#and looking so minimalistic it looks like it can only process logical things like numbers

[ryllen]

no, but pinecones is really beautiful isn't it ?

[ghanimengal]

Why Website Structure Is Crucial For Enhancing Your SEO

For as long as I can remember I had that belief that who cares about how your website structure or your website load speed is. But eventually, I realized that I was wrong these things play a vital role in Search Engine Optimization.

Think about it in another way, you went to the library to find a book about marketing. But the problem with this library is that the librarian hasn’t organized their bookshelves. They have placed books randomly and haven’t given them any orders.

How hard would it be for you to find the book of your desires when there isn’t any genre or category option and you have to check each book to find out whether it’s a marketing book or a romantic fiction. Soul-Sucking at least!

It works the same for the search engine to analyze a website. When a user types a search query and the search engine starts to find the required information on your website, but there is no proper structure of the website to tell the search engine which way to go. And you know what the search engine is going to do next. The search engine would leave your site marking that there is no information on this website for this specific search term.

This can downgrade your search rankings. As a Blog or website owner, you wouldn’t like to lose the traffic you want the traffic. In simple and easy words:

What Is a Website Structure?

Site Structure or Website Structure is properly organizing a website to make it easier for search engine crawlers to read and understand a website and its content.

The site structure has a direct impact on your site rankings, if your site structure is better your rankings will automatically be higher. SITE STRUCTURE = HIGHER RANKINGS

In this article, I will be trying to give my best to you, so that you can learn to give your site a best structure you can.

Why Website Structure Is Important

I’ve seen blogs that have many categories added in their navigation. But when you click on one of them you will see that they are giving you 50-70% same content like their other categories. It means if you search in their blogs “Milk” they will give you the same content, and if you search “Alchohol” the results will be same.

It’s not a clever idea for getting more clicks, actually, it’s a bad decision that can destroy your reputation. The website structuring isn’t just important for higher rankings it’s also important for user experience.

In my honest opinion, if you want to rank higher and wanna get that reputation, just optimize your website’s user experience. If the user loves a site, then the Search Engines will ultimately love it too. The ultimate goal of optimizing your website structure would be to make it easier for readers to understand your website and each page of your website without scratching their heads and reading the whole terms to understand what’s in this web page.

You can never rank a site without a proper structuring plan. And when I say website structuring, it directly means your categories, your site footer, your site’s navigation menu, and all the individual pages of your site.

On the one side, the website structure is something that’s a lot more important than other ranking factors, but I’m pumped when I look at blogs and website owners who advertise themselves as experts but don’t even understand what a structured website means.

Below I’m going to discuss a few points why a structured site is important and then I would be giving the exact steps to make your own SEO-Friendly website structure.

A Good Website Structure Always Means A Great User Experience As I described earlier, a website structure isn’t good enough until it’s a great user experience. The only thing that makes the website structure more SEO-Friendly is the user experience. When optimizing your website structure make sure it’s also optimized for user experience.

A Good Website Structure Rewards Your Site With Sitelinks Sitelinks are listings of your most important and optimized pages. And Google will reward your site with Sitelinks on SERPs that will show your main pages. You have probably seen them before. I love Google’s Sitelinks and you know why. Because you can’t get them by filling a form or adding some links on Google Search Console. You have to make your site worthy of Sitelinks to get them. And the way you do that is by optimizing your website structure.

A good Website structure means better crawling Search engine crawlers love sites with optimized structures. Because it helps them too. It makes their work easier and faster to complete. And what you get by helping Google’s Bots? Well, they will index your site and your posts faster and faster.

Now we know what is website structure and why it’s so important to enhance a website’s SEO. Below I’m going to share some Website Structure Optimization steps with you.

Plan A Better Hierarchy For Your Site Structure

This is a step that you have to plan before actually developing your website. But if you have a running blog/website then don’t worry still you can plan your site hierarchy. Your hierarchy is more than just organizing your pages and site theme. Your hierarchy will also become your navigation and your URL structure so it’s an important step to consider for an SEO-Friendly website.

Generally, Hierarchy means an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being “above”, “below”, or “at the same level as” one another. Wikipedia

But a website hierarchy isn’t similar to organizing items or peoples of an organization. Generally, a site hierarchy looks like this:

In other words, your home page or menu bar will direct users to your key page (like your blog page, shop page, resources page, etc.). And then those key pages will make it easier to find something by showing users some sort of categories (e.g. Your blog page shows categories like SEO, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and your Shop page will show Books, Courses, Printables, etc.). And then finally (if it’s necessary) adding sub-categories will make it easier to reach the specific page of your website.

When planning your website hierarchy structure, keep these key principles in mind:

Don’t overcomplicate this process, keep your hierarchy logical

Keep the number of items in your navigation menu between 2 to 7

Try to keep a balance in the number of sub-categories

I always recommend keeping your navigations very simple and minimalistic. Unless you are amazon or Walmart, don’t add many categories or items in your navigation menu.

Below is a screenshot of Backlinko’s Home page. You can see of simple and fresh the navigation is looking. There are just three items in the navigation menu. The home, about page, and newsletter.

The same minimalistic approach can be seen in their footer area. There are just 6 items in the footer section.

