodes?  Remember Commander Data?  Remember the unusual habit he had of NOT using contractions?  They did that specifically to make him sound less human.  When we don’t use contractions, it sounds as though we’re scolding our visitors through a robotic box.  Using them makes us seem more human and helps bridge the gap. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that a main reason for a lack of contractions is that apostrophes break source code.  As a marketer though, I’d say that’s the programmers problem.

And last (for now) I want the world to fix their error messages, notifications and confirmation messages to be more human, because I don’t like it when a web page gets angry at me for making a mistake.   I know this happens because web pages are made by programmers, and notifications are made to explain exactly what went wrong.  I fondly remember arguing with a developer friend who always wanted errors to be structural and informative.  I wanted to say things like “Whoops! We don’t recognize that email format, please try again”.  He wanted to say “That is not a valid email address”.  He never grokked that his would subtly treat people as though they were incompetent where as mine takes the blame onto the company.

The test I always run with web copy, or copy of any kind, is to read it out loud as things look very different on paper than they do when you say them.   Once you’ve tried to read a bulleted list aloud, you’ll probably never use one again.  Once you start writing naturally, not based on old methods, you’ll find your copy suddenly more appealing to people.

It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner.  My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.

In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee.  The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again.  One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.

It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different.  Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.

Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries.  One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”.  My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.

On the web, you are your website.  Your website (you) communicates with visitors, who in turn try and communicate with it (you again).  As in real life, sometimes there are breakdowns in communication, and the message doesn’t come across clearly.  Here are some things to watch for…

Too much wewe talk.  Not talk of small or diminutive things, or anything inappropriate – it’s talk about you.  Your company.  What you have done.  Why you’re great.  Why I, if I was smart, would buy from you.

This type of copy is a killer.  People respond more effectively to copy that talks about them, talks to them, solves their problem.  Copy that lacks a strong customer focus will lose visitors quickly.  If you mention your customers (you, your, yours) at least 2 times more than you mention yourself (we, I, company name), you’ll be doing well.  Don’t hurt yourself by checking manually though, use the We We Calculator from Future Now.  I scored 65% customer focused (alright, enough about me).  I challenge all of you to do better!

Too much jargon and meaningless corporate-speak.

Yes, we all get it. Your company is poised on the edge of several strong vertical markets, and ready to leverage new media and web 2.0 technologies to blow away existing old world dynamics and surge forward with new synergies and exciting, action driven initiatives.

Except nobody (except for looney tunes executives who don’t know what they actually want) really talks that way, and nobody likes being talked to that way.  You would be better off to say “We like all the new technology out there and are looking forward to incorporating platforms like Twitter and Facebook and using audio and video on the web to allow us to communicate with our visitors better.”

Fight the Bull is an extension for MS Office (works in Open Office as well) that analyzes your content for heavy jargon and meaningless speech.

Too many typefaces.  There can be only one.

I’ve been reading about type lately, two good books – one is called “Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works”.  The other is called “Designing with Type”.  I like fonts and typefaces, both are important to communication as some typefaces convey trust while other can convey doubt.  Without getting into it too deeply (because I will later), conventional wisdom tells us that we should use no more than three typefaces at a time.  One typeface for the main headline; one for the copy; one for sub headings.

The colours, ooooooh the colours.

Your main font should be one colour, something close to black or dark gray.  Your background should be slightly off white.  Line spacing and letter spacing should make your copy easy to read.  If you must use colours in your fonts, or on your website, use them sparingly.  It’s not a circus tent, after all, it’s your business and unless your business supplies flashing coloured lights and tie dyed clothing, you should probably keep it toned down.

If you can’t write, hire someone who can.

Some people are great writers.  Some people write by smashing their fingers on the keyboard in rapid succession.  At least, that’s what it seems like when I read some of the copy out there.  I’m always amazed by the care and attention people pay to the graphic properties of a website and to what lengths they’ll go to get something ‘perfect’ and how little they seem to care about their copy. Don’t spend $4000 on a website and follow it up with amateur hour copy.  A great writer will work with you to craft your site’s copy, perfect a tone of voice and attitude and, most importantly, make sure grammar and spelling are consistent and correct.

Coming soon = Leaving now

If you have a page that says “coming soon, please check back later for updates”, that tells me one of a couple of things.  First, that you wanted this great website and maybe underestimated the time an effort it takes to write copy.  If the “coming soon” persists, I’m going to assume that you no longer care about your website.  If that’s the case, why should I or anybody else care?

