#...sentences that would require multiple hours to explain to someone with no context

[magicalgirlmascot]

Yessss I love theeessssse

Even if Vakama doesn't specifically make weapons for the Mata, I could definitely see him smithing things for them and/or based on their specific sensibilities. Like idk if he'd make Kopaka a whole sword and shield but he might make Onua digging claws. (Onua has to use all his willpower to accept them graciously and maturely and not immediately wordlessly shove them on and go digging himself a big hole in the nearest patch of dirt.) Making things for people, especially useful things, is how Vakama shows he cares.

In the smithing course, he had to get really good at time management, because there's a not insignificant amount of stuff in smithing that's time sensitive, and if you're starting something that's going to take an hour and you absolutely can't take a break in the middle of it because that will cause structural integrity issues, you'd better make damn sure you have an hour to spare before lunch because otherwise the instructors will give you hell about doing it too many times in a row. Not that Vakama has any experience with this.

For Onewa, the process of Making Art is fascinating because no two people are going to make it the same way, even if they're making the same thing using the same medium. They're each going to be bringing their own skills and preferences and biases and ideas to a piece of art. Even if they're straight up trying to copy something it's going to be different every time. This is something else Krahka struggles to understand but appreciates about him over time. Onewa is a lot of things, but fortunately (and unfortunately sometimes) thoughtful is one of them.

Nuju and Whenua's sci-fi based arguments are largely superficial these days (they like series with the same overall themes, it's the execution they disagree on mostly). Whenua also found out that Nuju spent a lot of time on early Star Trek forums in the early 00s arguing about shipping which he finds very funny (and also disagrees with his choice of OTP because of course he does).

Nuju would be more worried about the cost of filament and the amount of space things take up but Whenua gets so passionate about it, spending hours researching each object and telling Nuju about them and learning how to sand and paint and decorate them so they resemble the originals even more closely and like sue him for thinking his husband is cute. There are worse things Whenua could be spending money on. (Sode note: if they had the space in their apartment, Whenua would absolutely be a model train guy. With the big setup and everything. He drags Nuju to model train shows all the time.)

Nuju insists on taking care of the banking and so on because if Whenua had his way he would be physically in the bank every week. Constantly. Nuju is incredibly proficient at app banking (and phone banking before that since that didn't involve speaking, just pushing buttons and following a robot voice's instructions). Whenua is the only person Nuju knows who not only has a proper chequebook still, but uses it frequently. Every time he owes people money they get a cheque if he hasn't been to the bank recently.

I don't have finished artwork, whether drawn or fic, for KNPS. What I have is headcanons and scenarios because I love your AU.

I MEAN. I LOVE THOSE ALSO. it is the highest possible compliment to say you have Thoughts and Ideas about something I wrote I love you anon

any that you want to uh. share with the class? :3c

[rigelmejo]

Comprehension Levels

I did the actual words-known/words-on-page to find out my comprehension % of chinese (so characters known/characters on page to make things simple to count). i wanted to see how close I am to reading at that 98% sweet spot they tell people to read. so here’s my comprehension % of some novels of mine, as of 7/20/21:

撒野: 98.9% comprehension (I should just extensively read it, I could speed read the page I glanced at and guess the unknown words once I saw them)

SVSSS: 97.9% (pretty much at a comfortable reading level, the unknown hanzi were mostly parts of multi-character description words I could roughly guess the meaning of, but I was marking every unknown character)

小王子: 96.8% (again, this is as of today, I flipped to a random page so I wouldn’t have myself remembering the plot to affect how much I ‘knew’)

DMBJ 1: 96%

Peach Blossom Debt: 96% if I count name characters as unknown, 97% comprehension if I ignore character names. (I imagine part of the difficulty is my lack of xianxia reading vocab, so if I intensively read a few beginning chapters I could probably fix that).

Guardian: 95.7% understood (I picked the last page of the first print volume, as I figured if I picked the first chapter which I’ve studied and reread my comprehension level would be higher than if it was a part of the novel I haven’t read)

Update: the current fanfic I am reading 夜半衣寒，I tested my comprehension of the new chapter 16 I started. Out of 705 characters, I didn’t know 9, 695/705=0.987 so I have 98.7% comprehension! This is interesting to me, because I would guess (since I didn’t actually measure at the time), that I did not have above 98% comprehension when I started reading it (of course I’ve read like 34k+ characters of it now so I’d hope I’m more familiar with its vocab now). So this is just info for me, that if something starts out as ‘hard’ as this fic to start, if I intensively read for a while (and I’d guess probably the first few chapters since that’s where author’s own specific language is the most new and their setup/genre words hopefully get introduced), I might be able to learn enough words to put it into a more comfortable regular comprehension level for myself. I do think, at least now that I’m into the flow of this story, I’m reading it a bit faster (still on the slower end since I look up every unknown or ‘fuzzy’ word to double check the pronunciation). To be fair to me? These chapters are 20 pleco pages, which used to take me 1-1.5 hours ToT. Now they take 30-40 minutes, since I slow down to look up things and listen to certain sections, but considering they’d take 15-20 minutes to follow along to someone narrating out loud, I’m getting closer to a normal reading speed. If I sped read/extensively read these chapters instead of intensively looking things up, I may well be at 20-30 minutes a chapter. 

Last night I read 4496 characters, chapter 1 of 福尔摩斯  血字的研究. I used the click-dictionary for new words, and there was definitely a lot of new vocab (though mostly places and names confused me). All of the experiment related new vocab it was nice to see though and learn, since I like reading mysteries I’m sure those words will come up again in other stuff I read. 

Some things I find interesting about this information: I read 小王子 extensively months ago so presumably when I comprehended a bit less than the current amount (since I learned a lot of new words from context or from glancing at the english translation for some words). So whatever my personal ‘minimum’ level of comprehension I can personally tolerate when reading extensively is, it’s below 96% comprehension. 

Listening Reading Method and other activities I’ve been doing has helped my comprehension a LOT. I did NOT expect the comprehensions of all these to be as close to 98% as they are. Particularly Guardian, being at 95% - that isn’t very far from the comfortable reading material level of ‘98%’ I’m aiming for. I’m not sure how fast I can boost up my comprehension just a BIT more, but wow is it close to the goal...

On a related note, that explains why Guardian and Silent Reading have felt relatively easier for me to ‘extensively read’ when I feel like it lately. While I still have some difficulty, since I have familiarity with the general story (Guardian) or have read the english translation (Silent Reading), the new words are not super hard to guess and therefore following the main idea is not an issue. Guardian is above the 95% comprehension level for me now, and its likely I extensively read a novel I had NO prior knowledge about -  小王子 - also at 95% comprehension or less.

I looked up the comprehension level I had because I just read this article about how to pick reading material when learning a new language, and it made me curious how far Below that 98% comprehension level I usually try to read.

For comparisons, I’m curious how my personal comprehension compares to the general-vocab-difficulty tool and results I got from that (which can be viewed in this post more in depth). 

This was the novel’s ranking, from easiest to harder, based on that tool (lower number = more difficult):

小王子 2.004

DMBJ 1 1.992

撒野 1.98

SVSSS 1.9

Guardian 1.9

Peach Blossom Debt  1.858

I am guessing the difference in order of difficulty compared to my personal comprehension levels, might have to do with the materials I learn from? Or may have to do with the fact the tool sorts by full words, not characters, so 2-4 character words/phrases that are unknown would only count as one unit. Whereas when I calculated my comprehension I counted by character (since I was physically counting on paper it was easier to just go by character when counting unknown versus amount-of-content on the page). Also, the tool took a bigger sample of 2,000 words for each novel, whereas I used 300-500 characters per page samples.

It’s also possible, because of the small amount of characters in my comprehension % samples - Guardian overall may have more unknown words and put it lower than 95% overall, and stuff like DMBJ may well have a lot more words I know and potentially be more comprehensible than 96% overall. 

For the most part I had 4-15 unknown characters per page. Which could realistically affect my reading more or less depending on what role they served in the sentence. Characters in descriptions I can figure out the rough meaning of easier when reading because they’re often part of 2-4 character words and phrases where I know the rest of the characters, or they’re an emotion/mood description another word I know on the page will also re-state, but unknown characters for critical verbs or nouns affect story comprehension a lot more. Xiao wang zi is a good example of my overall actual reading level, since some unknown hanzi were in descriptions and I could ‘guess’ well enough to follow just ine, but some of the unknown hanzi on the page were verbs and nouns which makes those sections harder to comprehend. 

Some promising notes from articles!

From FluentU: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/reading-in-a-second-language/

So I am at the spot for most novels I want to read right now 95%+, where if I read with a dictionary it probably feels okay and I will learn a lot, but it will feel challenging at times.

And for a few (at least SaYe) I can really just extensive read the way its supposed to feel. 

Reading Rockets: https://www.readingrockets.org/article/fluency-introduction

This article puts 95% as the minimum comprehension level for a person to read to improve reading fluency.

This https://readingmatrix.com/articles/september_2011/prichard_matsumoto.pdf

is an interesting paper, and puts 95% as the minimum for comprehension to read unassisted, but also mentions it could be a spectrum rather than all-or-nothing. Readers who use strategies to comprehend more can improve their comprehension a bit, and readers who have background knowledge on the subject can improve their ability to comprehend the reading material a bit. 

This part was also fascinating: “ Hu and Nation (2000) sought to examine the lexical threshold more deeply. They tested the comprehension of a narrative text by 66 advanced learners, adapting the text to include frequent words estimated to be known by all the subjects. They replaced uncommon words with nonsense words in order to set coverage levels to 80%, 90%, 95%, and 100%. Comprehension of the various versions of the passages was measured by a multiple-choice comprehension test and a recall measure. Subjects at the 95% level had a mean score of 10.2 points out of 14 on the multiple-choice text, while the readers with 90% coverage averaged only slightly lower at 9.5 points. There were a wide range of scores at these two coverage levels with 7 of 16 subjects at the 90% level getting a higher score than the mean score of the 95% coverage group. The results were similar on the recall measure. Overall, while there was a clear and strong correlation between coverage and comprehension, the existence of the 95% lexical threshold was not supported by Hu and Nation. They estimate that if there was a comprehension threshold at all, it may have been between 80 and 90% since all the readers with 80% coverage had difficulty comprehending the text. Hu and Nation state that learners at the 90% were able to reach comprehension through reading skills and background knowledge. They also hypothesize that 98% may be the coverage required at which most learners can comprehend the text adequately. The mark they set to determine this was about 85% comprehension, which was much higher than that used by Laufer (1989, 1992). “

“ Lower threshold: A percentage at which comprehension becomes possible; a percentage at which few learners below have any significant comprehension of the text (referred to by Hu & Nation, 2000, as potentially being between 80 and 90%). 211 

Significant increase threshold: A coverage point above which learners’ mean comprehension increases significantly (95%, based on Laufer, 1989). 

Adequate comprehension threshold: A percentage at which most learners achieve “adequate comprehension” (suggested as 95% in Laufer, based on 55% comprehension; hypothesized as 98% coverage in Hu & Nation based on 85% comprehension). 

Upper threshold: A point above which an increase in coverage does not lead to improved comprehension (Laufer, 1992). If it exists, it is likely 98-99%.

That study may explain why some people with lower vocab knowledge ‘feel’ more ok with reading at lower comprehensions (that’d be me lol ToT). When I was learning french, I started reading extensively at a somewhat low vocab level, and in english I knew in elementary school I’d pick up novels for adults and read some sometimes, and by end of elementary I had a college reading level, so mm.

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Weird “We Come in Peace.”

This was difficult to write, and I am not sure if it makes much sense, but I promised to write this one for you, and I did my best. If you like writings about the logistics of a first contact situation go ahead and send me more ideas. I was thinking about learning about simple human biology would be interesting, 

As always I hope you enjoy feel free to comment, question, critique, message or anything else. 

Captain Kelly stood below the ramp of the strange alien ship surrounded on all sides by her most trusted companions. To her left, her first lieutenant, to her right, her linguistics specialist directly behind her three of her most experienced men, and right to the back…. The 2nd lieutenant who had begged her on his knees to tag along. He was young and inexperienced, but then again, he had shown resolve under pressure and probably kept them from being shot. Because of him they were taking their first steps into communication with an alien race.

Above them, the ramp began to lower releasing light downwards upon them. At the top a set of sentries watched them with tense anticipation. She may not speak alien, but she knew caution when she saw it. She urged her team upwards, the boots of her space suit thudding against the strange material.

Lieutenant Vir hurried up to stand next to walk next to her a bounce in his step, eyes wide with childish wonder. She sort of hoped he never lost that, she also hoped that he would never have a reason to.

They stopped at the top of the ramp, as the door hissed shut behind them leaving them alone and stranded aboard an alien ship.

***

The atmosphere of frustration was clear. The galactic assembly’s best specialists had been sent out to attempt and make communication possible between the two species but so far, they had made no real progress. The variability in the creature’s intonations and voices made it structurally impossible to tell what they were trying to say and even identify if they were saying the same thing. A hiss from one sounded completely structurally different from the hiss from another. Additionally, they seemed to refer to themselves through a multiple combinations of the sounds.

On the other hand, scientists had made greater headway in learning about the creatures genetically and structurally. The human leader, the small one, had handed off the green-orbed creature for scientific testing, and despite its constant need to touch things, it was easy to deal with. From examination, they learned that the creature spoke based on a system of fluctuating air pressed out from its esophagus, through two vibrating vocal bands, and the interaction of its mouth, specifically a muscle within the mouth. Unfortunately each creature had varying sizes of vocal cords, tongues, teeth, and nasal passageways making communication completely different creature to creature.

Conversely, the creatures seemed to be growing irritated, as they did not understand their complex, additional, body posturing. One specifically including one digit pointing in random directions, and then the creature would get angry when they didn’t understand.

Things had ground to a halt at this point. The main creature was resting its head against the table, the second one was frantically gesticulating towards and unknown device, and the other three looked saggier than usual. The only one who didn’t seem to have changed was the green-orb creature watching from close by as a scientists took measurements about his chest.

The curious-eyed creature had been watching silently for some time before shrugging himself away from the scientist, to range across the room gathering all the chairs and dragging them into a large group. Creatures and member of the council alike stared at the creature with confusion. By the time he was finished all the chairs were piled in the circle at the center of the room. Everyone was standing ty this point having had their chairs confiscated.

The creature pulled one of the chairs forward a sharp chirp and a growl. He brought forth the next one and repeated the sound. He did this over and over again, and then urged the other creatures to do so one after the other.

“Wait, wait, I think I understand.”

“Someone, start recording.”

They ran statistics comparing the different sounds and found they had the same rhythmic pattern to them. “Chair,” They repeated.

***

“Why didn’t they get it when I said that?” Their linguist asked angrily as the aliens chirped to each other excitedly. They grabbed a chair and made a noise. It was a weird kind of sequel and hiss.

Adam did his best to copy it. The aliens parroted it back to him a few times excited with his copying rendition.

They sat down again moved by a new vigor. Captain Kelly finally let the boy over. He was proving himself to be more useful to this mission than he had any right to be, and if they were going to communicate with these inhuman beings, than they were going to have to use all of their available assets.

***

It was important to first establish the nouns for objects. Each one had to be carefully statistically analyzed for difference in language pattern, but just because they knew the names of objects meant absolutely nothing. The rules and meanings of their language would be difficult to puzzle out.