Create a URL Structure

The URL structure is very similar to the hierarchy structure. In fact, it does contain the same structure as you hierarchy. If you have already planned and designed a hierarchy structure for your site, then this step is going to be way easier for you. Let’s assume your site hierarchy looks like this:

So, the URL structure for Nob Hill would look like this:

http://www.kumisrestaurant.com/locations/nobhill

And the URL structure for Chinatown would be this:

http://www.kumisrestaurant.com/locations/chinatown

Use Your Navigations Correctly

When creating your navigations make sure that your navigations aren’t much complicated to understand. And also it’s important to add your important pages in your navigations only. Don’t just add any random page. Add key resources, important pages, or cornerstone blog posts. In this way, the site crawlers and also users would interact better with your site and with your content.

Sites which require three (or even fewer) clicks to reach deep pages are more preferable and successful than sites that require clicks over clicks to reach any important page.

Develop An Internal Linking Structure

Internal linking is so important for your SEO-friendly structure, it literally gives life to your site. Moz.com published an informational guide about internal linking which you can read here, Moz Internal linking article. Internal Linking has 3 huge advantages:

Internal linking allows users to navigate a site easily

It helps establish an information hierarchy for the website

It spreads link juice around websites which help in SEO

But the truth is, you don’t have to spend hours planning the internal linking structure. Just keep in mind that every post or every page should have to link to your other pages as well. It’s simple as that!

Conclusion

The site structure isn’t anything artistic or creative, it’s not even technical but it’s humor. When using site structure to improve your site’s SEO, just think, how the users are going to use this site and how can you make it easy for them?

Keep the points that I shared in this article and don’t hesitate to change something in your own way. Just you have to make it simple. If you have any suggestions or questions you can reach out to me. Contact Me

This Article was originally published on https://ghanimengal.com/2021/04/why-website-structure-is-crucial-for-seo.html

[honeymoonjin]

makin’ monet - jungkook

A/N: requested by @xilee-reaper​. Jungkook’s interest is peaked when his roommate Taehyung has a collection of fake classic paintings. 2.2k words.

“O Week, baby!”

Jungkook ignores Tae’s cheer as he pokes around his room. Tae had only been in this student accommodation for three days, but his stuff was already all over the place.

Tae had always been a collector; no matter where he went, he was always picking up trinkets and memorabilia like he was a magnet for it.

Now, it seemed, his new obsession were these tiny little canvas squares, painted as miniature imitations of famous paintings. Jungkook picks one up, a mock-up of Monet’s Water Lilies that is accurate down to the smallest detail. There’s no name on the bottom, just a tiny black set of initials.

“God, where did I leave the slides?”

Tae has been rooting around his room for the better part of half an hour, getting ready for a campus party that only he wanted to go to, yet somehow was the one that was now an hour late for, and Jungkook was forced to endure the unpleasant experience of Tae going through every single clothing article to try and find the best outfit.

Jungkook was just in a white t-shirt and worn jeans, but that apparently was too minimalistic for Tae.

He puts down the Water Lilies and moves on. There are six of them on Tae’s bookshelf, and while they’re good, sure, it seems a little excessive. “Hey, Tae,” he calls out to the man who’s head over heels in his closet, waiting for a muffled ‘yeah?’ before continuing. “These little paintings, you made them?”

Tae emerges ass-first from the messy heap of clothes, triumphantly brandishing a pair of Gucci slides. “Nah, ‘course not, I bought them off Y/n.”

Jungkook frowns. The name’s not familiar. “Y/n? I didn’t know you had a girlfriend?”

Taehyung just scoffs, hopping around on one foot as he puts on his shoes. “I don’t, she’s just a friend. If I spot her at the party tonight, I’ll introduce you two.”

Well aware of Tae’s habit of saying things with no intention of actually doing them, Jungkook just hums in affirmation and leaves the paintings on the shelf, itching to finally go out.

The girl, Y/n, apparently wasn’t at the party. Maybe she was, but Taehyung just forgot to introduce her. Either way, the loose end was bothering Jungkook more than he expected. Why was he so curious about this girl? He tried to picture what she was like. Chances are she wasn’t that much like Tae. All of his friends always seemed way different from him, Jungkook included, as if he wanted to be the Regina George of his friend groups at all times.

That did leave a lot of possibility, though, and he found himself asking Tae more and more about this mystery girl, curiosity eating him alive.

She was studying engineering like Jungkook, apparently, so perhaps she was like those cold, logical, hard-ass women he had seen in his classes, but her paintings would suggest otherwise. Tae also mentioned he often hung out with at her place, and she had an impressive collection of videogames that ‘even you would be jealous of, Kook’. So perhaps she was an anti-social nerd that sat on the couch for hours with a controller and a bag of Cheetos, but then Tae never had any interest in hanging out with people that had no interest in hanging out with him.

The more he found out, the less he knew.

Now, Jungkook sits in his first computer lab of the semester. Engineering was a pretty massive discipline, no matter what university you were at, and the giant lecture halls were so packed that you couldn’t really make a lot of friends and get to know people, but there were so many timetable streams of computer labs that each one had broken down to about twenty-five people.

Next to him is a guy with boxy, unflattering glasses, the ones you could never imagine anyone actively choosing to wear, and he seems too plugged in to some anime with extremely endowed women to want to talk to Jungkook.