These leaps in logic may be fallacious, but perception is everything.  If you can’t finish them, hire someone to. If you can’t do that, unpublish them.  If you don’t want to do that, believing that the “content helps for search engine rankings”, I’ll be blunt and say, all you’re doing is showing people what looks like a strip mall with half the stores empty.  Empty pages, optimized or not, aren’t going to help you.

Anything else?

Plenty, stay tuned during communication week at Harbour City SEO for more communication tips and tools.  Ciao for now!

From the abstract

A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness.

In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems.

The conclusion?  In a nutshell, organizing content by tagging works as well  (if not better) than organizing content using library systems.  Furthermore, it turns out that non qualified, non-paid individuals were just as effective at organizing content ans librarians and taxonomists.

I used to think that tagging wouldn’t work, just because there were too many random factors when you ask a person without knowledge of a thing to categorize a certain thing (that’s what tagging is, essentially) and couple it with financial motives.  I still think commercial applications of tagging are too open to manipulation, but it’s good to know that the system works.

Applications for tagging in SEO

So here’s where I decide to start using tagging more effectively on Harbour City SEO.  Play along at home if you like.

1st.  Go to delicious.com.  Type in the main keyword you’re targeting into their search box.  I did “SEO”.  Then I look at the first page of results.  All of the sites on there are ones I’m familiar with and pace a certain amount of trust with, so I take down the details of the tags I see them using.

2nd.  Take the common occurrences of tags and put them aside.  I eliminated any tags that only occurred once.

3rd.  Take the remaining list of tags and insert them into your tag structure if you’re using WordPress or another CMS that supports tagging.  If you’re not using a system with built in tagging capabilities, make sure the keywords are somewhere on your page.

This is the list I came up with:

• google
• keywords
• marketing
• ranking
• reference
• search
• seo
• tips
• tools
• webdesign

I’ll be sure to include those tags for my SEO strategy, as they should help increase relevance for my topics and usability for visitors.  Sweet sassy molassey, I’m excited to finally be using tags with confidence.  How about you, are you ready?

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.

Clear as mud right?  I’ve been putting together scraps and pieces of information for some time trying to understand exactly what it all means.  I wasn’t able to describe it, or what I thought it was, for years.  Not to myself and not to others.

A few weeks ago I had my ‘eureka’ moment.  I think I was driving to work, maybe I was in the shower (those are places my ‘eurekas’ commonly occur) and I figured it all out.  Rather than interpreting our queries and providing the results it thinks are best, the semantic web will understand our queries and provide the results we need, knowing what we meant not interpreting what we said.  Right?  I think so anyway.

Wolfram Alpha is at the forefront of this new understanding with it’s computational knowledge engine.  Google and Yahoo!?  They’ve made strides and efforts at truly understanding, but have fallen short or failed completely.

Google has, supposedly, incorporated latent semantic indexing into it’s algorithm.  Yahoo! tried tagging by incorporating del.icio.us tags into search results.  Neither, in my opinion, improved search results to the point where Google or any major search engine are able to understand the meaning of a query, or the relationships of words in a specific context.

Oh, I suppose they’ve made improvements and progress here and there.  Fundamentally though, there’s something missing.  Allow me to ‘splain.

I’m optimizing my own site.  Makes sense, I’m an SEO guy, I want the brass ring.  I don’t use black hat stuff, not because it’s wrong but because I don’t know how.  Now, I know, and I think you know, that the following phrases all mean the same thing.

SEO Nanaimo
Nanaimo SEO
Search Engine Optimization Nanaimo
Nanaimo Search Engine Optimization
SEO Nanaimo BC
etc…

I would go on, but I don’t want to get accused of keyword stuffing.  So, as I was saying, we all know that the above phrases are the same.  Google doesn’t though.  I have to target each phrase individually in Google as the results for each query are different.  It’s the same players, ultimately, just in a different order.

For you, the small business, it means you have to choose wisely.  If you have a small site, say only 5 or 10 pages, you’ll have some hard choices to make.   You can blog (like I do) which is a good way to create relevance.  You can do major link building campaigns and target various terms through your anchor text, since Google still relies heavily on links to decide relevance (not as much as before though) or you can build more content for your site.

You could also let sleeping dogs lie and pick one term that represents the best opportunity.   Need help with that?  No problem, drop me a line for free advice on your current keyword strategy.