Personal pronouns proved to be an issue that took them some hours to puzzle out. Certain ones accepted He some accepted She and all accepted they although they could be an identifier for a group of the creatures though a group of creatures was not called a “They”. We was used when the creature speaking was part of the group indicated. They themselves could not be part of a they, but they could be part of a we. They seemed very reluctant to explain the difference between a he and a she, and so they left that particular mystery for another time accepting what the creatures told them as fact.

They eventually got the name of their race, though, of course, there was no direct translation. The word consisted of a short exhalation of air then a hum a chip and then another sort of humming sound.

“Human.”

It took an entire session just to explain these personal pronouns in relation to the nous they already understood.

The humans came back the next day with new equipment proceeding to draw images, and symbols that apparently represented the sounds that they made. It was fascinating to find that they had a written language proving once and for all that they were a sentient species equal to any in the galactic assembly.

The green eyed human remained integral in these discussions. Despite his inferior position in the hierarchy, he was the first to act, and sometimes, the first to understand. He was the one who made it clear that body language was just as important to the “Humans” as was spoken language. Pointing with a single digit was to indicate attention be focused on a specific object. A head shake meant no and a nod meant yes. The lifting of both shoulders was an indication of confusion neither agreeing nor disagreeing.  

“I” and “Me” were indications of the self though each creature also had a personal name. In certain cases they had three names…. Though that wasn’t discovered until later.

“I was usually followed by an action I run, I walk while “Me” Denoted something happening to a person, for me, to me, with me. Us and We acted the same way.

“You” was the word they used when speaking to another creature, when not unitizing their personal name.

Motion words followed their personal pronouns. The leader spoke the words while the green eyed creature demonstrated. He waked, he ran, he spun and he jumped.

Going, was a general term indicating the movement to somewhere, coming meant to return or to journey FROM a location.

The first sentence, “I come.”

“You come.” The creature said pointing at one member of the council.

Hesitantly they walked forward towards the human.

The room around erupted as the creatures began shrieking and showing their teeth. They fled backwards away from the horrible display of maddened barbarism. Upon seeing this the humans calmed hands in the air vital organs exposed.

No words could be shared, so no one understood what was happening.

How were we to know that facial expressions were so important?

It took another day to explain wanting something and then possession.

I want, I have, we want, we have.

General verbs followed that, beginning with easy concepts not abstract. To speak, to fly, to breathe.

All throughout they learned question words beginning with what paired with that. What to ask what something is or was, but usually paired with other words to determine context. Where for location, when for time, who, for a specific person. All which had a matching answer who paired with personal pronouns or names what with that where with here or there (here for right next to a person) there paired with a pointing gesture or some other context.

The humans surprised them indicating that their language also utilized the pat and the present is and am indicating something in the now while others required prefixes or suffixes to indicate past. Their translating equipment was beginning to pick up short sentences now, and with excitement the humans accepted the strange technology.

The green eyed human most of all.

***

Lieutenant Vir marched aboard the ship with the strange alien translation device clipped to his right ear. He was going to speak with an alien today, he was determined. Not just a sentence, he was going to get an answer to a question.

The first alien he saw had been there every day, a simple soldier, nothing more, but Lieutenant Vir walked right up to him. The creature watched in tense worry and confusion, “What is your name?”

Seconds passed.

“Gurt.”

***

It took weeks to understand the question why and even longer to explain abstract concepts. They had been there for months.

But the day came. They sat across the tale from each other Captain Kelly sitting next to her linguist and her soldiers.

“Why are you here?” The alien asked in its stilted and halting voice. It almost sounded like a bird or a parrot talking. It could have spoken through the translator, like some of the others did, but like the linguist it insisted.

“We come in peace.” Came the reply…. A reply that humans had thought up for thousands of years, in every science fiction novel and television show. An intergalactic hand of peace extending across space and time. “We want to know….. To understand.”

“You want knowledge.”

“We wanted to know that we are not alone, and now we want to be…. Friends/allies.”

“You…. Are danger.”

“Why?”

The alien paused for a long moment rubbing its head…. A gesture it had picked up from the humans, “You run quickly, jump high, sharp teeth. You want….. Eat us?”

“Predator?” The word was passed around explained and translated in the next thirty minutes.

The humans looked appalled, “No!”

“You ran and chased, following at first….. You make fear for us.

The humans convened for a long moment glowering at the green eyed creature who seemed shocked for a second butting in to the conversation, “No. I did not want to eat. I wanted…. Uh…. Allies…. I was….. Pleased.”

The translation was broken, the meaning algorithms struggling to piece together understanding form one separate mode of communication to another.

The entire room shifted in confusion and surprise. How could this be?

The predators had crossed the galaxy searching. They sought friendship in the stars despite their barbaric nature and their powerful, predatory instincts. What drove them was not hunger, or even knowledge.

Alone in the universe they sought proof…. Proof they were not alone.

[beihonglin]

[about subbing.]

alright y’all sit tight and buckle up, i’ve held this in for three months now but today i saw a youtube comment demanding to know why it took so long for eng subs for a certain show to come out and i think some things should be made clear. 

fan subbers are not obligated to do the subbing we do. we are people with our own lives who are busy with work and school and life. the time spent subbing takes away from our study time, our down time, or time better spent doing more productive things. 

“but wait, surely it doesn’t take that long to sub a show? i see gifs on tumblr / translated transcriptions on twitter, so i know people are capable of translating things but nobody will sub the whole episode / it takes so long for eng subs to come out.”

it takes. so. much. time. in case you’re not familiar with the process (i know i wasn’t, before joining a subbing team), i’ll walk you through it with personal examples. 

(1) obtaining the raw video: 

content is often hosted on iqiyi, youku, tencent. unlike youtube, these platforms have little to no ‘fast’ ways to download the videos. for example, iqiyi uploads their episodes as .qsv files, which, due to their non-standard format, cannot be opened in any normal multimedia player and require the use of iqiyi's proprietary software. in order to decode the file and make it usable, downloaders have to find ccodes and ckeys, which takes time. to make it worse, these ccodes and ckeys change every few weeks, which means downloaders have to go on a hunt for them all over again. 

even if you could find an online downloader for videos, video parsers such as this one often give you very little control over the quality of the video - most of the downloads end up looking like someone chewed it up and spit it out. 

this means that whoever obtains the raw video has to use methods like coding or terminal just to get the hd file, which takes time and effort. 

from here, the raw video goes to two people: the transcriber and the timer. 

(2a) transcribing the video:

this is a step i skip when i am subbing alone or when i’m subbing in a team that are all chinese-speakers, but when i’m working in a team that has typesetters who don’t speak chinese, we have to provide a transcription along with our translation so that they can match the words on screen with the translations they put in. in some teams, there are members who only transcribe, but in smaller teams, translators have to do it ourselves.

transcribing takes time - it can take anywhere from half an hour to two hours for a five minute segment, depending on how used you are to typing in that language.

(2b) timing the video:

for me, this is The Most Time Consuming part of subbing - it’s the part i dread when subbing alone. it involves making sure your subs appear at the same time as the corresponding characters on screen, and often, if your subs appear even a couple of frames off, the entire sequence will look strange to the viewer. timing involves small adjustments made over and over again just so your subs look at least presentable. 

it requires precision, which takes time. and it requires practice and being comfortable with the timing software - if you’re starting out with new software, you might take more than two hours to time a five minute segment. 

even worse is when a video comes without chinese subtitles (rip all of us who ever had to sub these) - we don’t have a frame of reference and have to decide how to time by ourselves. we have to take into account sentence length and how fast viewers can read per second, how long a clause can be before viewers forget what was in the previous clause, and we have to make these decisions in tandem with how fast the people on screen are speaking. which takes time.  

(3) translating the video:

i think this step is often what people reduce subbing to and is what most people are familiar with seeing, but i cannot stress this enough - it also takes time.

personally, i take an hour to clear five minutes worth of dialogue on a good day. and then i take additional time for the sfx captions. and then additional time to proof-read and make sure i didn’t mishear, misinterpret or mistranslate things. most of the time, interviews love using internet slang or gaming terms and for those of us who don’t game or spend most of our lives on weibo, it’s an extra step for us to search for the term, understand its meaning and the context in which it’s being used. which takes time.

when a video comes without chinese subtitles and the members on screen happen to Love Screaming Over Each Other... replaying the segment over and over again to try and hear what they’re saying takes time. and patience. and eardrum abilities. 

in a team, it also involves proof-reading each other’s work. our translations team always proof-reads each other’s segments in case we catch something the others missed out on or mistranslated, or in case semantics are awkward and we have to restructure a sentence. i’m very, very lucky in that the subbing team i’m in have different strengths - one of us is better at chinese and explaining complex phrases, one of us is good at pragmatics and catching nuances and suggesting rephrases and one of us is good at semantics and making sure things are grammatically accurate. but sometimes teams are unbalanced and it takes extra effort to make sure things still turn out in the best quality possible. 

in some cases, we can discuss one (1) word choice for a full ten minutes because there simply isn’t a phrase for it in english and we have to t/n it, or because multiple english words map to the same chinese word and choosing the wrong one will provide a wrong connotation. in other cases, we know that some scenes will be talked a lot about or giffed a lot by international fans, and we have to make sure that the translations have to be as accurate and as nuanced as possible so that nothing gets twisted. and in the worse case scenario, a wrong word choice can change a fan’s whole impression of a member. 

(4) typesetting the video: 

for dialogue subtitles, this involves finding a font that is readable by everyone and a style that will be visible against all backgrounds. it involves making sure they stay in the same place and are of the same style (all aligned left, a certain number of pixels from the bottom etc). 

for sfx captions, this involves matching your english font to the chinese font used so the scene style isn’t incongruous and matching styles like outlines and shadows so that the colour scheme remains the same. in some cases, there is no space for the sfx translation, and typesetters have to blank out the original to make the translations visible. in many cases, they move, so typesetters have to animate the text, which takes extra effort. 

for multiple-episode shows, typesetters have to make sure that the styling remains consistent and visible in all settings, which make the thought given to these choices all the more important.

in some teams, typesetters don’t speak chinese, and have to refer to transcriptions and corresponding translations to typeset correctly. this takes time. in the cases where the original video comes without chinese subtitles, typesetters have to decide in which order the noise and mayhem should appear on screen. this takes time. 

and in the first place, this assumes that you have the software to do hard-subs - something not all of us have. 

(5) encoding and posting the video:

this step takes the least effort but it still needs So Much Time - converting the aegisubs or premiere pro file into an .mp4 requires a media encoder, and adobe media encoder more or less takes three hours to encode a three hour episode. sometimes, it exports as an .mov and you have to handbrake it to get it to an .mp4 file, which takes extra time. 

uploading it on youtube also takes time - it takes an hour to get a two-hour video uploaded, and it takes another few hours for it to process so that you can publish it in 1080p. 

some of our laptops don’t have enough processing power to go through a three hour video - even encoding a half-hour episode can slow down our laptops so much they’re pretty much useless until it’s done. some of us even don’t have a media encoder on our laptops and have to run to computer labs to get it encoded. and if the closest one is on campus twenty minutes away and it’s snowing outside? good luck. 

people who gif casually or translate in blocks of text on twitter don’t have to deal with steps (2), (4) and (5), and that’s where the difference lies - even if they’re capable of translating things, the sheer amount of effort and time it takes can deter people from trying. 

in addition, most of the time, the content we sub is copyrighted so we can’t even monetise the eng subs - we get nothing out of subbing. 

the reason why we do it anyway is because we love the show or the people on the show and want to share that with an international audience. we’re fans and for some of us, that’s justification enough to put in the time and effort needed to get more love and attention for our faves. 

and that’s why we appreciate it when people ask us, “hi, would you be interested in subbing this show?” most of these requests are polite and include an “only if you want to” add-on (which frees us from the obligation to agree), and it lets us know that you’re following our faves and lets us know what kind of content you’re interested in. most of the time, most of us don’t even need a ‘thank you’ in the comments (although they are very much appreciated), because if we see comments laughing over a certain member’s actions, it means someone else is loving our faves too and to me, it makes the effort worth it. 

i understand people asking, “why does it take so long to sub?” out of curiosity, because before i joined my subbing teams, i knew nothing about the process. but going, “why is it taking so long to sub?” is different, and demanding that a show be subbed when it takes us ten hours of work to let you enjoy a twenty minute video? that’s not fair. 

tl;dr: don’t underestimate the amount of effort it takes to sub a show. subbers have their own lives and are not obligated to work on your schedule. 

if you’re still thinking about demanding subs faster, consider joining the subs team. otherwise, shut up and enjoy the fact that fans are putting in time and effort for your entertainment for free. 

[worldoflis]

Fic Writer Tag

I wasn't tagged by name but @lilyvandersteen said any Klaine writer who felt like it could do it, and I'm feeling chatty, so there :)

How many works do you have on AO3?

I have published 7 on AO3, one of which is a collection of drabbles for the Summer Event that I still need to complete. The others are chapter fics, and are finished. I got one more chapter fic called 'Brothers' which was my first klaine fic that should still be moved to AO3 from FF.net, but I'm a little scared of rereading that, and it also feels a little weird posting a fic from 2012 in 2021 (though I did see the other day you can adjust the publishing date, so maybe I'll get to it still).

What’s your total AO3 word count?

271,452

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

I've only ever written for Glee (I think...) - sometimes I think of branching out but there's just never any cast or pairing that fuels me enough to write. Or maybe I'm just conservative :D. So only Glee, and mostly Klaine and Kurtbastian.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Considering I only have 7, this is basically everything, but there you go :D

California Boys This is a surfer!Sebastian story I just finished, and I... never realised it was actually my most popular story until looking it up just now. It's mostly just a fun happy-go-lucky story with some angst and pining because that's good for you!

Dancing in Moonlight Always funny if a sequel has more kudos than the first part in the series, but there you go! This is another Kurtbastian story, with an HIV+ Sebastian, trying to navigate their relationship as a sero+/sero- couple, when Sebastian's past comes back to haunt them. I wrote it for a Big Bang, and I rushed the epilogue because of the deadline, and I got A LOT of comments on it, not all good. And while I know I had a lot of fun writing it, and I worked very hard on all the parallels, I still have very mixed feelings about this fic.

The Danger inside of Me Another sequel that has more kudos than the first installment! This is a Klaine fic (the only one in the list, I realize now), with HIV+!Blaine. I know, it was a thing, I didn't intend for it to happen but there you go. As with DIM, it's a learning-to-navigate-the-relationship-with-HIV kind of fic.

Dream About Us Predecessor to DIM! Designer!Kurt and model!Sebastian meet and sparks fly. However, Sebastian has a secret... It's a 20k fic and I wrote this in a week or so - which is absolutely insane for me because I'm a very slow writer usually. I wasn't very productive at work that week, I have to admit...

I'll see you around, my love This is a companion piece to DIM, that I wrote to sort of address, in-universe, some of the comments I got on the epilogue.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I used to, and I used to love it - and I do try to reply to new comments on new fic. But I'm an anxious person, and after the mixed feedback on DIM I have gotten very weary of negative comments, so for a long while I didn't, simply because I was too scared to even read them. And now I feel weird replying to new comments, when I haven't replied to the old comments, because what if the old commenters come back and see I replied on a new comment, but not on their old one?

But I spent half an hour today going through the comments on CB and replying to all of them, even the old ones, and it made me happy, so maybe I'll get inspired :)

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

My endings are happy. My fics can get angsty always contain angst to some extent (esp. the Danger!verse ones), but my endings shall be happy!