The seat next to him is vacant when the class starts, but ten minutes in, one of the doors opens and a girl slips in. At first Jungkook assumes she’s in the wrong room, because she looks nothing like the other hundred or so engineering students he had seen so far.

She’s so short she has to go on tiptoes to glance over the computer screens and find a spare seat, wide eyes lighting up on the space to Jungkook’s right.

“And why are you so tardy, madam?”

She pauses in her scurry towards his desk and stares at the lecturer, who is crossing his arms over in an unconvincing show of dominance. “Because I didn’t get here in time,” she answers matter-of-factly. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

Jungkook can’t help but quirk his lips into a grin at that, but once she turns back to his direction, he quickly hides it behind his hand, coughing lightly.

The computer lab is hard, way more complicated than anything he had done in high school, and he’s so focused on putting in the right commands that it takes him another twenty or so minutes to look up from his monitor and notice the girl next to him.

He rubs the tiredness from his eyes and stretches back, glancing over at her screen. He pauses, arms still stretched out in the air behind him. “You’ve already finished?” he asks incredulously.

She looks up from where she’s scribbling absentmindedly on a piece of graph paper and stares at him. Once she processes what he said, her eyes widen in realization. “Oh, yeah, I checked it out last night and it was kinda easy, so I figured I’d just do it then.”

Ignoring the fact that he felt a little stupid for struggling so much, he sits up in his chair properly and swivels to face her. “Why are you here, then?”

She grins cheekily and cocks her head to the lecturer’s desk, where he’s overseeing the lab like a sergeant. “The general ambience, you know.”

Jungkook laughs, eyes glancing down for a moment. He blinks a couple times and realizes that her scribbles are actually quite good, and in fact familiar. “Café Terrace at Night?”

She cocks her head at the sudden change of topic. “Huh? Oh, right! How did you know?” She sighs. “I’ll be honest, I’m a little sad that I couldn’t pass it off as my own.”

Computer lab forgotten, he begins swaying back and forth on his chair lazily, bumping knees with her every swing. He notes with a little burst of happiness that she makes no attempt to move away from the contact. “I saw a Van Gogh recently. Not a real one, though,” he adds quickly upon seeing the impressed look on her face.

Wait a minute. He glances down at her half of the desk again and sees a haphazard pile of textbooks and refill she had brought in with her. On the spine of Introduction to Mechanical Engineering is the name Y/N, in sharpie-d all-caps.

His mouth falls open in a perfect o, and he points dumbly at the textbooks. “You’re Y/n!”

She bites on her lip, glancing back and forth between her books and him. “Yeah?”

“My friend, Taehyung, he’s got a bunch of your paintings in his dorm room.”

Her eyes brighten in realization. “Ah, Kimmy! Small world, huh.” She glances down at her drawing, eyes distant and unfocussed. She takes a deep breath and looks back up at him, twiddling her thumbs. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in buying one?”

Jungkook tips his head. “Buying one?”

She frowns, and Jungkook can’t help but stare at her delicate pout. “Well, I’m not giving them away for free! They take hours of hard work and I-”

“That’s- That’s not what I meant,” he clarifies hurriedly, “I just didn’t realize you were, like, selling them selling them.”

Her pout tips up into a soft smile, and she raises her eyebrows in good humor. “Well, this is the first time we’ve met, so it’s unsurprising that you don’t know everything about me.” She pauses. “In fact, I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh! Jungkook. Jeon Jungkook.”

“Well it’s nice to finally meet the man Kimmy has never once mentioned,” she jokes. When Jungkook furrows his brows and looks a little put out, she laughs and pushes him a little on the shoulder. “I’m just messing with you, idiot! He talks about you all the time. Kookie, right?”

He flushes at the embarrassing nickname but nods in assent.

“Anyway, I used to just make the paintings as a hobby, but I’ve been in a little…financial strife recently, so I’m trying to use them as a little extra income.”

Jungkook sobers. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Y/n laughs again, and the joyous tone causes something to spark in Jungkook. “Oh, no, no, don’t be sorry. I’m just being dramatic, I guess. I let my bunny out of the hatch, and he chewed the cord of my roommate’s headphones. They were pretty expensive ones, so now Yoon’s taken mine hostage until I can save up enough to replace them.” Her gaze turns inward, and she sighs. “Although now I can’t game without him biting my head off about the volume.” She clears her throat and shrugs, cheering up again. “Anyway, if you don’t want to buy one, that’s all good, just thought I’d ask.”

Jungkook leans back in his chair slightly and tips his head back, shaking his hair out of his face. He’s pleased when he sees her swallow and stick her tongue out subconsciously to wet her lips. “No, I’ll buy one,” he counters, “anything to help out with a fellow gamer’s plight.”

Maybe the subtle plug wasn’t so subtle, but her face lights up nevertheless. Over the remaining fourteen minutes of the lab, Jungkook’s computer eventually goes to sleep, as they spend the whole time discussing which servers had the best graphics, and how many times it took them to beat a final boss.

Once the clock strikes ten to the hour, almost all of the students rush to log off and gather their stuff, but Jungkook is in no hurry. Y/n is hunched over his outstretched arm, writing her number on his hand with a pen.

