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SEO for the News vs. SEO for Marketing

February 22, 2011 in Geek Chic, Musings | Leave a comment

I was just asked an interesting question in an email today – how is SEO for a news site different from SEO for other sites whose aim is marketing or PR?

Here was my answer:

The most important aspect of SEO is that content is readable by people (which the search engines try very hard to emulate in their algorithms) and that a site offers up fresh and pertinent content – those are both things that every good news story and every good news site should also do.

Journalists write headlines and leads with keywords that relate to the story and that will draw the audience into reading the rest of the story. They use an inverted pyramid to put important information first. Good SEO does the same thing. Optimizing content for search involves writing content that contains good clues (keywords) so that the readers and search engines rank the content as being relevant.

Good optimization starts with having good content that is relevant to your audience and then knowing your content and your audience well enough to find and use keywords that won’t destroy the content itself. Just packing a bunch of keywords into bad writing won’t work and search engines are getting more and more sophisticated as they try to stamp out content that tries the “keyword stuffing” trick.

While journalistic writing and marketing writing have a different goal – one to inform and the other to sell – the way to optimize each is really very similar. The goal of SEO in either case is the same, improve upon already great content that is wanted/needed by people and make it so that those people can find it.

Snagit

February 10, 2011 in Geek Chic | Leave a comment

Screen capture rocks and no one rocks it better than Snagit.

It’s super easy to use – you don’t even need to open it, just hit “print screen” on your PC and it automatically takes over.

I really like that it opens your newly snagged image into the Snagit image editor. Previously I would copy and paste screenshots into Photoshop and then manipulate them (a pain if PS isn’t already open on my PC).

The image editor can do most of the things you need to do to any screen capture – crop, rotate, resize, add border effects, etc. Things get even cooler when you start adding hyperlinked hotspots, drawing onto your snagged image, instantly opening your image in various programs (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) or easily emailing the image.

For less than 50 bucks I really think you can’t beat the value. I recommend trying the free trial and seeing how long you can resist its siren song (it was only 3 days for me) http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/

p.s. It works for PCs and Macs

<3 Hearts <3

January 25, 2011 in Artsy Fartsy, Valentine's Day | Leave a comment

School Starts This Week!

January 24, 2011 in School | Leave a comment

I’m really excited for this semester.

I’m taking “Building Mobile Applications” where I’ll learn to build mobile applications for iPhones and Droids (any app ideas?). I’m also taking “Marketing Management” where I’ll learn how to do marketing research, pricing, advertising, etc. They seem totally different, but in my own little mind they are both necessary for my vision of my future as an Art Director or Web Marketing Director.

Wish me luck. This is my first semester taking two classes instead of just one (eek). But dangit, I don’t want to be in school forever… oh wait… maybe I do I’ll let you know how it goes as I go along.

Balsamiq Mockups

January 24, 2011 in Geek Chic | 2 comments

I’m in love… with Balsamiq Mockups. I learned about it at Design Camp Boston this November. By the way, if you can attend Design Camp Boston next year – do it! It’s free (need I say more?), it’s held at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (the architecture will make any design lover drool), they feed you (should that be number 1?), you meet other like-minded web geeks and you learn a ton from some great experts.

OK, back to Balsamiq Mockups. What the heck is it? Balsamiq Mockups is a rapid wireframing tool that allows you to quickly and easily create mockups for web sites. The great thing about it is that the boxes and lines and other doodads all look hand drawn. It’s a great way to get ideas out and work on your information architecture without feeling too attached to what you’ve done. It’s also a great way to show a client an idea and let them know that it is still AN IDEA. There are no colors or gradients or pretty pictures to distract them and make them ask the dreaded “can that be red instead of blue, can we use Verdana, why is that picture fuzzy?” – you get the idea.

Here is a really quick one I did (less than 5 minutes) as a “just get something down” draft for a client I’m working with. Don’t judge, it’s only here to illustrate what they look like.

You have the option of inserting many objects that you would expect to find on a web site – buttons, text boxes, pictures, tables, tabs, etc.

If you’re creating multiple pages you can also easily link them together to show the flow of the site. You can then save all of your pages as a multi-page PDF that you can email.

Why I recommend this over some other methods of wireframing:

Paper, napkins, backs of business cards, etc. – too easy to lose or ruin, too hard to share

Photoshop – eats up computer memory, takes a long time, is too easy to start making it pretty

Fireworks – same problems as with Photoshop

If anyone disagrees or has another program or method that they love and adore, please let me know.

Progress on the Adventure Tours site mockup

January 13, 2010 in Geek Chic | 1 comment

I’ve been doing the Building a website with Web Premium CS4 tutorial from Adobe and am up to Step 8 now (woohoo).

This is the site so far: Adventure Tours

So far I’ve learned how to:

plan the site’s functional and technical requirements
install the required server software and use Dreamweaver to define a local site
set up a production site and link local files to the site in Dreamweaver
examine the Photoshop design comp to see how the design team used best practices to meet the requirements
use Fireworks to translate a visual design built in Photoshop into modern HTML and CSS
create a modern page layout in Dreamweaver CS4 by modifying CSS and inserting images and form items
use Photoshop Smart Objects to update images, add navigation links, and test for cross browser compatitibility

Next I’ll be learning to:

design and create a database in MySQL
query and present data from a database on a PHP page using Dreamweaver
return data from PHP in XML format and present layered web pages with the Ajax-based Spry framework
accept input from a website visitor and dynamically generate a view of their selected data
use Flash to create an interactive web presentation
convert video files for use on the web and incorporate the videos into a finished web page
set up a page for browser-based updates with Dreamweaver and Adobe’s InContext Editing

Stay tuned for more progress

HTML and XHTML

January 13, 2010 in Geek Chic | Leave a comment

I’ve been reviewing my HTML and XHTML to make sure that I know how to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. I found these tutorials from W3Schools very helpful:

HTML

XHTML

Next on to the quizzes for HTML and XHTML and then to review CSS.