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

No crossovers as of yet, no.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Well, as I said, the DIM epilogue has received mixed reviews, and I was very much not prepared for that. But other than that I've mostly gotten just very lovely and encouraging comments!

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I've written multiple m/m scenes. I don't like it too much, I tend to opt for a fade-to-black. But for TDIOM for example (with HIV+!Blaine), their having sex was just too important - it was a huge step so it had to be there and it had to be explicit. Other times inspiration strikes and I let it happen - but always in context of a longer fic, I'll never write PWP, it's just not my thing.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I... don't think so?

Have you ever had a fic translated?

If I have, they didn't tell me. I got fanart a few times though!!!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, I don't think that would work - I'm a little too headstrong about what I want and how. I already drive my beta crazy with how hard it is for me to listen to her, let alone an actual co-writer :D.

What’s your all time favourite ship?

Klaine has always been my OTP, though unfortunately it's lost a bit of its appeal over the years. But dynamic-wise, I think Kurtbastian is probably a little closer to my heart.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

The only things I currently have unfinished are two advent challenges and this year's summer challenge... I'd like to finish them, but it's sort of weird? Like the moment has passed? But who knows, CB also took me seven years so there :)

What are your writing strengths?

I don't know. I asked my beta, she also doesn't know. :D (we're a little useless like that) I got a compliment today about my characterization, but I'm not sure - I like to think I'm good at dialogues, though?

What are your writing weaknesses?

I’m slow. Gods, I'm SO slow. And because it takes so much effort to get the words out, I'm always very reluctant to throw out stuff I wrote before, and I might try to change an entire outline just to be able to fit in that one scene that doesn't make sense anymore for whatever reason, but also it's a good scene so I want it in there!

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

It can add flavor to your writing, but like in cooking, you shouldn't overuse your spices. There's definitely ways to make it work - even if sometimes it fails hard. I would definitely recommend working with someone who is at least B1 in the language though :D

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Glee! (though technically it was for Dalton, itself a Glee fanfic, so I don't know how that works)

What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

That's a very hard question, and not just because most of my fic was written 7+ years ago, and I haven't reread them since :D. I loved writing Dream About Us because I was on such a high. I'm usually so slow writing but that fic came POURING out. Dancing In Moonlight was a very mathematical fic, almost, because it switches back and forth between present day and past day between chapters, with each chapter starting with the last sentence of the previous chapters - it required a lot of puzzling to get the parallels just right and I'm very proud of it. Plus I wrote an OC that was very well received. And then for the Danger!verse I got a lot of help from my friend who was an HIV-nurse at the time - but I first had to explain what fanfic is and why I needed all those details and that was a trip and a half :D.

So yeah. All of them :D

I’m tagging anyone because it hardly seems fair, but if anyone wants to continue my tradition of doing this one without being tagged, please tag me so I get to see it!

[turklingua]

Turkish Translation and Becoming a Turkish Translator http://bit.ly/2Se1ryT

Translating is the situation of “articulating” the entire emotional and intellectual activities in the chaotic soul structure of human being. In the heart of this complexity or chaos, translator is the person who analyzes all these perception processes with the emotional-intellectual power of the author and his or her language of expression, and fulfills “articulating” in his own language. There are three essential main essential components in the translation action: Our first essential is knowledge accumulation; we mean that the translator is culturally equipped . Our second essential is the ability of emotion-dream transfer; we can call it creative ability. Our the third and last essential is that the source and target language knowledge is at the certain level of translating. It is faced with human nature and human beings who acts different from what they say and do, and who can be defined in thousands of characters. Humans have a curiosity and passion to deal with invisible and unknown areas. When we begin to write this curiosity and passion out, the thing what we call literature arises. The author who has the ability of making invisible ones visible, the unknown ones known, only needs expert translators to spread out his discoveries to the world.

The way to be an expert translator is to built multiple relationships with life and to articulate the other lives far away or the lives right besides us, with the emotional and intellectual accumulation that is gained from the totality of these multiple relationships which is not possible to be known without translating action. Translation action is not a simple, mechanical or ordinary interposition, but requires to constitute a common language with the author and the editor. Creating a common language is one of the hardest act and the translator does one of those hard work. Translator is the person who shows the success of integrating with the heart and brain of the author. In other words, he is the soul mate of the author not someone else based upon the work that he translates. Interpreting, except your native language, is the act of transferring, analyzing and perception of any knowledge at any language what it means in your native language. It is necessary to have an objective and moral stance when carrying out this action. You can not say a word that is not said in the original text; you can not construe a sentence or word you do not know! There is the importance of translating profession: we need to learn what we do not know and communication for the flow of life, that information in foreign languages should be translated into our native language to get the information, assimilate and reproduce.

It is impossible to communicate with other countries and lives without translation, the power and the importance of the translation profession emerges here. There are dozens of occupational areas within the definition of translator. For example, people who will translate literary and commercial areas must have different qualities. When we think that there are different fields within these two fields, I can say that the qualifications of the translator should be determined according to the area selection. However, it is essential to have the ability of writing, analytical thinking, creativity, and language skills both the native and foreign language. The perception of interpreting in Turkey is based on the perception of “a job that anyone who knows a foreign language can do”. This is extremely wrong generalization! We have to break this perception and generalization; because knowing foreign languages is just one of the most important elements of translation. If I express within the context of literary translation, interpreting is not a job that can be done without the intellectual accumulation and authorship ability. The translator has a changing relationship according to each book, but if there are topic concerning sentimentality and justice in it, you will unintentionally take a side but you will have to conceal…

The translation should remain as good as the original text. The translator does not have a mission of making the original text better! There are physical, mental effort and energy of the editor, translator, proofreader and other people in any book that has been translated. The quality of the translation excels in when these energies are in harmony with each other. To be a translator in Turkey means to work under aggravated circumstances with low wages, without having any social security. We have no choice other than to be organized to stop this. If you are not economically dependent on to translate; if you say I can not stand the pressure of the boss or manager; translating for sure seems to be attractive in this sense, but words and sentences that we can not figure out and meet a lot of difficulties when deciphering, takes the place of pressure of the boss or manager… Setting many experienced difficulties aside I would say: you look at yourself with the eye of a creator when your translation gets credit and becomes a book that takes its place in bookcase or shelves.

You are that creator! Could it be a greater happiness than that? You contribute to yourself and others and to life by translating every work you do. There is no training required to become a translator; however I recommend you to place training in somewhere of your life to become a good translator. A translator who does not have translation training can do successful translations; however these translations are usually coincidence. An educated translator can explain what, how and why he translated. Expert knowledge is important. Do not expect the time you will translate to have knowledge about the topic you will be translating. Research, learn, get ready for the translation as you are studying lesson. You should also improve yourself out of school. Make the translation a part of your life. Try to translate what you listen, watch, read in your daily life. Repeat the exercises every day in this way. Pay attention to develop your general culture, accumulation of your popular culture. Follow the news, current events. Be informed of economics, literature, politics, etc. Prepare a CV to yourself, accumulate things to add to your CV until you graduate. Participate to seminars, conferences, volunteer projects, attend courses. Try to build connections with benificial people. Do not underestimate the written translation.

Making a written translation is also a part of providing sufficient accumulation for interpreting. Your character may be suitable to verbal translation; however instead of running away from the translation by pleading, go over your problems. Develop yourself regarding the issues such as enduring and continuous focusing, long working time, meeting the deadlines. We often don’t choose to work as a full-time or freelance translator. Working freelance chooses us. If it chooses you, get your home environment well organized. A large table, a fridge full of tertiary processed meals and a high speed computer can be a good idea for a proper working environment. When we enter the sector, usually the things may not go as planned. You are interested in art; but you can face always with an automotive translation. Suddenly, you can find yourself as a specialized translator in the automotive sector. Interest, curiosity and enthusiasm are good. But do not worry if you can not get jobs in the areas you want, learn to love the fields where you work. Go ahead with preliminary preparation whatever you will interpret; never interpret by yourself, especially when you are new graduate. Do not go alone for more than one or two hours interpretations after you gain a certain experience. There can be anything during interpreting, you may face with unexpected problems. Make confidentiality and impartiality your first principle. Do not share the contents of any meetings with third parties. Never do a biased translation. The conference interpreter is the headliner of the translation cabin.

When you get on the stage, do not let anyone to interfere which song you will sing. Translation is a creation. It is a product that you entirely produce; so all rights are yours. If your voice is recorded, demand copyright for your product. Translator interprets in oral translation jobs. Do not try to solve technical problems. Do not fall back upon the organization. We live in the global world. Speakers from all over the world can speak English at international meetings. Be prepared to hear different accents. Include speakers with different accents among your oral translation exercises. Interpreting is an enjoyable activity; however the market we try to survive, requires you to have nerves of steel. Be gentle, smile and learn to look in the bright side of everything. He who gets up in anger, sits down with a loss. Do not allow to suffer from the competitive feelings and ambition. Your colleagues may be your friends or turn into your competitors according to your attitude. Try to built good relationships with everyone. Interpreting is already difficult; doing this without breaking any heart and having fun, is completely in your hands. You should continue to built up your language training that you get at school with your personal studies. Area selection is difficult, on the way of this selection do not be hurry to decide, it will settle in time. The most important point is to know your own language first, please often read books. Be reminded that it is not expected to make healthy translations from someone, who has no command of his native language. Appearance and attitude are quite important in the field of interpreting. People are ready to judge you, even with your appearance, the way of sitting. When you get in a platform, if you show a profile that is lack of confidence, people try to abuse you and pile extra work to you in every sense. So take a tough stance and try to recover your mistakes instantly, and the most important thing is to trust yourself and be proud of your work.

The post Turkish Translation and Becoming a Turkish Translator appeared first on Turkish Translation Service Company for Businesses & Individuals, Professional, Fast and Easy.

[dillenwaeraa]

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled

They say learning SEO is like learning a new language. With such a skill, comes hours of pouring over educational materials and practising it until it comes with ease. But if you don’t learn the skill with the guidance of a teacher or the right resources, you can end up with holes in your knowledge and a wobbly accent (so to speak).

Luckily at Distilled, I have access to a full office of SEO professionals who have been practising such skills for years. It is this resource that I am going to share a snippet of, with you today.

This isn’t your typical SEO beginners guide. Instead, it’s a how-to-get-ahead and stand-out-from-the-crowd debut. The kind of thing when learning a new skill, you’d want to stumble across.

So - here’s what you need to know if you want to stand out from your average SEO newbie crowd...

1. Download these plugins/extensions to make life easier 

If there is a way to automate something, do it. By installing the right extensions and knowing what tools to use for what purpose, can save you hours of long-hand work. Here are some tools and extensions that if you don’t have downloaded already, you need to do so now.

Chrome Extensions:

Pi Portent

This extension will review all the key SEO elements of the page that you’re on. Instead of using the ‘inspect’ feature and locating page h1s, meta descriptions, title tags, and the rest of it on your own accord; this plugin identifies these easily and gives you a brief explanation per element. 

MozBar

This tool can be used for viewing:

Link metrics (i.e. DA & PA)

Page analysis (i.e. page title, markup) 

Highlight links (i.e. nofollow, follow) 

Keyword difficulty

Page optimization 

On-Page content suggestions 

Web Developer

As we can see, this tool gives you an easily laid out menu of some key web developer tools that can help you analyse a site from the Googlebot perspective.

Cool tip: If you want to see how much Javascript a website has enabled, turning on ‘Disable JavaScript;’ and then reloading the web page will show you what Googlebot sees - which can be very insightful! 

Redirect path 

As the name suggests, this tool identifies the redirect path of a URL. Simple, but effective. 

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant validates the implementation of Google tracking scripts on any page you turn it on for. Once you hit ‘record’, it will analyse all the pages on the current tab. 

Open Multiple URLs

Again, this one is self-explanatory and basic, but very useful when you have a lot of links you need to check. Copying and pasting them into the box to open simultaneously, can shave a few minutes off your day. 

What Font

Whilst this tool doesn’t have anything to do with SEO… it can definitely help in the presentation of your recommendations and SEO decks. For example, say you have Facebook as a client. To make things more presentable and visually pleasing, you can use this tool to pick the exact Facebook blue, to then use in the colour scheme of your deck or spreadsheets. 

You can also click on a heading on a website, and it will tell you the exact font being used; of which you can replicate in your presentation materials. 

Wappalyzer

This extension identifies what software technologies a website is using. Such features include analytics, programming language, web framework, widgets, tag manager, etc. It's your one-stop-shop to figure out all your web programming needs. 

2. Get specific results from your common SEO tools 

The following are tools SEO consultants at Distilled use daily. Instead of trying to capture what each of these can do for you in a few sentences, I’ve linked various blog posts relative to each tool for you to dive into.

Screaming Frog 

What is it? A website crawler that crawls URLs to then provide you with data that you can draw insights from. 

How to use it? Download it onto your computer, and read my fellow Distiller’s post; How to Use Screaming Frog: A Beginner’s Guide.

Deep Crawl

What is it? A crawling program that is cloud-based. This tool is ideal if you’re crawling a website with hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs, and you don’t want to clog up your computer and make everything frustratingly slow on a downloaded crawl program. 

How to use it? Sign up and create an account on their website, and start exploring the tool! Moz’s blog post effectively captures some key behaviours; Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web

Ahrefs 

What is it? An online tool that looks into the organic search traffic, keywords and backlink profile of a website. 

How to use it? Create an account here. One of the most used features on ahrefs, is the ‘keyword explorer’ section, explained further here; A Beginner’s Guide to Ahrefs for Small-Batch Keyword Research

SEMrush

What is it? An online visibility platform that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. 

How to use it? Log in and explore all of the different functions available. A Distilled team member has identified using the tool effective for keyword research. See here; How to Use SEMrush for Competitive Keyword Research

Happy exploring! 

3. Don't underestimate 'soft' skills to complement your technical arsenal

A crucial skill to learn as a newbie SEO, is understanding that ‘soft’ skills are just as important as your technical skills. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities and understanding your own findings and point of view; however, if you work for an agency or even in-house; you’ll have to explain your thought-process to someone who isn’t as familiar with it as you are. Whether it’s a client or management, nurturing this relationship is vital to your career progression. 

How?

Try and formulate your recommendations in a way that is most beneficial to the client → Take the context of their pain points & struggles into account. For example, ‘best practice’ solutions might not be applicable to them (due to their technical set up, resources, internal politics, etc). So make your recommendations relevant to them, not ‘the industry’. 

Always try to be flexible and present several possible solutions → this gives them leeway and control over what they think would suit them best, without requiring you to go back to the drawing board unnecessarily. On the Moz Blog, Laurel has written a great post that dives into these soft skills in her post, ‘Empathetic consulting: 3 things to remember when working with other teams’.  Have a read through to get more of an understanding of how clients can feel when dealing with accepting outside help. 

Try to keep a stable team working on one account → Having team members drifting in and out of work might be misconstrued as your team not caring about the account. If someone can no longer work on it, inform your client properly and re-introduce someone else that does have the time and resources to dedicate to the client. 

Further resources to improve your soft skills:

After combing through both the Moz blog and Distilled blog, below are a few quick links to some posts that explore various elements of developing your soft skills as a consultant that are available to you to investigate further. 

‘How to Talk to Your Clients in a Language They Understand’

‘The MECE Framework — What It Is and How to Use It’

‘Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape’

‘How to Present a Recommendation’

4. Learn SEO from the right sources

The other day I was watching a video from SearchLove Boston 2019 by Daniel Russell, and he said something that resonated with me. He said he looks at how ‘the big dogs’ are doing it; whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, learn from the best. 