The tickle of the pen sets his nerves alight, but it’s nothing compared to the warmth of her hand keeping his steady, and the wrist resting on his as she wrote. He laughs to try and distract himself from just how much his heart was racing from her close proximity. “I said Tae would put me in contact with you! Don’t you trust me?” he teases.

“I don’t trust Kimmy,” she counters immediately, not looking up until she underlines her number twice and puts an exclamation mark. She tucks her pen away in her pencil case and starts packing up her things. Although he has a class next and should probably hurry up, Jungkook just sits back in his chair and observes her. “You can tell him a million times and he’ll still forget, and I’m not putting my business on the line for his flaky ass.”

He chuckles, and absentmindedly his thumb rubs over the ink on the back of his hand. “You’re quite bossy, you know that?”

She grins at him, kicking him lightly in the shins. “And you’re a terrible flirter!”

“If you noticed I was flirting, then I must have been doing it right,” he counters. “Is it working?”

She kicks him again, but her cheeks heat up. “I gave you my number, didn’t I?” She glances at the clock and bites her lip. “Ah, I’m late for my physics nap. Dammit.”

“You’re what?”

She hoists her backpack on, and answers as he gets up hurriedly and stuffs his things away. “If you get to physics early enough, you can get a seat at the back, and Professor Namjoon can’t see you sleeping.”

He scoffs, finally picking up his bag and joining her as they left the classroom together. He doesn’t have the luxury of sleeping in class, and his is in the opposite direction to the way she’s leading him, but he doesn’t want to part ways just yet. Maybe he can skip, just this once, and get Jimin to give him his notes. “I apologize for keeping you up past your bedtime, chief.”

She snorts out her nose but manages to keep her face impassive. “At least you know your place, young grasshopper.”

“We’re the same age!”

“Kimmy’s older than me and he still knows I’m the boss.”

“Sorry, but you’re going to have to earn my sworn fealty. I’m not a loyal puppy like Tae.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re quite bossy, you know that?”

He laughs at his words from earlier being thrown back at him. “Only to pretty girls.”

She blushes but forces an unimpressed look on her face. “So, there are others, huh?”

Jungkook shakes his head in bemused disbelief, making a note to himself to thank Tae for buying the photos that started all this. He stares at her while she’s making a point of doggedly avoiding his gaze. They had only just met, sure, but there was something about her that made his heart beat faster, and he desperately wanted to explore that feeling. “Not if you don’t want there to be.”

Read the sequel!

[violetsystems]

#personal

I met up with my mom New Year’s Eve to order Korean food for lunch.  I spoke with my dad and his wife over the phone New Year’s Day.  Beyond that, I don’t think anyone reached out on the phone.  You usually get those texts.  My personal phone number was absorbed by my job years ago for a work line.  Since July nobody other than the jobs I’ve applied for have asked for my new phone number.  I’ve traditionally been gloom and doom about everything.  This year it’s a little hard not to get frustrated or annoyed.  There’s been this constant performance going on around me.  The neighbor in front keeps screaming and chanting repeatedly.  They’re moving out next month.  People keep standing in front of my favorite items in the grocery store.  That’s probably just dumb luck.  I go out into public and I catch people actively following me around.  It’s gotten to be so obvious and amateur I wonder if it’s just meant to drive me crazy.  That’s the only logic I’ve been able to see in it.  People know too much about me even without me being on social media these days.  And yet people can’t reach out and appreciate my life still being lived.  The one thing I’ve grown accustomed to with New Year’s traditions is this “out with the old and in with the new” sentiment.  It’s a great time to start fresh.  I quit drinking one year and never looked back.  This year I’m more focused on my accounting for my business rather than vices.  I’ve set up a pretty boring schedule of incurring income for myself.  Some of that is fun.  I plan to release some more music monthly.  Simply because people randomly buy the entire discography while I sleep.  Everybody seems to know who I am but seems to feel cooler snubbing me.  I just think it’s all a waste of time.  It’s weird to have been stuck in place for so long and have people forget you are breathing.  I’ve always been kind of a minimalist.  I’ve thrown out more stuff than I can count over the last year.  My entire office at my old job just went into the trash.  I felt like this was some sort of message.  I spent the last year deciphering hidden messages from people, places and things thinking they cared.  It’s hard to process.  Maybe they do through an extension of only caring about themselves.  Maybe it’s twisted.  Maybe I don’t deserve any of it.  Maybe part of recovering and getting out of that environment is acting like I don’t.  I think people have this serious hallucination that come spring everything will be great again.  Even with a virus raging, half the population unvaccinated and the rich hoarding all the income.  We’re all addicted to the Hope of it all.  I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow.  The probability that it does and what I plan around it requires some honest soul searching.  And some internet searching too.  Hope past tense is one of the worst words.  I’d hoped we could have had more time.  I’d hoped this would have turned out better.  I’d hoped to have some friends to celebrate with.  That’s just not how it is right now for me.   Too many expectations for a doomsday scenario.  I know it’s not convenient that half my life has slipped by while people pretended I am the invisible man.  I hope you would have learned by now.