Whilst finding the best person at SEO is near impossible, I personally have found going to a place where the best do tend to congregate, is a good start. Yes, I’m referring to conferences. 

Not only do digital marketing conferences offer an opportunity to attend all the sessions you are interested in and want to learn about, but they are also a fantastic platform to network and build your contacts. Typically, networking might not be your first point of call when learning about SEO. But it really should be up there on your to-do list. 

The conversations you have with SEO experts who are working in the industry, own their own agencies or have been working in-house for a big brand; will offer you exceptional insights and tips that your average SEO blog won’t touch on.

Furthermore, conferences such as SearchLove, offer sessions that are focused on the most up-to-date SEO practices, held by SEO experts who have been vetted and chosen to share their personal case studies and strategies with the audience. After two days of learning actionable SEO strategies, there are networking events held at the end of every day, to give attendees a chance to meet fellow SEO professionals, as well as meet the speakers. 

If you’re interested in attending an SEO conference, SearchLove is the one for you! Held in San Diego and London, see which one is for you here.

SEARCHLOVE IS THE CAN'T MISS SEARCH EVENT OF THE YEAR.

David Wilson (attendee)

Want to learn SEO the Distilled Way?

If you can’t stray from your desk, Distilled also offers an educational platform, called DistilledU, that has interactive SEO courses you can participate in; receiving a certificate at the end! If you’re interested in completing this online course, all you have to do is become a member of DistilledU. See here to learn more!

5. Track your own progress and identify areas you want to build on 

Last but not least, is to understand that your progression is up to you. Whether you’re in-house or work for an agency, it’s down to you to manage your own time and progression. Particularly working in the ever-changing nature of SEO, things can begin to feel a little out of control. Here at Distilled, we place value on independent work; which doesn't mean working in a silo, but instead means that you manage your own time and tasks. 

A common term that is used to refer to this process of self management of skill progression, is a t-shaped marketer. A t-shaped marketer is someone who develops a cross-discipline competence as well as have a deeper knowledge and expertise in one area in specific. These two blog posts I’ve stumbled across have proven to be useful in explaining this concept further, one by Rand Fishkin, ‘The t-shaped web marketer’, and the other by Mike Tekula, ‘Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set’.

There are many ways you can go about tracking your progression across various tools/skills. A few time and task management tools have been passed around the office, with the following being most commonly used.

SEO Skills Checklist 

My personal favourite is the excel spreadsheet my colleague, Arpun Buhni has developed and refined for all SEOs to use. By clicking on this link, and creating a copy for yourself; you can use it as a tracking sheet to watch the progress of your skills increase. 

As you can see, there are different categories of areas in digital marketing that you can focus on, with each row containing a specific task. Nothing is too broad or overwhelming, instead, it is easily spread into bite-sized tasks where you can put in a score of your skill level for each. All the scores are explained in the sheet. Don’t worry if initially, you keep putting down 1s and 2s; that’s expected! It shows the opportunity to build those skills to 3s and 4s. Enjoy!

Trello Boards

This is an online program that allows you to visually organise tasks through the creation of ‘boards’. You can share these boards with fellow team members, whilst also have private boards of your own for idea dumps and planning. Making a board for areas to learn, and areas to improve on is another effective way to utilise this system. Explore it here.

Excel Planner

Whilst this may appear plain and mundane, Excel can be a great tool to manage your daily tasks and time. See the screenshot below of an example monthly planner structure. Make a copy for yourself here! 

You could also make another sheet that focuses on progression, containing columns such as your progress made on Google Analytics, using Screaming Frog, how to do a tech audit; etc. This should be edited and checked monthly so you can see how you’re progressing and identify areas to work on. 

That’s a wrap!

Please feel free to add any comments you have or further ideas you’ve come across that you feel would be beneficial for newbie SEOs. 

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/five-golden-rules-for-seo-beginners/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[davidrsmithlove]

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled

They say learning SEO is like learning a new language. With such a skill, comes hours of pouring over educational materials and practising it until it comes with ease. But if you don’t learn the skill with the guidance of a teacher or the right resources, you can end up with holes in your knowledge and a wobbly accent (so to speak).

Luckily at Distilled, I have access to a full office of SEO professionals who have been practising such skills for years. It is this resource that I am going to share a snippet of, with you today.

This isn’t your typical SEO beginners guide. Instead, it’s a how-to-get-ahead and stand-out-from-the-crowd debut. The kind of thing when learning a new skill, you’d want to stumble across.

So - here’s what you need to know if you want to stand out from your average SEO newbie crowd...

1. Download these plugins/extensions to make life easier 

If there is a way to automate something, do it. By installing the right extensions and knowing what tools to use for what purpose, can save you hours of long-hand work. Here are some tools and extensions that if you don’t have downloaded already, you need to do so now.

Chrome Extensions:

Pi Portent

This extension will review all the key SEO elements of the page that you’re on. Instead of using the ‘inspect’ feature and locating page h1s, meta descriptions, title tags, and the rest of it on your own accord; this plugin identifies these easily and gives you a brief explanation per element. 

MozBar

This tool can be used for viewing:

Link metrics (i.e. DA & PA)

Page analysis (i.e. page title, markup) 

Highlight links (i.e. nofollow, follow) 

Keyword difficulty

Page optimization 

On-Page content suggestions 

Web Developer

As we can see, this tool gives you an easily laid out menu of some key web developer tools that can help you analyse a site from the Googlebot perspective.

Cool tip: If you want to see how much Javascript a website has enabled, turning on ‘Disable JavaScript;’ and then reloading the web page will show you what Googlebot sees - which can be very insightful! 

Redirect path 

As the name suggests, this tool identifies the redirect path of a URL. Simple, but effective. 

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant validates the implementation of Google tracking scripts on any page you turn it on for. Once you hit ‘record’, it will analyse all the pages on the current tab. 

Open Multiple URLs

Again, this one is self-explanatory and basic, but very useful when you have a lot of links you need to check. Copying and pasting them into the box to open simultaneously, can shave a few minutes off your day. 

What Font

Whilst this tool doesn’t have anything to do with SEO… it can definitely help in the presentation of your recommendations and SEO decks. For example, say you have Facebook as a client. To make things more presentable and visually pleasing, you can use this tool to pick the exact Facebook blue, to then use in the colour scheme of your deck or spreadsheets. 

You can also click on a heading on a website, and it will tell you the exact font being used; of which you can replicate in your presentation materials. 

Wappalyzer

This extension identifies what software technologies a website is using. Such features include analytics, programming language, web framework, widgets, tag manager, etc. It's your one-stop-shop to figure out all your web programming needs. 

2. Get specific results from your common SEO tools 

The following are tools SEO consultants at Distilled use daily. Instead of trying to capture what each of these can do for you in a few sentences, I’ve linked various blog posts relative to each tool for you to dive into.

Screaming Frog 

What is it? A website crawler that crawls URLs to then provide you with data that you can draw insights from. 

How to use it? Download it onto your computer, and read my fellow Distiller’s post; How to Use Screaming Frog: A Beginner’s Guide.

Deep Crawl

What is it? A crawling program that is cloud-based. This tool is ideal if you’re crawling a website with hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs, and you don’t want to clog up your computer and make everything frustratingly slow on a downloaded crawl program. 

How to use it? Sign up and create an account on their website, and start exploring the tool! Moz’s blog post effectively captures some key behaviours; Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web

Ahrefs 

What is it? An online tool that looks into the organic search traffic, keywords and backlink profile of a website. 

How to use it? Create an account here. One of the most used features on ahrefs, is the ‘keyword explorer’ section, explained further here; A Beginner’s Guide to Ahrefs for Small-Batch Keyword Research

SEMrush

What is it? An online visibility platform that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. 

How to use it? Log in and explore all of the different functions available. A Distilled team member has identified using the tool effective for keyword research. See here; How to Use SEMrush for Competitive Keyword Research

Happy exploring! 

3. Don't underestimate 'soft' skills to complement your technical arsenal

A crucial skill to learn as a newbie SEO, is understanding that ‘soft’ skills are just as important as your technical skills. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities and understanding your own findings and point of view; however, if you work for an agency or even in-house; you’ll have to explain your thought-process to someone who isn’t as familiar with it as you are. Whether it’s a client or management, nurturing this relationship is vital to your career progression. 

How?

Try and formulate your recommendations in a way that is most beneficial to the client → Take the context of their pain points & struggles into account. For example, ‘best practice’ solutions might not be applicable to them (due to their technical set up, resources, internal politics, etc). So make your recommendations relevant to them, not ‘the industry’. 

Always try to be flexible and present several possible solutions → this gives them leeway and control over what they think would suit them best, without requiring you to go back to the drawing board unnecessarily. On the Moz Blog, Laurel has written a great post that dives into these soft skills in her post, ‘Empathetic consulting: 3 things to remember when working with other teams’.  Have a read through to get more of an understanding of how clients can feel when dealing with accepting outside help. 

Try to keep a stable team working on one account → Having team members drifting in and out of work might be misconstrued as your team not caring about the account. If someone can no longer work on it, inform your client properly and re-introduce someone else that does have the time and resources to dedicate to the client. 

Further resources to improve your soft skills:

After combing through both the Moz blog and Distilled blog, below are a few quick links to some posts that explore various elements of developing your soft skills as a consultant that are available to you to investigate further. 

‘How to Talk to Your Clients in a Language They Understand’

‘The MECE Framework — What It Is and How to Use It’

‘Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape’

‘How to Present a Recommendation’

4. Learn SEO from the right sources

The other day I was watching a video from SearchLove Boston 2019 by Daniel Russell, and he said something that resonated with me. He said he looks at how ‘the big dogs’ are doing it; whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, learn from the best. 

Whilst finding the best person at SEO is near impossible, I personally have found going to a place where the best do tend to congregate, is a good start. Yes, I’m referring to conferences. 

Not only do digital marketing conferences offer an opportunity to attend all the sessions you are interested in and want to learn about, but they are also a fantastic platform to network and build your contacts. Typically, networking might not be your first point of call when learning about SEO. But it really should be up there on your to-do list. 

The conversations you have with SEO experts who are working in the industry, own their own agencies or have been working in-house for a big brand; will offer you exceptional insights and tips that your average SEO blog won’t touch on.

Furthermore, conferences such as SearchLove, offer sessions that are focused on the most up-to-date SEO practices, held by SEO experts who have been vetted and chosen to share their personal case studies and strategies with the audience. After two days of learning actionable SEO strategies, there are networking events held at the end of every day, to give attendees a chance to meet fellow SEO professionals, as well as meet the speakers. 

If you’re interested in attending an SEO conference, SearchLove is the one for you! Held in San Diego and London, see which one is for you here.

SEARCHLOVE IS THE CAN'T MISS SEARCH EVENT OF THE YEAR.

David Wilson (attendee)

Want to learn SEO the Distilled Way?

If you can’t stray from your desk, Distilled also offers an educational platform, called DistilledU, that has interactive SEO courses you can participate in; receiving a certificate at the end! If you’re interested in completing this online course, all you have to do is become a member of DistilledU. See here to learn more!

5. Track your own progress and identify areas you want to build on 

Last but not least, is to understand that your progression is up to you. Whether you’re in-house or work for an agency, it’s down to you to manage your own time and progression. Particularly working in the ever-changing nature of SEO, things can begin to feel a little out of control. Here at Distilled, we place value on independent work; which doesn't mean working in a silo, but instead means that you manage your own time and tasks. 

A common term that is used to refer to this process of self management of skill progression, is a t-shaped marketer. A t-shaped marketer is someone who develops a cross-discipline competence as well as have a deeper knowledge and expertise in one area in specific. These two blog posts I’ve stumbled across have proven to be useful in explaining this concept further, one by Rand Fishkin, ‘The t-shaped web marketer’, and the other by Mike Tekula, ‘Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set’.

There are many ways you can go about tracking your progression across various tools/skills. A few time and task management tools have been passed around the office, with the following being most commonly used.

SEO Skills Checklist 

My personal favourite is the excel spreadsheet my colleague, Arpun Buhni has developed and refined for all SEOs to use. By clicking on this link, and creating a copy for yourself; you can use it as a tracking sheet to watch the progress of your skills increase. 

As you can see, there are different categories of areas in digital marketing that you can focus on, with each row containing a specific task. Nothing is too broad or overwhelming, instead, it is easily spread into bite-sized tasks where you can put in a score of your skill level for each. All the scores are explained in the sheet. Don’t worry if initially, you keep putting down 1s and 2s; that’s expected! It shows the opportunity to build those skills to 3s and 4s. Enjoy!

Trello Boards

This is an online program that allows you to visually organise tasks through the creation of ‘boards’. You can share these boards with fellow team members, whilst also have private boards of your own for idea dumps and planning. Making a board for areas to learn, and areas to improve on is another effective way to utilise this system. Explore it here.

Excel Planner

Whilst this may appear plain and mundane, Excel can be a great tool to manage your daily tasks and time. See the screenshot below of an example monthly planner structure. Make a copy for yourself here! 

You could also make another sheet that focuses on progression, containing columns such as your progress made on Google Analytics, using Screaming Frog, how to do a tech audit; etc. This should be edited and checked monthly so you can see how you’re progressing and identify areas to work on. 

That’s a wrap!

Please feel free to add any comments you have or further ideas you’ve come across that you feel would be beneficial for newbie SEOs. 

[ronijashworth]

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled

They say learning SEO is like learning a new language. With such a skill, comes hours of pouring over educational materials and practising it until it comes with ease. But if you don’t learn the skill with the guidance of a teacher or the right resources, you can end up with holes in your knowledge and a wobbly accent (so to speak).

Luckily at Distilled, I have access to a full office of SEO professionals who have been practising such skills for years. It is this resource that I am going to share a snippet of, with you today.

This isn’t your typical SEO beginners guide. Instead, it’s a how-to-get-ahead and stand-out-from-the-crowd debut. The kind of thing when learning a new skill, you’d want to stumble across.

So - here’s what you need to know if you want to stand out from your average SEO newbie crowd...

1. Download these plugins/extensions to make life easier 

If there is a way to automate something, do it. By installing the right extensions and knowing what tools to use for what purpose, can save you hours of long-hand work. Here are some tools and extensions that if you don’t have downloaded already, you need to do so now.

Chrome Extensions:

Pi Portent

This extension will review all the key SEO elements of the page that you’re on. Instead of using the ‘inspect’ feature and locating page h1s, meta descriptions, title tags, and the rest of it on your own accord; this plugin identifies these easily and gives you a brief explanation per element. 

Download it here!

MozBar

This tool can be used for viewing:

Link metrics (i.e. DA & PA)

Page analysis (i.e. page title, markup) 

Highlight links (i.e. nofollow, follow) 

Keyword difficulty

Page optimization 

On-Page content suggestions 

Download it here!

Web Developer

As we can see, this tool gives you an easily laid out menu of some key web developer tools that can help you analyse a site from the Googlebot perspective.

Cool tip: If you want to see how much Javascript a website has enabled, turning on ‘Disable JavaScript;’ and then reloading the web page will show you what Googlebot sees - which can be very insightful! 

Download it here!

Redirect path 

As the name suggests, this tool identifies the redirect path of a URL. Simple, but effective. 

Download it here!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant validates the implementation of Google tracking scripts on any page you turn it on for. Once you hit ‘record’, it will analyse all the pages on the current tab. 

Download it here!

Open Multiple URLs

Again, this one is self-explanatory and basic, but very useful when you have a lot of links you need to check. Copying and pasting them into the box to open simultaneously, can shave a few minutes off your day. 

Download it here!

What Font

Whilst this tool doesn’t have anything to do with SEO… it can definitely help in the presentation of your recommendations and SEO decks. For example, say you have Facebook as a client. To make things more presentable and visually pleasing, you can use this tool to pick the exact Facebook blue, to then use in the colour scheme of your deck or spreadsheets. 

You can also click on a heading on a website, and it will tell you the exact font being used; of which you can replicate in your presentation materials. 

Download it here!

Wappalyzer

This extension identifies what software technologies a website is using. Such features include analytics, programming language, web framework, widgets, tag manager, etc. It's your one-stop-shop to figure out all your web programming needs. 

Download it here! 

2. Get specific results from your common SEO tools 

The following are tools SEO consultants at Distilled use daily. Instead of trying to capture what each of these can do for you in a few sentences, I’ve linked various blog posts relative to each tool for you to dive into.

Screaming Frog 

What is it? A website crawler that crawls URLs to then provide you with data that you can draw insights from. 

How to use it? Download it onto your computer, and read my fellow Distiller’s post; How to Use Screaming Frog: A Beginner’s Guide.

Deep Crawl

What is it? A crawling program that is cloud-based. This tool is ideal if you’re crawling a website with hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs, and you don’t want to clog up your computer and make everything frustratingly slow on a downloaded crawl program. 

How to use it? Sign up and create an account on their website, and start exploring the tool! Moz’s blog post effectively captures some key behaviours; Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web

Ahrefs 

What is it? An online tool that looks into the organic search traffic, keywords and backlink profile of a website. 

How to use it? Create an account here. One of the most used features on ahrefs, is the ‘keyword explorer’ section, explained further here; A Beginner’s Guide to Ahrefs for Small-Batch Keyword Research

SEMrush

What is it? An online visibility platform that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. 

How to use it? Log in and explore all of the different functions available. A Distilled team member has identified using the tool effective for keyword research. See here; How to Use SEMrush for Competitive Keyword Research

Happy exploring! 

3. Don't underestimate 'soft' skills to complement your technical arsenal

A crucial skill to learn as a newbie SEO, is understanding that ‘soft’ skills are just as important as your technical skills. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities and understanding your own findings and point of view; however, if you work for an agency or even in-house; you’ll have to explain your thought-process to someone who isn’t as familiar with it as you are. Whether it’s a client or management, nurturing this relationship is vital to your career progression. 

How?

Try and formulate your recommendations in a way that is most beneficial to the client → Take the context of their pain points & struggles into account. For example, ‘best practice’ solutions might not be applicable to them (due to their technical set up, resources, internal politics, etc). So make your recommendations relevant to them, not ‘the industry’. 

Always try to be flexible and present several possible solutions → this gives them leeway and control over what they think would suit them best, without requiring you to go back to the drawing board unnecessarily. On the Moz Blog, Laurel has written a great post that dives into these soft skills in her post, ‘Empathetic consulting: 3 things to remember when working with other teams’.  Have a read through to get more of an understanding of how clients can feel when dealing with accepting outside help. 

Try to keep a stable team working on one account → Having team members drifting in and out of work might be misconstrued as your team not caring about the account. If someone can no longer work on it, inform your client properly and re-introduce someone else that does have the time and resources to dedicate to the client. 

Further resources to improve your soft skills:

After combing through both the Moz blog and Distilled blog, below are a few quick links to some posts that explore various elements of developing your soft skills as a consultant that are available to you to investigate further. 

‘How to Talk to Your Clients in a Language They Understand’

‘The MECE Framework — What It Is and How to Use It’

‘Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape’

‘How to Present a Recommendation’

4. Learn SEO from the right sources

The other day I was watching a video from SearchLove Boston 2019 by Daniel Russell, and he said something that resonated with me. He said he looks at how ‘the big dogs’ are doing it; whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, learn from the best. 

Whilst finding the best person at SEO is near impossible, I personally have found going to a place where the best do tend to congregate, is a good start. Yes, I’m referring to conferences. 

Not only do digital marketing conferences offer an opportunity to attend all the sessions you are interested in and want to learn about, but they are also a fantastic platform to network and build your contacts. Typically, networking might not be your first point of call when learning about SEO. But it really should be up there on your to-do list. 

The conversations you have with SEO experts who are working in the industry, own their own agencies or have been working in-house for a big brand; will offer you exceptional insights and tips that your average SEO blog won’t touch on.

Furthermore, conferences such as SearchLove, offer sessions that are focused on the most up-to-date SEO practices, held by SEO experts who have been vetted and chosen to share their personal case studies and strategies with the audience. After two days of learning actionable SEO strategies, there are networking events held at the end of every day, to give attendees a chance to meet fellow SEO professionals, as well as meet the speakers. 

If you’re interested in attending an SEO conference, SearchLove is the one for you! Held in San Diego and London, see which one is for you here.

SEARCHLOVE IS THE CAN'T MISS SEARCH EVENT OF THE YEAR.

David Wilson (attendee)

Want to learn SEO the Distilled Way?

If you can’t stray from your desk, Distilled also offers an educational platform, called DistilledU, that has interactive SEO courses you can participate in; receiving a certificate at the end! If you’re interested in completing this online course, all you have to do is become a member of DistilledU. See here to learn more!

5. Track your own progress and identify areas you want to build on 

Last but not least, is to understand that your progression is up to you. Whether you’re in-house or work for an agency, it’s down to you to manage your own time and progression. Particularly working in the ever-changing nature of SEO, things can begin to feel a little out of control. Here at Distilled, we place value on independent work; which doesn't mean working in a silo, but instead means that you manage your own time and tasks. 

A common term that is used to refer to this process of self management of skill progression, is a t-shaped marketer. A t-shaped marketer is someone who develops a cross-discipline competence as well as have a deeper knowledge and expertise in one area in specific. These two blog posts I’ve stumbled across have proven to be useful in explaining this concept further, one by Rand Fishkin, ‘The t-shaped web marketer’, and the other by Mike Tekula, ‘Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set’.

There are many ways you can go about tracking your progression across various tools/skills. A few time and task management tools have been passed around the office, with the following being most commonly used.

SEO Skills Checklist 

My personal favourite is the excel spreadsheet my colleague, Arpun Buhni has developed and refined for all SEOs to use. By clicking on this link, and creating a copy for yourself; you can use it as a tracking sheet to watch the progress of your skills increase. 

As you can see, there are different categories of areas in digital marketing that you can focus on, with each row containing a specific task. Nothing is too broad or overwhelming, instead, it is easily spread into bite-sized tasks where you can put in a score of your skill level for each. All the scores are explained in the sheet. Don’t worry if initially, you keep putting down 1s and 2s; that’s expected! It shows the opportunity to build those skills to 3s and 4s. Enjoy!

Trello

This is an online program that allows you to visually organise tasks through the creation of ‘boards’. You can share these boards with fellow team members, whilst also have private boards of your own for idea dumps and planning. Making a board for areas to learn, and areas to improve on is another effective way to utilise this system. Explore it here.

Excel

Whilst this may appear plain and mundane, Excel can be a great tool to manage your daily tasks and time. See the screenshot below of an example monthly planner structure. Make a copy for yourself here! 

You could also make another sheet that focuses on progression, containing columns such as your progress made on Google Analytics, using Screaming Frog, how to do a tech audit; etc. This should be edited and checked monthly so you can see how you’re progressing and identify areas to work on. 

That’s a wrap!

Please feel free to add any comments you have or further ideas you’ve come across that you feel would be beneficial for newbie SEOs. 

from Digital Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/five-golden-rules-for-seo-beginners/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[anthonykrierion]

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled

They say learning SEO is like learning a new language. With such a skill, comes hours of pouring over educational materials and practising it until it comes with ease. But if you don’t learn the skill with the guidance of a teacher or the right resources, you can end up with holes in your knowledge and a wobbly accent (so to speak).

Luckily at Distilled, I have access to a full office of SEO professionals who have been practising such skills for years. It is this resource that I am going to share a snippet of, with you today.

This isn’t your typical SEO beginners guide. Instead, it’s a how-to-get-ahead and stand-out-from-the-crowd debut. The kind of thing when learning a new skill, you’d want to stumble across.

So - here’s what you need to know if you want to stand out from your average SEO newbie crowd...

1. Download these plugins/extensions to make life easier 

If there is a way to automate something, do it. By installing the right extensions and knowing what tools to use for what purpose, can save you hours of long-hand work. Here are some tools and extensions that if you don’t have downloaded already, you need to do so now.

Chrome Extensions:

Pi Portent

This extension will review all the key SEO elements of the page that you’re on. Instead of using the ‘inspect’ feature and locating page h1s, meta descriptions, title tags, and the rest of it on your own accord; this plugin identifies these easily and gives you a brief explanation per element. 

MozBar

This tool can be used for viewing:

Link metrics (i.e. DA & PA)

Page analysis (i.e. page title, markup) 

Highlight links (i.e. nofollow, follow) 

Keyword difficulty

Page optimization 

On-Page content suggestions 

Web Developer

As we can see, this tool gives you an easily laid out menu of some key web developer tools that can help you analyse a site from the Googlebot perspective.

Cool tip: If you want to see how much Javascript a website has enabled, turning on ‘Disable JavaScript;’ and then reloading the web page will show you what Googlebot sees - which can be very insightful! 

Redirect path 

As the name suggests, this tool identifies the redirect path of a URL. Simple, but effective. 

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant validates the implementation of Google tracking scripts on any page you turn it on for. Once you hit ‘record’, it will analyse all the pages on the current tab. 

Open Multiple URLs

Again, this one is self-explanatory and basic, but very useful when you have a lot of links you need to check. Copying and pasting them into the box to open simultaneously, can shave a few minutes off your day. 

What Font

Whilst this tool doesn’t have anything to do with SEO… it can definitely help in the presentation of your recommendations and SEO decks. For example, say you have Facebook as a client. To make things more presentable and visually pleasing, you can use this tool to pick the exact Facebook blue, to then use in the colour scheme of your deck or spreadsheets. 

You can also click on a heading on a website, and it will tell you the exact font being used; of which you can replicate in your presentation materials. 

Wappalyzer

This extension identifies what software technologies a website is using. Such features include analytics, programming language, web framework, widgets, tag manager, etc. It's your one-stop-shop to figure out all your web programming needs. 

2. Get specific results from your common SEO tools 

The following are tools SEO consultants at Distilled use daily. Instead of trying to capture what each of these can do for you in a few sentences, I’ve linked various blog posts relative to each tool for you to dive into.

Screaming Frog 

What is it? A website crawler that crawls URLs to then provide you with data that you can draw insights from. 

How to use it? Download it onto your computer, and read my fellow Distiller’s post; How to Use Screaming Frog: A Beginner’s Guide.

Deep Crawl

What is it? A crawling program that is cloud-based. This tool is ideal if you’re crawling a website with hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs, and you don’t want to clog up your computer and make everything frustratingly slow on a downloaded crawl program. 

How to use it? Sign up and create an account on their website, and start exploring the tool! Moz’s blog post effectively captures some key behaviours; Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web

Ahrefs 

What is it? An online tool that looks into the organic search traffic, keywords and backlink profile of a website. 

How to use it? Create an account here. One of the most used features on ahrefs, is the ‘keyword explorer’ section, explained further here; A Beginner’s Guide to Ahrefs for Small-Batch Keyword Research

SEMrush

What is it? An online visibility platform that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. 

How to use it? Log in and explore all of the different functions available. A Distilled team member has identified using the tool effective for keyword research. See here; How to Use SEMrush for Competitive Keyword Research

Happy exploring! 

3. Don't underestimate 'soft' skills to complement your technical arsenal

A crucial skill to learn as a newbie SEO, is understanding that ‘soft’ skills are just as important as your technical skills. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities and understanding your own findings and point of view; however, if you work for an agency or even in-house; you’ll have to explain your thought-process to someone who isn’t as familiar with it as you are. Whether it’s a client or management, nurturing this relationship is vital to your career progression. 

How?

Try and formulate your recommendations in a way that is most beneficial to the client → Take the context of their pain points & struggles into account. For example, ‘best practice’ solutions might not be applicable to them (due to their technical set up, resources, internal politics, etc). So make your recommendations relevant to them, not ‘the industry’. 

Always try to be flexible and present several possible solutions → this gives them leeway and control over what they think would suit them best, without requiring you to go back to the drawing board unnecessarily. On the Moz Blog, Laurel has written a great post that dives into these soft skills in her post, ‘Empathetic consulting: 3 things to remember when working with other teams’.  Have a read through to get more of an understanding of how clients can feel when dealing with accepting outside help. 

Try to keep a stable team working on one account → Having team members drifting in and out of work might be misconstrued as your team not caring about the account. If someone can no longer work on it, inform your client properly and re-introduce someone else that does have the time and resources to dedicate to the client. 

Further resources to improve your soft skills:

After combing through both the Moz blog and Distilled blog, below are a few quick links to some posts that explore various elements of developing your soft skills as a consultant that are available to you to investigate further. 

‘How to Talk to Your Clients in a Language They Understand’

‘The MECE Framework — What It Is and How to Use It’

‘Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape’

‘How to Present a Recommendation’

4. Learn SEO from the right sources

The other day I was watching a video from SearchLove Boston 2019 by Daniel Russell, and he said something that resonated with me. He said he looks at how ‘the big dogs’ are doing it; whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, learn from the best. 

Whilst finding the best person at SEO is near impossible, I personally have found going to a place where the best do tend to congregate, is a good start. Yes, I’m referring to conferences. 

Not only do digital marketing conferences offer an opportunity to attend all the sessions you are interested in and want to learn about, but they are also a fantastic platform to network and build your contacts. Typically, networking might not be your first point of call when learning about SEO. But it really should be up there on your to-do list. 

The conversations you have with SEO experts who are working in the industry, own their own agencies or have been working in-house for a big brand; will offer you exceptional insights and tips that your average SEO blog won’t touch on.

Furthermore, conferences such as SearchLove, offer sessions that are focused on the most up-to-date SEO practices, held by SEO experts who have been vetted and chosen to share their personal case studies and strategies with the audience. After two days of learning actionable SEO strategies, there are networking events held at the end of every day, to give attendees a chance to meet fellow SEO professionals, as well as meet the speakers. 

If you’re interested in attending an SEO conference, SearchLove is the one for you! Held in San Diego and London, see which one is for you here.

SEARCHLOVE IS THE CAN'T MISS SEARCH EVENT OF THE YEAR.

David Wilson (attendee)

Want to learn SEO the Distilled Way?

If you can’t stray from your desk, Distilled also offers an educational platform, called DistilledU, that has interactive SEO courses you can participate in; receiving a certificate at the end! If you’re interested in completing this online course, all you have to do is become a member of DistilledU. See here to learn more!

5. Track your own progress and identify areas you want to build on 

Last but not least, is to understand that your progression is up to you. Whether you’re in-house or work for an agency, it’s down to you to manage your own time and progression. Particularly working in the ever-changing nature of SEO, things can begin to feel a little out of control. Here at Distilled, we place value on independent work; which doesn't mean working in a silo, but instead means that you manage your own time and tasks. 