If I learned anything about the years progressing it is that things move forward.  You can tell when they don’t.  You grow and people get left behind.  I’ve been growing for years.  I’ve travelled around the world by myself.  Adventures that haunt me when I’m bored.  My mom bought over this book she bought me when I was a child.  The title was simply “I’m bored mom.”  It was true.  There was a reason for it.  But as a child you don’t really have much say or perspective.  These days seeing the book on the shelf means a little more.  I’m bored with settling for less from people who don’t work as hard as I do.  I’m bored with people lying through their teeth and straining their eyes to hide it.  I’m bored with people talking and never listening.  I’m bored with people always making it about them and never seeing connection.  I’m bored with people using you as a pawn in a game that you are expendable in.  I’m bored with everyone thinking they have me all figured out and then stealing my best lines to impress their friends.  I’m bored with thinking it’s cool to be forgotten about.  I’m bored with thinking I’m not worth enough.  Especially when I am completely out of debt for the first time in years and staying there.  I’m bored with people never coming out of their shell to meet you eye to eye.  I’m bored with people demanding I stoop to their level to relate when they have no intention of ever hearing me out and why I’m in pain.  I’m boring with all this information being front and center for the algorithms to mash and dissect but nobody ever reaching a conclusion.  I’m bored with people and their indecision that was never going anywhere in the first place.  I’m bored with all the people who chose others over me and act like they made a great choice.  I’m bored with the mediocrity that people accept when they listen to excuses instead of demanding quantifiable deeds and actions from a person first.  The list could go on.  It’s a lot of things to be bored with.  The one thing I’m not bored with or frustrated with is myself.  I’m actually quite proud of myself in a lot of ways.  Everybody is scared to admit it because they fear losing that power over you.  America is hellbent on comparing and contrasting everything for profit.  It’s subconscious at this point.  Value is defined by scarcity.  Nobody can put in the good word.  The art and people that get uplifted versus the auteurs that get ignored in silence.  We’re told this is what was required of us to keep the country together.  And yet everything is broken.  You are told to hope for the best.  To be patient for something that never comes.  And you look around you and everything is piecemeal.  Nobody compares to you.  Everyone is embarrassed so much by the history of you they pretend you are dead.  And in some ways I’m bored to death and have moved on mentally at least.  I could have complained.  I largely did from week to week.  And maybe twenty people actually read these.  I connected nonetheless over the years.  I found a new path forward.  I escaped boredom by putting the past behind me.  And new starts are always exciting if you believe them to actually lead you to freedom.  That can be hard to believe sitting in a worse place than you may have been the year prior.

Boredom is all about perspective.  It’s not boring to have people follow you around and talk behind your back.  It’s frustrating.  And in some ways the last year has been the culmination of a lot of struggles I faced head on.  The way they worked out may have not been completely how I planned.  But I survived more or less with my own advice and planning.  I could have hoped for the best.  But the best would have been me listening to myself and acting on it without any real validation.  And truth be told, I’m bored with all the fake validation society provides with ulterior motives.  Matter of fact, I’m bored with people’s lack of conviction when it comes to what they want.  It’s not sexy or cute to constantly string people along in mind games that circumvent their civil rights for marketing strategy.  It’s not social justice at the expense of someone else’s freedom.  What is very boring is the fact people have known me for years and can’t be bothered to do anything about it other than gossip or worse.  You can be a victim of boredom all you want.  Or you can try something new.  When you try something new and the world gives you the finger every chance you get it can be frustrating.  How are you supposed to alleviate this boredom when the world won’t acknowledge what makes you tick?  Spend money?  Go out and support small business?  Join a discussion group on Facebook?  I’m bored with the suggestion.  I’m bored with the quality of people you support when you know I’m out here bleeding out.  I’m bored with accepting the fact that anyone does anything productive other than talk and listen to themselves speak.  It’s such a narcissistic vacuum we’ve created for ourselves.  And we chain ourselves to the familiarity of it all because we’re scared.  I have no luxury to be scared of anything.  I’ve had it all taken away.  I’ve had people stalk, hunt, and actively grief me in public for over a year if not more.  And it ended in the most boring way.  Alone.  Meant to feel worthless so I get bored and give in to what people want from me.  Whatever the fuck that is?  I don’t know what anyone thinks about me because no one fucking talks to me.  They stare and follow.  They act like I’m some sort of celebrity and pretend I’m a piece of shit at the same time.  I live alone in an apartment with crumbling floors and adopted animals.  Everyone knows every little detail about me but no one can bother to text how I feel or how I am doing.  And I am bored with accepting this is ok when people expect the world out of me every waking moment of the day.  I’m bored with the lack of responsibility.  I’m bored with the lack of accountability.  I’m bored with everyone having room to talk but no room for six feet of social distancing.  I’m bored with risking my life for a photo op.  I’m bored with being a buzz word for people who can’t pay attention enough to know the underlying theory of it all.  I’m bored making excuses for a year that hasn’t even delivered my coffee on time.  I’m bored with thinking I’m the problem.  And the one way to solve boredom is to give up on the past entirely and move on.  Which is what it deserves mostly because it gave up on me a long time ago.  <3 Tim

[disaffectednotes]

Corona & culture / cultural studies - Scattergun virus thoughts

Putting some scattered thoughts down, largely inspired by a steady diet of high-fibre podcasts in recent weeks. These notes are fragments, really, and hardly add up to more than passing thoughts, given the unfolding situation and the partiality of any knowledge right now. I’ve noticed in myself the will to “master” the situation by consuming as much information as possible – even as I know this will inevitably fail. Perhaps the following can be read in the same spirit of failed mastery, or to sublimate the anxious energy that’s all around...