A common term that is used to refer to this process of self management of skill progression, is a t-shaped marketer. A t-shaped marketer is someone who develops a cross-discipline competence as well as have a deeper knowledge and expertise in one area in specific. These two blog posts I’ve stumbled across have proven to be useful in explaining this concept further, one by Rand Fishkin, ‘The t-shaped web marketer’, and the other by Mike Tekula, ‘Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set’.

There are many ways you can go about tracking your progression across various tools/skills. A few time and task management tools have been passed around the office, with the following being most commonly used.

SEO Skills Checklist 

My personal favourite is the excel spreadsheet my colleague, Arpun Buhni has developed and refined for all SEOs to use. By clicking on this link, and creating a copy for yourself; you can use it as a tracking sheet to watch the progress of your skills increase. 

As you can see, there are different categories of areas in digital marketing that you can focus on, with each row containing a specific task. Nothing is too broad or overwhelming, instead, it is easily spread into bite-sized tasks where you can put in a score of your skill level for each. All the scores are explained in the sheet. Don’t worry if initially, you keep putting down 1s and 2s; that’s expected! It shows the opportunity to build those skills to 3s and 4s. Enjoy!

Trello Boards

This is an online program that allows you to visually organise tasks through the creation of ‘boards’. You can share these boards with fellow team members, whilst also have private boards of your own for idea dumps and planning. Making a board for areas to learn, and areas to improve on is another effective way to utilise this system. Explore it here.

Excel Planner

Whilst this may appear plain and mundane, Excel can be a great tool to manage your daily tasks and time. See the screenshot below of an example monthly planner structure. Make a copy for yourself here! 

You could also make another sheet that focuses on progression, containing columns such as your progress made on Google Analytics, using Screaming Frog, how to do a tech audit; etc. This should be edited and checked monthly so you can see how you’re progressing and identify areas to work on. 

That’s a wrap!

Please feel free to add any comments you have or further ideas you’ve come across that you feel would be beneficial for newbie SEOs. 

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

[donnafmae]

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled

They say learning SEO is like learning a new language. With such a skill, comes hours of pouring over educational materials and practising it until it comes with ease. But if you don’t learn the skill with the guidance of a teacher or the right resources, you can end up with holes in your knowledge and a wobbly accent (so to speak).

Luckily at Distilled, I have access to a full office of SEO professionals who have been practising such skills for years. It is this resource that I am going to share a snippet of, with you today.

This isn’t your typical SEO beginners guide. Instead, it’s a how-to-get-ahead and stand-out-from-the-crowd debut. The kind of thing when learning a new skill, you’d want to stumble across.

So - here’s what you need to know if you want to stand out from your average SEO newbie crowd...

1. Download these plugins/extensions to make life easier 

If there is a way to automate something, do it. By installing the right extensions and knowing what tools to use for what purpose, can save you hours of long-hand work. Here are some tools and extensions that if you don’t have downloaded already, you need to do so now.

Chrome Extensions:

Pi Portent

This extension will review all the key SEO elements of the page that you’re on. Instead of using the ‘inspect’ feature and locating page h1s, meta descriptions, title tags, and the rest of it on your own accord; this plugin identifies these easily and gives you a brief explanation per element. 

Download it here!

MozBar

This tool can be used for viewing:

Link metrics (i.e. DA & PA)

Page analysis (i.e. page title, markup) 

Highlight links (i.e. nofollow, follow) 

Keyword difficulty

Page optimization 

On-Page content suggestions 

Download it here!

Web Developer

As we can see, this tool gives you an easily laid out menu of some key web developer tools that can help you analyse a site from the Googlebot perspective.

Cool tip: If you want to see how much Javascript a website has enabled, turning on ‘Disable JavaScript;’ and then reloading the web page will show you what Googlebot sees - which can be very insightful! 

Download it here!

Redirect path 

As the name suggests, this tool identifies the redirect path of a URL. Simple, but effective. 

Download it here!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant validates the implementation of Google tracking scripts on any page you turn it on for. Once you hit ‘record’, it will analyse all the pages on the current tab. 

Download it here!

Open Multiple URLs

Again, this one is self-explanatory and basic, but very useful when you have a lot of links you need to check. Copying and pasting them into the box to open simultaneously, can shave a few minutes off your day. 

Download it here!

What Font

Whilst this tool doesn’t have anything to do with SEO… it can definitely help in the presentation of your recommendations and SEO decks. For example, say you have Facebook as a client. To make things more presentable and visually pleasing, you can use this tool to pick the exact Facebook blue, to then use in the colour scheme of your deck or spreadsheets. 

You can also click on a heading on a website, and it will tell you the exact font being used; of which you can replicate in your presentation materials. 

Download it here!

Wappalyzer

This extension identifies what software technologies a website is using. Such features include analytics, programming language, web framework, widgets, tag manager, etc. It's your one-stop-shop to figure out all your web programming needs. 

Download it here! 

2. Get specific results from your common SEO tools 

The following are tools SEO consultants at Distilled use daily. Instead of trying to capture what each of these can do for you in a few sentences, I’ve linked various blog posts relative to each tool for you to dive into.

Screaming Frog 

What is it? A website crawler that crawls URLs to then provide you with data that you can draw insights from. 

How to use it? Download it onto your computer, and read my fellow Distiller’s post; How to Use Screaming Frog: A Beginner’s Guide.

Deep Crawl

What is it? A crawling program that is cloud-based. This tool is ideal if you’re crawling a website with hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs, and you don’t want to clog up your computer and make everything frustratingly slow on a downloaded crawl program. 

How to use it? Sign up and create an account on their website, and start exploring the tool! Moz’s blog post effectively captures some key behaviours; Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web

Ahrefs 

What is it? An online tool that looks into the organic search traffic, keywords and backlink profile of a website. 

How to use it? Create an account here. One of the most used features on ahrefs, is the ‘keyword explorer’ section, explained further here; A Beginner’s Guide to Ahrefs for Small-Batch Keyword Research

SEMrush

What is it? An online visibility platform that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. 

How to use it? Log in and explore all of the different functions available. A Distilled team member has identified using the tool effective for keyword research. See here; How to Use SEMrush for Competitive Keyword Research

Happy exploring! 

3. Don't underestimate 'soft' skills to complement your technical arsenal

A crucial skill to learn as a newbie SEO, is understanding that ‘soft’ skills are just as important as your technical skills. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities and understanding your own findings and point of view; however, if you work for an agency or even in-house; you’ll have to explain your thought-process to someone who isn’t as familiar with it as you are. Whether it’s a client or management, nurturing this relationship is vital to your career progression. 

How?

Try and formulate your recommendations in a way that is most beneficial to the client → Take the context of their pain points & struggles into account. For example, ‘best practice’ solutions might not be applicable to them (due to their technical set up, resources, internal politics, etc). So make your recommendations relevant to them, not ‘the industry’. 

Always try to be flexible and present several possible solutions → this gives them leeway and control over what they think would suit them best, without requiring you to go back to the drawing board unnecessarily. On the Moz Blog, Laurel has written a great post that dives into these soft skills in her post, ‘Empathetic consulting: 3 things to remember when working with other teams’.  Have a read through to get more of an understanding of how clients can feel when dealing with accepting outside help. 

Try to keep a stable team working on one account → Having team members drifting in and out of work might be misconstrued as your team not caring about the account. If someone can no longer work on it, inform your client properly and re-introduce someone else that does have the time and resources to dedicate to the client. 

Further resources to improve your soft skills:

After combing through both the Moz blog and Distilled blog, below are a few quick links to some posts that explore various elements of developing your soft skills as a consultant that are available to you to investigate further. 

‘How to Talk to Your Clients in a Language They Understand’

‘The MECE Framework — What It Is and How to Use It’

‘Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape’

‘How to Present a Recommendation’

4. Learn SEO from the right sources

The other day I was watching a video from SearchLove Boston 2019 by Daniel Russell, and he said something that resonated with me. He said he looks at how ‘the big dogs’ are doing it; whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, learn from the best. 

Whilst finding the best person at SEO is near impossible, I personally have found going to a place where the best do tend to congregate, is a good start. Yes, I’m referring to conferences. 

Not only do digital marketing conferences offer an opportunity to attend all the sessions you are interested in and want to learn about, but they are also a fantastic platform to network and build your contacts. Typically, networking might not be your first point of call when learning about SEO. But it really should be up there on your to-do list. 

The conversations you have with SEO experts who are working in the industry, own their own agencies or have been working in-house for a big brand; will offer you exceptional insights and tips that your average SEO blog won’t touch on.

Furthermore, conferences such as SearchLove, offer sessions that are focused on the most up-to-date SEO practices, held by SEO experts who have been vetted and chosen to share their personal case studies and strategies with the audience. After two days of learning actionable SEO strategies, there are networking events held at the end of every day, to give attendees a chance to meet fellow SEO professionals, as well as meet the speakers. 

If you’re interested in attending an SEO conference, SearchLove is the one for you! Held in San Diego and London, see which one is for you here.

SEARCHLOVE IS THE CAN'T MISS SEARCH EVENT OF THE YEAR.

David Wilson (attendee)

Want to learn SEO the Distilled Way?

If you can’t stray from your desk, Distilled also offers an educational platform, called DistilledU, that has interactive SEO courses you can participate in; receiving a certificate at the end! If you’re interested in completing this online course, all you have to do is become a member of DistilledU. See here to learn more!

5. Track your own progress and identify areas you want to build on 

Last but not least, is to understand that your progression is up to you. Whether you’re in-house or work for an agency, it’s down to you to manage your own time and progression. Particularly working in the ever-changing nature of SEO, things can begin to feel a little out of control. Here at Distilled, we place value on independent work; which doesn't mean working in a silo, but instead means that you manage your own time and tasks. 

A common term that is used to refer to this process of self management of skill progression, is a t-shaped marketer. A t-shaped marketer is someone who develops a cross-discipline competence as well as have a deeper knowledge and expertise in one area in specific. These two blog posts I’ve stumbled across have proven to be useful in explaining this concept further, one by Rand Fishkin, ‘The t-shaped web marketer’, and the other by Mike Tekula, ‘Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set’.

There are many ways you can go about tracking your progression across various tools/skills. A few time and task management tools have been passed around the office, with the following being most commonly used.

SEO Skills Checklist 

My personal favourite is the excel spreadsheet my colleague, Arpun Buhni has developed and refined for all SEOs to use. By clicking on this link, and creating a copy for yourself; you can use it as a tracking sheet to watch the progress of your skills increase. 

As you can see, there are different categories of areas in digital marketing that you can focus on, with each row containing a specific task. Nothing is too broad or overwhelming, instead, it is easily spread into bite-sized tasks where you can put in a score of your skill level for each. All the scores are explained in the sheet. Don’t worry if initially, you keep putting down 1s and 2s; that’s expected! It shows the opportunity to build those skills to 3s and 4s. Enjoy!

Trello

This is an online program that allows you to visually organise tasks through the creation of ‘boards’. You can share these boards with fellow team members, whilst also have private boards of your own for idea dumps and planning. Making a board for areas to learn, and areas to improve on is another effective way to utilise this system. Explore it here.

Excel

Whilst this may appear plain and mundane, Excel can be a great tool to manage your daily tasks and time. See the screenshot below of an example monthly planner structure. Make a copy for yourself here! 

You could also make another sheet that focuses on progression, containing columns such as your progress made on Google Analytics, using Screaming Frog, how to do a tech audit; etc. This should be edited and checked monthly so you can see how you’re progressing and identify areas to work on. 

That’s a wrap!

Please feel free to add any comments you have or further ideas you’ve come across that you feel would be beneficial for newbie SEOs. 

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/five-golden-rules-for-seo-beginners/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[heavenwheel]

Five Golden Rules for SEO Beginners - Tips From Distilled

They say learning SEO is like learning a new language. With such a skill, comes hours of pouring over educational materials and practising it until it comes with ease. But if you don’t learn the skill with the guidance of a teacher or the right resources, you can end up with holes in your knowledge and a wobbly accent (so to speak).

Luckily at Distilled, I have access to a full office of SEO professionals who have been practising such skills for years. It is this resource that I am going to share a snippet of, with you today.

This isn’t your typical SEO beginners guide. Instead, it’s a how-to-get-ahead and stand-out-from-the-crowd debut. The kind of thing when learning a new skill, you’d want to stumble across.

So - here’s what you need to know if you want to stand out from your average SEO newbie crowd...

1. Download these plugins/extensions to make life easier 

If there is a way to automate something, do it. By installing the right extensions and knowing what tools to use for what purpose, can save you hours of long-hand work. Here are some tools and extensions that if you don’t have downloaded already, you need to do so now.

Chrome Extensions:

Pi Portent

This extension will review all the key SEO elements of the page that you’re on. Instead of using the ‘inspect’ feature and locating page h1s, meta descriptions, title tags, and the rest of it on your own accord; this plugin identifies these easily and gives you a brief explanation per element. 

Download it here!

MozBar

This tool can be used for viewing:

Link metrics (i.e. DA & PA)

Page analysis (i.e. page title, markup) 

Highlight links (i.e. nofollow, follow) 

Keyword difficulty

Page optimization 

On-Page content suggestions 

Download it here!

Web Developer

As we can see, this tool gives you an easily laid out menu of some key web developer tools that can help you analyse a site from the Googlebot perspective.

Cool tip: If you want to see how much Javascript a website has enabled, turning on ‘Disable JavaScript;’ and then reloading the web page will show you what Googlebot sees - which can be very insightful! 

Download it here!

Redirect path 

As the name suggests, this tool identifies the redirect path of a URL. Simple, but effective. 

Download it here!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant validates the implementation of Google tracking scripts on any page you turn it on for. Once you hit ‘record’, it will analyse all the pages on the current tab. 

Download it here!

Open Multiple URLs

Again, this one is self-explanatory and basic, but very useful when you have a lot of links you need to check. Copying and pasting them into the box to open simultaneously, can shave a few minutes off your day. 

Download it here!

What Font

Whilst this tool doesn’t have anything to do with SEO… it can definitely help in the presentation of your recommendations and SEO decks. For example, say you have Facebook as a client. To make things more presentable and visually pleasing, you can use this tool to pick the exact Facebook blue, to then use in the colour scheme of your deck or spreadsheets. 

You can also click on a heading on a website, and it will tell you the exact font being used; of which you can replicate in your presentation materials. 

Download it here!

Wappalyzer

This extension identifies what software technologies a website is using. Such features include analytics, programming language, web framework, widgets, tag manager, etc. It's your one-stop-shop to figure out all your web programming needs. 

Download it here! 

2. Get specific results from your common SEO tools 

The following are tools SEO consultants at Distilled use daily. Instead of trying to capture what each of these can do for you in a few sentences, I’ve linked various blog posts relative to each tool for you to dive into.

Screaming Frog 

What is it? A website crawler that crawls URLs to then provide you with data that you can draw insights from. 

How to use it? Download it onto your computer, and read my fellow Distiller’s post; How to Use Screaming Frog: A Beginner’s Guide.

Deep Crawl

What is it? A crawling program that is cloud-based. This tool is ideal if you’re crawling a website with hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs, and you don’t want to clog up your computer and make everything frustratingly slow on a downloaded crawl program. 

How to use it? Sign up and create an account on their website, and start exploring the tool! Moz’s blog post effectively captures some key behaviours; Lessons Learned While Crawling the Web

Ahrefs 

What is it? An online tool that looks into the organic search traffic, keywords and backlink profile of a website. 

How to use it? Create an account here. One of the most used features on ahrefs, is the ‘keyword explorer’ section, explained further here; A Beginner’s Guide to Ahrefs for Small-Batch Keyword Research

SEMrush

What is it? An online visibility platform that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. 

How to use it? Log in and explore all of the different functions available. A Distilled team member has identified using the tool effective for keyword research. See here; How to Use SEMrush for Competitive Keyword Research

Happy exploring! 

3. Don't underestimate 'soft' skills to complement your technical arsenal

A crucial skill to learn as a newbie SEO, is understanding that ‘soft’ skills are just as important as your technical skills. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities and understanding your own findings and point of view; however, if you work for an agency or even in-house; you’ll have to explain your thought-process to someone who isn’t as familiar with it as you are. Whether it’s a client or management, nurturing this relationship is vital to your career progression. 

How?

Try and formulate your recommendations in a way that is most beneficial to the client → Take the context of their pain points & struggles into account. For example, ‘best practice’ solutions might not be applicable to them (due to their technical set up, resources, internal politics, etc). So make your recommendations relevant to them, not ‘the industry’. 

Always try to be flexible and present several possible solutions → this gives them leeway and control over what they think would suit them best, without requiring you to go back to the drawing board unnecessarily. On the Moz Blog, Laurel has written a great post that dives into these soft skills in her post, ‘Empathetic consulting: 3 things to remember when working with other teams’.  Have a read through to get more of an understanding of how clients can feel when dealing with accepting outside help. 

Try to keep a stable team working on one account → Having team members drifting in and out of work might be misconstrued as your team not caring about the account. If someone can no longer work on it, inform your client properly and re-introduce someone else that does have the time and resources to dedicate to the client. 

Further resources to improve your soft skills:

After combing through both the Moz blog and Distilled blog, below are a few quick links to some posts that explore various elements of developing your soft skills as a consultant that are available to you to investigate further. 

‘How to Talk to Your Clients in a Language They Understand’

‘The MECE Framework — What It Is and How to Use It’

‘Communicating to Clients & Stakeholders in a Constantly Changing SEO Landscape’

‘How to Present a Recommendation’

4. Learn SEO from the right sources

The other day I was watching a video from SearchLove Boston 2019 by Daniel Russell, and he said something that resonated with me. He said he looks at how ‘the big dogs’ are doing it; whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, learn from the best. 

Whilst finding the best person at SEO is near impossible, I personally have found going to a place where the best do tend to congregate, is a good start. Yes, I’m referring to conferences. 

Not only do digital marketing conferences offer an opportunity to attend all the sessions you are interested in and want to learn about, but they are also a fantastic platform to network and build your contacts. Typically, networking might not be your first point of call when learning about SEO. But it really should be up there on your to-do list. 

The conversations you have with SEO experts who are working in the industry, own their own agencies or have been working in-house for a big brand; will offer you exceptional insights and tips that your average SEO blog won’t touch on.

Furthermore, conferences such as SearchLove, offer sessions that are focused on the most up-to-date SEO practices, held by SEO experts who have been vetted and chosen to share their personal case studies and strategies with the audience. After two days of learning actionable SEO strategies, there are networking events held at the end of every day, to give attendees a chance to meet fellow SEO professionals, as well as meet the speakers. 

If you’re interested in attending an SEO conference, SearchLove is the one for you! Held in San Diego and London, see which one is for you here.

SEARCHLOVE IS THE CAN'T MISS SEARCH EVENT OF THE YEAR.

David Wilson (attendee)

Want to learn SEO the Distilled Way?

If you can’t stray from your desk, Distilled also offers an educational platform, called DistilledU, that has interactive SEO courses you can participate in; receiving a certificate at the end! If you’re interested in completing this online course, all you have to do is become a member of DistilledU. See here to learn more!

5. Track your own progress and identify areas you want to build on 

Last but not least, is to understand that your progression is up to you. Whether you’re in-house or work for an agency, it’s down to you to manage your own time and progression. Particularly working in the ever-changing nature of SEO, things can begin to feel a little out of control. Here at Distilled, we place value on independent work; which doesn't mean working in a silo, but instead means that you manage your own time and tasks. 

A common term that is used to refer to this process of self management of skill progression, is a t-shaped marketer. A t-shaped marketer is someone who develops a cross-discipline competence as well as have a deeper knowledge and expertise in one area in specific. These two blog posts I’ve stumbled across have proven to be useful in explaining this concept further, one by Rand Fishkin, ‘The t-shaped web marketer’, and the other by Mike Tekula, ‘Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set’.

There are many ways you can go about tracking your progression across various tools/skills. A few time and task management tools have been passed around the office, with the following being most commonly used.

SEO Skills Checklist 

My personal favourite is the excel spreadsheet my colleague, Arpun Buhni has developed and refined for all SEOs to use. By clicking on this link, and creating a copy for yourself; you can use it as a tracking sheet to watch the progress of your skills increase. 

As you can see, there are different categories of areas in digital marketing that you can focus on, with each row containing a specific task. Nothing is too broad or overwhelming, instead, it is easily spread into bite-sized tasks where you can put in a score of your skill level for each. All the scores are explained in the sheet. Don’t worry if initially, you keep putting down 1s and 2s; that’s expected! It shows the opportunity to build those skills to 3s and 4s. Enjoy!

Trello

This is an online program that allows you to visually organise tasks through the creation of ‘boards’. You can share these boards with fellow team members, whilst also have private boards of your own for idea dumps and planning. Making a board for areas to learn, and areas to improve on is another effective way to utilise this system. Explore it here.

Excel

Whilst this may appear plain and mundane, Excel can be a great tool to manage your daily tasks and time. See the screenshot below of an example monthly planner structure. Make a copy for yourself here! 

You could also make another sheet that focuses on progression, containing columns such as your progress made on Google Analytics, using Screaming Frog, how to do a tech audit; etc. This should be edited and checked monthly so you can see how you’re progressing and identify areas to work on. 

That’s a wrap!

Please feel free to add any comments you have or further ideas you’ve come across that you feel would be beneficial for newbie SEOs. 

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/five-golden-rules-for-seo-beginners/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[rat-game]

On Allegory and Authorial Intent

For my first real post I’d like to share this story from my personal life. It was the single most important event related to my game and I don’t think that will ever change. I wrote the story of my game in a way where at first I didn’t have a beat-by-beat script and I barely knew the locations and order of events, I had a rough idea of the themes and the way the story will shape but the very first thing I fleshed out apart from the battle mechanics, story-wise, were the characters. I’ll stay vague for now but the personality of the main 5 and the antagonist were fully formed at this point, I would do writing exercises where I’d have them talk about something completely unrelated to the game to flesh out their manner of speaking and interpersonal relationships (maybe I’ll post one of these in the future) and it felt incredibly natural, like chatting with a real person, I didn’t have to think about it whatsoever. At this time I was playing a game called Celeste (which I highly recommend btw). It’s a platformer about climbing a mountain, it has little story-segments in between stages where the main character talks to someone, I won’t recount the story here but in one scene the MC (main character) says in no uncertain terms that climbing the mountain is an allegory for her struggle with anxiety. One of the level mechanics is a chase-scene autoscroller where an evil version of the MC chases the MC around, taunting her. Story-segments containing the evil version make it very clear that the evil version an allegory as well, it’s an anthropomorphized manifestation of the MCs inner struggle, her inner critic and her low self-esteem. Throughout the game the MC learns to work with the evil version rather then against it. Empathizing with it and working together will help them longterm and make them (literally) stronger. Now, I’m going to be honest and say that I don’t think celeste is very well written, it’s not particularly subtle and also it’s unspecific enough to make basically everybody be able to project their internal struggles onto the story. I read in an interview that the games designer, Matt Thorson, himself struggled with anxiety and depression. He talked about how finishing the game became his “mountain to climb”. After watching this in-game cutscene, I suddenly completely broke down sobbing for what felt like hours. I didn’t really know why at first, my body just reacted. Interestingly this wasn’t at all because celestes story resonated, I wasn’t attached to the mountain metaphor or the evil self-doubt version or anything inside the game at all, none of that had any direct impact on me emotionally. Why then, did I break down?

Well, it was because I... I realized that I wrote my games story as an allegory for my life. I’m just going to assert that you believe me when I talk about this so and skip to the next question: “Wtf does this mean and how did you not know that? How do you write something down - in detail - and not realize it’s literally you?” Now this will probably illicit a strong reaction in some readers, so I’d like to give context to this: I have a mental disorder called OSDD (better known as DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder). It’s a trauma disorder that forms from prolonged repeated life-threatening trauma from the ages of 4 to about 9. Many people know this as “Multiple Personality Disorder” (this terminology has been deprecated for over 25 years, please give the wiki article a read to educated yourself on this). It presents as a person having multiple distinct, disjunct personality states. Each state has their own identity, their own body image, tastes and personality and most crucially: their own memory. During formation of the personality in childhood, the brains way to handle the terrible trauma-inducing things is to encapsulate them, to store them away in another personality, wrapping it in total or partial amnesia so the childs main personality can be unaffected . If the brain didn’t do this, the child would seize to function. I think the best way of introducing this concept to people is with soldiers: A soldiers personality is intentionally split during training, they have their regular self, functioning in society and with their family like a regular person, and they have their “soldier” self. The latter is the person fighting in active combat, able to kill or see their friends be killed without second though about it, able to take tremendous amounts of stress and pain while still functioning. The “soldier” personality state is the difference between a swat member clearing and entire complex, gunning down dozens of opposing soldiers without a second thought and a regular person in a disaster scenario, fearing for their life and breaking down from the stress because of it. Unable to think, move or maybe even save themself. I won’t go into specific detail but for my case, I know of 5 of those states in me. For the attentive of you, you may recognize that number: Every of the main characters in my game are literally one of my personality states. I’m not using literally fallaciously here, they’re not representation of them, they’re literally the personality state plugged out of the context of the real world and my brain and into the context of the game. This explains why writing dialogue for them felt so natural immediately, it’s what happens every day, every minute of every hour inside my head. I don’t have a singular inner voice, I have multiple. If I think about what to cook for dinner tonight, two of the states may argue about what they want, if I fail at an exam some of them may want to support me to feel better while others want to punish me and make me feel even worse. All 5 of those are in my game, you can imagine which of them will be the supporting cast and which of them will be the villain.

I actually stated that the games story is an allegory of my life, so how does entirety of the games story fit that description? For that I need to explain a little bit further, I’ll go into actual detail at a later point but my games story revolves around a hivemind that has taken over the world. This has already happened, the damage is done and irreversible and the entire world has been restructured or destroyed because of this. The main party was assembled from circumstance but has a main goal of “defeating the evil”. They force themself further and further into the center of the hiveminds society, believing that if they can defeat the core, the world will be saved. Spoiler alert: it won’t. It’s over, you lost before you even started playing. You can’t do anything about it but it’s still emotionally valuable to want to try. To just do your best just so you can say that you didn’t give up. As long as you fight, things will get better. Not because the evil is getting weakened but because you, as a person, will grow and heal and get used to the way the world is. I want you to read the past couple of sentences again. Done? You might have noticed that this sounds a lot like something a trauma therapist would tell their patient. You can’t “heal” trauma, you can’t revert the fact that a person is traumatized. It’s not possible for it to ever go away. Actual healing requires accepting this fact, learning how to work with the circumstances in order to be able to live a fulfilling life. That’s what I mean with the story being an allegory, the hivemind is basically trauma itself, fighting it mirrors the healing process, the entire party is literally me and their fight and the mechanics and ways to “win” are the same as with my healing process.

Now that you know what part of my game is allegorical, you may still ask: “How did you not notice this while coming up with the idea?” Supposedly the game retroactively became high-concept allegory for something incredibly personal to me, how could that have gone unnoticed and unconscious for so long? I honestly can’t answer that. Instead I’d like to instead share how my therapist answered that question: “maybe... someone else just wanted this to help you”

[seovoiceskills]

CAE vs IELTS Comparison

What is the CAE Use of English test like?

The test has five sections and takes 60 minutes:

          Part 1 - Multiple-choice cloze

          Part 2 - Open cloze

          Part 3 - Word formation

          Part 4 - Gapped sentences

          Part 5 - Key word transformations

Scoring:

There are 50 questions in the CAE Use of English Test. It makes up 20% of the entire exam.

How to prepare for the CAE Use of English test

The Use of English paper tests your knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.

Read as much as possible, and use a dictionary to help you learn new words

Use a grammar book to help you understand sentence structure

Read the instructions carefully before you start each section

Look at the example question at the beginning of each section

Correct spelling is necessary. Get into the habit of checking the spelling of words

Read the surrounding context before giving an answer

Don’t give alternative answers for any questions

CAE vs IELTS Comparison

Both test your main English skills - reading, writing, listening, and speaking. CAE has a 'grammar' part.

An important difference between IELTS and CAE is that IELTS is only valid for 2 years, whereas CAE doesn't have an expiration date.

IELTS takes a total of 2 hours 45 minutes. CAE is about 4 hours long.

In both tests the speaking section is done in front of a live teacher.

You can't 'fail' IELTS - your results are given on a scale from 4.0 to 8.9. You'll only get a CAE certificate if you pass (i.e. get 60%). But both need a lot of preparation and motivation for you to succeed. A pass grade in CAE would be the equivalent of about 7.0 in IELTS.

IELTS isn't easier - just different. Getting into a British university with an IELTS or CAE certificate is going to need the same high level of English.

CAE is less academic than IELTS - the topics are broader, the writing tasks more varied. For that reason you might find CAE less boring.

Best for Academic Reasons

Many universities require a certain score in IELTS to get in. That's why it's taken by 2 million people a year.

CAE is accepted by 6,000 colleges and universities around the world, and seems to be growing in popularity.

IELTS is more academic in tone, which is bad for my students (who are mostly business people) but is perfect for someone who is preparing for University. The writing tasks, for example, prepare you for academic work.

Time Management 

You might think there isn't much time management you can do in the listening test, but I disagree. Not everyone prepares for the CAE exam, so Cambridge have to explain what to do in a long, slow introduction. But since YOU know what to do, you can ignore the introduction and get started!

What is a Statement of Results?

Your Statement of Results contains the following information:

your score on the Cambridge English Scale for each of the four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) and use of English

your grade (A, B, C, Level B2) for the overall exam

your CEFR level for the overall exam.

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With or Without Kavanaugh, Court Docket is a ‘Law Prof’s Dream’

Applying a broad definition, 13 of the 38 cases in which the Supreme Court has granted review for the upcoming October 2018 term raise criminal law and related issues. (A few more are likely to be granted in the “long conference” order list scheduled for release Thursday.)

This is about average: Between a quarter to a third of cases decided by the court every year are criminal-law-related. But this term the docket feels a bit special: As I explained to the American Bar Association in my “Annual Review of the Supreme Court’s Term, Criminal Cases, October Term 2018 might be described as a criminal law professor’s dream.

Below is a list of what’s ahead.

What Are the “Elements” of Burglary and Robbery?

In every criminal case, the prosecution is constitutionally required to prove the “elements” of the crime —that is, the “facts necessary to constitute the crime,” as the court put it in 1970 in In re Winship. “What are the elements of Crime X?” is the stuff of first-year final exams, as well as multiple-choice questions found on the Multistate Bar Exam.

On Oct. 9, the court will spend two hours hearing oral arguments in three cases (two are consolidated) that ask what the “generic” elements of the common law crimes of “robbery” and “burglary” are. The answer to that question is needed in order to apply the Armed Career Criminal Act, a federal law that dramatically enhances prison sentences for persons who unlawfully possess a firearm and who also have been previously convicted of three drug crimes or violent felonies.