“We’re all in this together.” The virus as the “great equaliser.” Such appeals to the common good and common ground have been… common. War mobilisation rhetoric is also doing the same work of unifying the disparate population. At the same time, disgruntled jokes are made about celebrities and royals getting tests when frontline medical staff cannot. It’s also clear that this virus will rip through some communities more than others, as reporting this weekend about effects in black communities in the US has made clear. Arundhati Roy also made this clear too in her excellent piece for the FT this weekend. India is only just at the start of this. The economic crisis has reached many poorer countries before the virus itself hits.

On the cultural level, some of this mobilisation of fellow-feeling and resentment has been played out through celebrity culture (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/arts/virus-celebrities.html). There will be people on this list more expert in celebrity culture than me (paging Celebrity Studies scholars), but commentary is engaging in the cyclical argument about how this will be the end of celebrities. As if seeing in 1080p the smooth interiors behind celebrities cocooning at home will rupture the culture industry and the star system. And yet, the hatred is real. “The film Parasite, in which a poor South Korean family cleverly cons its way into the home of a rich one, has been converted into a well-worn social-media retort whenever celebrities offer glimpses inside their own manses; the reference succeeds partly because so many superrich people have such blandly similar minimalist homes.”

More abstractly – how do the universal and the particular interact in this moment? We seem to have the interaction of universalism in the sense of appeals to and mobilisations of public health (with its birth as a discipline in Soviet healthcare, no less) and the particularity of suffering.

Closer to the question of Cultural Studies as an intellectual formation: what reconfiguration of economy, culture, society etc might follow from this. After the financial crisis a decade ago, there was, no doubt, a new opening onto political economy in cultural studies. As Randy Martin put it in 2015, “the very architecture by which knowledge of the social has been made legible – the grand trinity that partitions economy, polity and culture – has come undone, and from these ruins issue all manner of challenge and possibility.” Of course, this pandemic event adds another dimension to the broken trinity – or, put differently, where do quasi-natural factors like novel viruses fit in the trinity? Chuang and Rob Wallace suggest the historic spread of pandemics cannot be untied from urban development, intensive agriculture and capitalist markets. If there’s no unsullied “nature” outside global capitalism, this also suggests the open question of whether this is an exogenous or endogenous shock to an interlocked world system.

Another plank of this concerns the status of the “economy” as an object, and what its abstract claim is on politics (in our really-existing world of market-dependence, obviously). E.g. the increasing attempts to weigh up the economic cost of lockdowns vs care of population. Already as part of a wide-spread legitimacy crisis post-2007-8, there was a growing sense, I think, that people did not see their lives reflected in GDP figures (see Will Davies on this). Sure, the numbers are going up, people seemed to say en masse, but I’m not seeing that in my life. Wellbeing budgets (e.g. NZ and UK) were one attempt to deliver a fix for this gap between lived experience and economic indicators.

What is being asked for here is an unprecedented global demobilisation and isolation, almost concurrently. There’s anxiety about this. It’s unknown territory. Above all, those clamouring for a return to the Service of Goods right now seem to be desperately ensnared by the oikodicy that Joseph Vogl talks about. “A theodicy of the economic universe: the inner consistency of an economic doctrine that—rightly or wrongly, for good or ill—views contradictions, adverse effects, and breakdowns in the system as eminently compatible with its sound institutional arrangement.” Nothing needs to change; just get the people back to their stations and everything can carry on. The hangover from this governmental largesse will surely come in the form of austerity lashings for many.

On the conjuncture in which this virus appeared – it seems important to remember the crisis of legitimacy that has been underway (at least) since the last financial crisis. This has had several effects, I think, on trust in politicians and trust in experts. Lockdowns have played out in rather draconian ways, I think, because flows of trust between citizenry and state are at low levels. (Equally in those countries that English-language media are lumping together as “Asian” or “East Asian”.) The US and the UK have fumbled their management terribly, and lost a lot of time to quell the virus in the process. Aside from the obvious political disaffection and so on surrounding elected officials, there was already an epistemological crisis surrounding the “expert” and expertise, the media and information sources — and now? It seems to be going in two directions. In some ways, epidemiologists and other public health actors seem to be trusted; in part, they seem to be figures of faith for acting in the best interests of the public / society / everyone. Goodwill seems to be carrying their message through, helped by endless news reports of deaths. And yet conspiracy theories continue to be rife – 40% of US Republicans believe the virus is a Chinese concoction from a lab; on the weekend, we’ve seen 5g mobile towers burned in the UK in some sort of anti-tech connection with China. It will also be interesting to watch the anti-vaxxer groups in the wake of this, themselves one of the chief symptoms of a rear-guard response to the epistemological crisis around science.