“Violent felony” is statutorily defined to include the state-law offense of “burglary,” and also any crime that “has as an element the use … or threatened use of physical force,” which normally includes robbery.

The Supreme Court has ruled that because state-law definitions of crimes may differ among the states, federal courts should use the “generic” definition of burglary or robbery. But what that definition is, precisely, has repeatedly split lower federal courts. On Oct. 9, the justices will wrestle with that question, first as it applies to robbery, in Stokeling v. United States, and then, in two consolidated cases, Stitt and Sims v. United States, in the context of burglary.

The common law distinguished robbery from simple theft by requiring an element of force. Over time, a number of jurisdictions have ruled that even minimal force can count, which allows “snatchings” of purses or necklaces to qualify for the enhanced sentences that a robbery conviction often permits.

Other jurisdictions disagree.

Denard Stokeling was previously convicted under Florida’s robbery law, which defines force as “sufficient to overcome a victim’s resistance.” But should that be the “generic” federal definition? Because the ACCA requires a “categorical” approach to deciding what types of felonies permit its enhanced federal sentences, the court is asked to decide whether “minimal force” suffices and how it should be defined for the national federal statute.

Right after Stokeling, the court will consider similar questions regarding burglary.

Although the common law applied the crime of burglary strictly to invasion of homes, most modern statutes have extended the crime to the entry of a “structure” with the intent to commit a crime inside it. (“Intent to commit a felony therein” is the first introduction of many law students to “legalese” that horrifies and amuses their nonlawyer friends.)

In Victor Stitt’s home state of Tennessee, the statutory requirement of “habitation” has been interpreted to include vehicles. In Jason Sims’ home state of Arkansas, the statutory term is “residential occupiable structure,” which has been interpreted to include a car or a boat if a person is even occasionally living in it. As in Stokeling, the court here must decide whether the “categorical” definition of burglary should encompass the broad modern definitions that have extended the crime beyond its common-law borders.

All three of these cases may be further influenced by the fact that the proper interpretation of the ACCA has troubled the court for decades now, so much so that in 2015, in Johnson v. United States, the court declared a nearby definitional subsection of the statute invalid as unconstitutionally vague.

“Double Jeopardy,” “Excessive Fines” and the Death Penalty

After the first year of law school, most law students have to take criminal procedure, affectionately shortened to “Crim Pro.” I like to call that class “Constitutional Law III: The Fun Parts!” At least four cases to be argued this fall suggest that OT 2018 will be a joy for us Crim Pro professors as well.

In Gamble v. U.S., the court will consider whether to overrule the “separate sovereigns” exception to the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment, which provides that “[n]o person shall … be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life and limb.” The common understanding of this awkwardly written clause is that a person may not be tried twice for the same offense. But despite the absolute-sounding nature of the constitutional text, the Supreme Court has ruled for well over a century that the clause allows “separate sovereigns” to each try a single defendant for what sure sounds like the “same offense.”

For example, two states may prosecute the same person for a kidnapping-murder in two trials, one after the other, one in each state, and upon conviction impose two independent sentences for the same crime. Similarly, a state may prosecute someone for the same crime that the federal government has already tried the person for, and vice versa: Those of us old enough to recall the 1991 Rodney King police assault case remember the federal government prosecuting the offending officers after they had already been tried and acquitted by the state.

Although there is no lower-court split of authorities on this question, scholars have long criticized this “separate sovereigns” atextual exception to the double jeopardy clause. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that last spring, when the pace of certiorari grants was slow, “textualist” and due-process-oriented justices alike were able to agree to revisit the question this term.

Meanwhile, Timbs v. Indiana will address another persistent question that has appeared on bar exams for years: “[W]hat provisions in the Bill of Rights have not yet been ‘incorporated’ against the States?” “Incorporation” is the legal doctrine developed in the mid-20th century that holds that various protections found in the federal Bill of Rights may also be applied to conduct by the states, by “incorporating” those protections into the “[n]o State shall … deny due process” guarantee of the 14th Amendment.

In McDonald v. Chicago, the court in 2010 ruled that the Second Amendment applies against the states, so now only three provisions in the Bill of Rights have not been incorporated. Timbs will address one of these: the “no excessive fines” provision in the Eighth Amendment. (The other two? The grand jury clause, see 1884’s Hurtado v. California, and the Third Amendment’s rule against quartering troops in times of peace, which has never arisen in a Supreme Court case, although lower courts have suggested that it is “incorporated.”)

Timbs now seeks to eliminate that easy Crim Pro exam question. The context is criminal asset forfeiture. When Tyson Timbs was convicted in Indiana of selling four grams of heroin, the state sought forfeiture of his $42,000 Land Rover because it had been used to transport the drugs. The state trial court ruled that “[w]hile the negative impact of [drug] trafficking … is substantial, … a forfeiture of approximately four times the maximum monetary fine is disproportional” under the Eighth Amendment.

The Indiana Court of  Appeals agreed that the excessive fines clause should be applied (incorporated) against the states. But the Indiana Supreme Court reversed, ruling that it would not “impose federal obligations on the State that the federal government itself has not mandated.” A persistent split on the question, involving at least 18 states’ courts and two federal courts of appeals, led to a grant of certiorari here.

Finally, another aspect of the Eighth Amendment, the constitutional administration of capital punishment, finds a spot on the Supreme Court’s docket almost every year. This term the court will hear argument in two cases involving the death penalty. On the second day of the term, Oct. 2, in Madison v. Alabama, the court will consider whether the Eighth Amendment permits the execution of a prisoner whose severe and deteriorating medical condition leaves him mentally disabled such that he is unable to remember his offense.

Brian Stevenson. Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Flickr

Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, will be arguing for Vernon Madison. The court has previously ruled that the state may not constitutionally execute the mentally insane (Ford v. Wainwright, in 1986) nor the mentally disabled (Atkins v. Virginia, in 2002). But in 2007, in Panetti v. Quarterman, the court declined to set specific standards for evaluating mental competency-to-be-executed claims.

Madison provides an opportunity to further develop this constitutional concept. (The 2007 decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who left the court in July — whether he will be replaced by October 2 is presently unsettled.)

In a second death penalty case, to be argued on November 6, the court will consider, once again, the appropriate rules for challenging a “method of execution.” In Glossip v. Gross, the court in 2015 issued a lengthy 5-4 decision attempting to set constitutional standards and litigation rules for lower courts to follow when an inmate contends that the method by which the state proposes to execute him is “cruel and unusual.” Glossip also approved “lethal injection” as a generally acceptable method. Russell Bucklew, however, suffers from an unusual medical condition (cavernous hemangioma) that he alleges “makes it very likely that his execution by Missouri’s lethal injection protocol will be gruesome and involve excruciating suffering.”

In Bucklew v. Precythe, Bucklew argues that an execution by lethal gas will be far more humane for him, and that Missouri is constitutionally required to use that method instead. Missouri law allows execution by either method, although it has no written protocols for gas executions. The Eighth Circuit twice affirmed denials of Bucklew’s challenges, but the Supreme Court twice issued last-minute stays before finally granting review.

The Rest of the Criminal Law Docket This Term

Here are brief descriptions of the other six criminal-law-or-related cases on the Supreme Court’s docket (so far) this term:

Gundy v. United States (Oct. 2 argument): Does Congress’ delegation of authority to the attorney general to set sex-offender regulations, including deciding whether to retroactively apply the criminal statute, violate the Constitution’s “nondelegation” principle? (There hasn’t been a successful nondelegation case since 1935, so this case carries special interest for constitutional law professors.)

Nielsen v. Preap (Oct. 10 argument): Is a criminal alien exempt from otherwise mandatory detention if, after the person is released from criminal custody, the Department of Homeland Security does not immediately take the person into custody?

Garza v. Idaho (Oct. 30 argument): Does the “presumption of prejudice” regarding a lawyer’s ineffective assistance apply, when a defense lawyer was instructed by the defendant to file an appeal but the lawyer did not file an appeal because the plea agreement contained an appeal waiver?

Herrera v. Wyoming: Did Wyoming’s admission as a state, or the statutory establishment of the Bighorn National Forest, abrogate the Crow Tribe’s 1868 federal treaty right to hunt on “unoccupied lands of the United States,” thereby permitting the criminal conviction of Clayvin Herrera, a Crow Tribe member, who was allegedly engaged in subsistence hunting for his family?

Lorenzo v. Securities and Exchange Commission.: May the government’s securities-fraud claim that does not meet the elements that 2011’s Janus Capital Group v. Derivative Traders requires for “fraudulent statements” be filed as a “fraudulent scheme” claim and thereby avoid the bar of Janus?

Nieves v. Bartlett: Is a First Amendment claim for retaliatory arrest automatically defeated because there was probable cause for the arrest? (This is a follow-on to the unanswered question in last term’s Lozman v. Riviera Beach.)

Rory Little

Rory Little is a Professor of Law at U.C. Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, a former clerk to Justices Potter Stewart (ret.) and William Brennan, and author of the American Bar Association’s “Annual Review of the Supreme Court’s Term, Criminal Cases.” He is also “Of Counsel” to the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery on discrete appellate matters. The Crime Report is pleased to reproduce this essay with the permission of SCOTUSblog. The full essay is available here. Readers’ comments are welcome.

With or Without Kavanaugh, Court Docket is a ‘Law Prof’s Dream’ syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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8 Common Words You Don't Know Are Making You Sound Unreliable

Communication becomes more casual every day. Ten years ago, we never would have felt comfortable including a smiley face in an email to our boss, but now in 2017, that seems less unprofessional.

While speaking and writing tend to have different guidelines, we still tend to have more fillers when speaking vs. typing a social media post or a quick message to a coworker. When we speak, we tend to allow ourselves more fillers; I’ll never forget the time one of my professors in college asked us to count the number of times we said, “like” in one day. Maybe I was hyper-aware, but the number was astronomical.

While it may seem like a small thing at first, the amount of times we use filler words like “um” or “like” in a conversation can make us appeal unreliable, no matter how educated or dependable we may be.

Your Word Choice Reflects Your Personality

It’s no surprise that word choice and expression says a lot about someone’s personality, but even the regularity in which words or word categories are used can speak volumes about a person.

Psychologist James W. Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin is one of many experts who assert that the way a person expresses thought reveals character. Any time a person speaks, they make choices – choices regarding appropriate nouns and verbs. Those small aspects are part of a bigger context which can provide clues into an individual’s large-scale behaviors [1]. Some researchers are so fascinated by this that they have created software to monitor a person’s word choice in order to predict the way they will act in the future.

8 Toxic Words to Avoid

Here is a list of words to limit in daily conversation. I promise you all it takes is a once-over and you’ll suddenly realize how often you’re saying every single one of them!

Al Verbs: Might, Should, Maybe and Would

While these are some of the most common verbs in the english language, all they do is make the speaker sound unsure of himself. Modal Verbs include, “Might,” “should,” “maybe,” and “would.” While these verbs are easy to include in casual conversation, think about how insincere it makes a friend sound when you invite them to hang out and they reply with something like, “Yeah, maybe. I might have something going on, but I’ll let you know…” The next time you find yourself wanting to use this kind of verb, allow yourself a short pause and mentally delete the words when uttering the sentence. It’ll feel unnatural at first, but before long you’ll be a pro.

Ok

I think we can all agree this is one of the most annoying responses to get when texting someone. Second only to “k,” “Ok” is such a blah response. It makes you sound indifferent and unsure. Plus it’s not even a descriptive term! It basically means “satisfactory.” Who wants that? In text form, it can read like the end of a conversation or even a passive aggressive way to try to be agreeable. These two letters serve as a self-protecting mechanism to avoid giving concrete statements that could be hurtful. If someone asks for your opinion and you regularly offer “Yeah, it’s ok” to avoid hurting them, then you need to understand why it’s not ok to say ok !

Awesome

This word is tricky. If someone tells you about an incredible trip they just took and you respond with, “Wow! That sounds awesome!” you’re probably being sincere. But if you tend to offer up this word regularly, you probably sound a little dense. Sorry! Saying “Awesome!” all the time makes people feel like you don’t have any of your own opinions. I know, I know, it’s just a word. But think about it for a second: When was the last time you were having a conversation and your friend seemed to say “awesome,” “oh wow. Awesome,” and “cool” after every other sentence? I’ve been in that situation before and it was really frustrating! I didn’t doubt that my friend actually felt that everything I was saying was “awesome,” but the overuse of the word became insincere quickly and made me want to stop sharing my story. It’s a vague word and usually over-exaggerated. I’d rather someone use multiple words to show enthusiasm or give me a compliment than just recycle one word over and over.

Um

Perhaps the most common filler word, “um” is, um, super, um, annoying! I hate to tell you this, but you probably say it so much more often than you realize. For one full day, try to keep a mental tally of how, um, often you, um say, “um.” It’s going to shock you. Even if you’re an intelligent person, overuse of the word makes you seem a bit delayed when it comes to processing thoughts. It’s simple enough to replace it. Instead of saying, “um,” try: “Let me think for a while.” You’re accomplishing the same goal, but the longer sentence gives you a proactive appearance and proves you want to take control the situation.

Like

Stop. Using. This. Filler. Word. If you have ever tried to sit through an hour of reality TV, then you know the word, “like” is the most common word (like) ever. If you’re oblivious enough to have never noticed it, you’re lucky. Once you start noticing, you can’t stop. The filler word makes you sound childish and it usually isn’t a necessary filler. While you could replace it with “such as” or something similar, if you really analyze a sentence before you speak it, you’ll find you don’t need it at all.

Actually

This word actually isn’t necessary in a majority of situations. The word itself tends to give the impression that whatever was uttered before was not true. If you take the time to look at sentences with this word, you’ll find that nearly all of them can be deleted without changing the meaning/message, while it makes the tone stronger and more direct. For example: The word choices you make can go a long way in showing the kind of person you are. Actually, word choices can predict the kind of person you can be in a conversation. The statement is redundant.

Sorry

This apology can make you seem weak and insecure if used in the wrong context. While you should always want to apologize if a situation warrants it, using “sorry” too often or even habitually can lead to you seeming embarrassed and afraid. If you’re actually wanting to apologize for something, feel free to use the word. But if you’re embarrassed or nervous, explain those emotions in different terms.

Hopefully

While the word itself seems like it should be optimistic, it actually has the opposite effect: using this word implies you aren’t determined or confident enough! For example, if you were my boss and you asked that I have something done and on your desk in two hours, which response would you rather hear from me:

No problem. I’ll take care of that now and get it back to you shortly.

Ok, sure. Hopefully it takes me a little less than two hours. I’ll bring it by when I’m done.

The second response doesn’t say outright that I won’t have the task completed, but it sure doesn’t seem confident. Hopefully means you don’t feel in control of something or confident enough you can create a change. In life, it will sometimes be necessary to be hopeful rather than overly confident, but when it comes to work situations, try to avoid the word as best you can.

The great thing about the list above is that it doesn’t take much effort to implement. In fact, all that’s required to stop using these unreliable-sounding words is self-awareness. Today is a new day. Be present in all conversations and realize how often you’re using the words listed. Then take the steps to replace them and ultimately delete them from casual chats and messages. You’ll be amazed at what a difference it makes.

Reference

[1]^Scientific American: What Your Choice of Words Says about Your Personality

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