At the level of everyday life, it will be interesting to experience the new tempos and rhythms of everyday life that will come out the other side of this. Obviously, people are right now being enlisted in a series of new habits around social distance, but time is also being enlisted too. We check the news to see updates on the length of lockdowns, the next meetings, the rise over the past 24hours. Morbid scoreboards measure out days and deaths, for our fascination and horror. We hear that lockdowns will come ago. Six weeks, two weeks, maybe six months, up to two years, maybe five years. Yet the future as a space of projection feels utterly blank. Who can plan anything, other than as a coping mechanism with an asterisk of a disclaimer (to be confirmed)? Epidemiological metaphors, otherwise describing dynamics visualised on graphs, have slid into the language with almost universal recognition. Flatten the curve (even in German they say this, auf Englisch). Now people speak casually about “the hammer and the dance.”

Another cultural question of everyday life – what will survive of neighbourhood businesses, given the economic ruin that is already evident in unemployment statistics and massive companies going on rent strike. In Berlin, neighbourhood places like cinemas, bars, restaurants and cafes, unable to open for weeks, have taken to asking people to support them by buying vouchers and merchandise online. Cancelled gigs and events ask people who can afford to ignore refund, so that music venues and theatres and promoters and artists can come out the other side. I’m sure similar things are happening elsewhere. But there’s a chance this could alter the face of local communities (in places already changed by gentrification, no doubt, and other processes).

Equally – what will cultural policy and support for cultural industries and artists look like? Responses already seem divergent. Germany has trumpeted a huge package of money for operators at all sizes (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/berlin-senate-bailout-process-1820982 & https://news.artnet.com/art-world/german-bailout-50-billion-1815396). In Berlin, bookshops are essential services and remain open. In Australia, the other case I know something about, anxiety was rising before the lockdown that this could decimate those artists already struggling with high costs of living and piecemeal work (https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/anwen-crawford/2020/19/2020/1584580982/coronavirus-cancelling-culture). I don’t know that any systematic response has emerged to this situation from the Australian government(s). Meanwhile, Jerry Saltz suggests the art world could look different after this – https://www.vulture.com/_pages/ck8ivxorc0000yeyerntsmxxj.html. By that we can also include the mass sackings of culture workers with barely any hope of reinstatement anytime soon – https://hyperallergic.com/551571/moma-educator-contracts/

I wonder if there might be a new “paranoid style” in culture and everyday life. What does life look like after we have been so thoroughly inculcated into logics of the other (and self) as virus vectors? It seems hard to imagine that sociability will not be affected by this sustained mentality. I imagine there could be an ecstatic return of sociability? Matched with paranoid moments? Prevailing at different points? Except, I think we already being prepared for a staged return to normal social mixing. So the ecstatic moment may not come. People wonder out loud too about parallel epidemics of loneliness and mental health from weeks of limited social contacts.

In cultural production, it will be interesting to see how this paranoid style might play out in formal and generic novelties, rather than simply the pandemic *content* that will be pushed through the Netflix pipe. The “bottle episode” format might become even more of a mainstay. And the lockdown nostalgia genre (like the “blitz spirit”) is probably already in the making. Will “flatten the curve” become “keep calm and carry on” kitsch?

It’s interesting to watch what Adam Tooze called a clumsy rewiring of globalisation – where Zoom comes to the fore as platform, where relations to flying around the world become more fraught and second-guessed. This ad hoc reconstitution of institutional and individual practices is obviously apparent at universities. It will be fascinating to see what the afterlife of this moment will be in the sector. Again, like the ecstasy of reunion with friends (and strangers), will the metaphysics of presence reassert itself as a thousand and one postponed conferences are launched onto the market for papers and academic attention? Or will the convenient and environmentally sustainable virtual conference finally become more acceptable? For those at a distance from the conference centres of the northern hemisphere, there’s been a certain obliviousness among, e.g., European academics about the many costs involved in travelling from, e.g., Australia for a conference. The Fridays for Future movement and others had already instilled greater awareness about this; so perhaps this accelerated acquaintance with these technologies will make the option viable. I’ve been part of several online reading groups already in the past fortnight, and their decentralisation has been inspiring. For example, one group hosted in Ireland had its largest number of participants in India and Israel. Obviously cultural, symbolic and financial capital will continue to accrue among the big-name academic cities and campuses, but these initiatives have opened onto new constellations of community, discussion and collective endeavour.

What are the subjective effects of all this? Some psychoanalysts co-wrote a letter a couple of weeks ago about their patients with some striking insights.

“And yet, against the predominant narrative of trauma and the dangers of isolation, we find many patients who are doing fine or even doing better, who like externalized chaos, or whose melancholia is abated by the nearness of death and reproach; those who are used to doing their own thing and who find their anxiety and sadness contained and cohered by the pervasive force of a virus that shuts all down. We hear those who have longed for everything to be cancelled, for life as we know it to be paused, hushed and stopped, even to the point of daring to express their own desire to, in fantasy, be one of the affected, which is to say, infected. Many admit that they are feeling strangely fine—no more FOMO—and even a few are looking forward to enjoying the spiteful reality that the virus effects all, rich and poor. Beyond this, there might seem very little worth saying. Some now don’t talk at all in session, while indicating that they are talking all the time, like the run on social media. Symptoms, despite so many breaks in the fabric of reality, persist, sometimes blindly and deafeningly so; it feels crushing. The continued contact can be important, but perhaps only for that—to know the analyst is still there.”

Other things to say… but I’m running out of steam and you’re probably running out of patience… so now in the form of suggestive promissory notes for further thoughts…

These ideas all came from listening to Adam Tooze talk about the current crisis and how it compares to 2008: Incoherent American power — soft power and culture yet literal bankruptcy of American social model, meanwhile Fed is efficiently fighting spotfires and Trump is a clown show; running 2008 playbook but at high speed; public balance sheet taking over from private again; fiscal conservatism as cross to nail progressive politics to cross for years; expansionary fiscal policy nationally vs contractions and austerity locally; emerging markets pressure (South Africa — immunosuppressed HIV population + downgrade of currency); timing of crisis with oil shock and uncertain global supply chains; car-making is dead right now; VW is worried about liquidity; what might bailout conditions be?; German governments talking about mass buying VW electric cars to ensure work when factories can reopen, while aiding in VW’s need to increase electric sales.

Media companies — some experiencing a massive boost in visitors right now, but with drop off in advertising. Who wants to sell stuff next to death charts? Who is in mood for big spending? Media outlets cutting staff or closing.

Mutual aid groups and solidarity networks have sprung up informally – and been mirrored formally by state calls for volunteers. This puts me in mind of the anarchist / horizontalist moment of Occupy a decade ago. Then, since, the return to state by activists for Corbyn and Sanders. What now?

Also, what do social movements do to respond to what will be inevitably be an uneven roll out of crisis response? Plus, the draconian enrolment of police and military, with powers for six months to two years? How do groups organise against that? What are the forms of creative protest in times of physical distance? Cementing affected and affective communities somehow – maybe seeding these online to go “live” when restrictions are lifted. Thinking also about ACT UP and other social movements – e.g. How to Survive A Plague. Those movements, internationally, put their bodies on the line, staged die ins during AIDS-HIV crisis. Militant disobedience might be demanded to get better crisis response. (Sidebar: Fauci and Birx, both experts on HIV and AIDS; Fauci was targeted by ACT UP but was sympathetic.) Some small protests in Berlin on the streets in recent weeks, using social distancing. Calling on politicians and population not to forget refugees at EU’s borders. Others occupying empty apartments (& Airbnb) to call for homeless relief. Also, what could cultural protest look like right now? (https://hyperallergic.com/550091/illuminator-covid-19/).

What might the crisis do for an ethics of care – and awareness of social reproduction too. Some public health thinkers have talked about “social immunity,” particularly in the US. And the flipside seems to be the social contagion that Chuang invoke. (No doubt here all the biopolitical debates come up again, e.g. Esposito on immunity)

And there’s been interesting work on geographies of movement and exclusion. Various visualisations of how the virus moves around the world and what this illustrates about travel, business, leisure etc today. But also the unevenly distributed luxury of working from home – the NY Times piece about poorer workers in NY moving around the city much more than the knowledge workers who could “shelter in place”. Five bus drivers have died in the UK. Meanwhile, in Germany, the former socialist eastern part of the country has far fewer cases. This once again underlines a deeply sensed feeling of stasis – both a distance from the cosmopolitan cultural power of an EU-level project but also the literal (comparative) lack of infrastructure for things such as fast-speed rail links between cities from eastern German states into western states and beyond into other parts of Europe.

No doubt these reflections are parochial and limited, drawn from what has most captured my attention – selfishly – in a truly global crisis, and one with many months to run….

For rolling lists of good discussions on these topics:

https://the-syllabus.com/coronavirus-readings/

https://yourpart.eu/p/QuarantineSchool_COVID19

[t-baba]

A Beginner’s Guide to Feathers.js

In this article, you’ll learn how to build a RESTful API Server in Node.js using Feathers.

An API server, also known as an Application Server, is a program that provides data to front-end applications. It also handles business logic in the back end and provides restricted access to an organization's database. It doesn't just prevent unauthorized persons from accessing the data; it can also restrict logged-in users from accessing or altering data if they don't have permission to do so.

Every application you build will need to provide a service to its end users. For that, your application will need data to process. You can use remote APIs to create a new service. For most applications, though, you’ll need to manage your own data store. A popular option is to use online data storage services such as Firebase. This way, you don't have to deal with the nitty gritty details of running a distributed database server. However, your project needs may require the use of a full-fledged, in-house database management system such as MongoDB or Oracle. For your front-end application to access the data stored in the database, you’ll need a server application that sits between the database and the front-end application.

As illustrated in the diagram above, the work of an application server is to access data from a database using SQL or NoSQL commands and convert into a format that front-end applications (client browser) can understand — such as JSON. In addition, the application server can use various security protocols — such as HTTPS encryption and token authorization — to ensure that communication between the database and the client application is safe and secure. One main advantage of using such an architecture is that you can deploy applications that target different platforms — desktop, mobile, web, and so on — using the same application server. It’s also very easy to scale your application horizontally in order to serve more users efficiently with fast response times.

We’re going to build a simple API server and demonstrate the various features that Feathers provides.

Prerequisites

Before you begin following this tutorial, you’ll need to have a good foundation in the following topics:

ES6 JavaScript

creating Express apps

creating RESTful APIs with Express

Feathers is built on top of Express, a minimalist web framework for Node.js. If you’ve completed the tutorials demonstrated in the links, you’ll realize that it's quite tiring building RESTful APIs using just Express. With Feathers, most of the repetitive work is already done for you. You only need to focus on configuring and customizing code. Let's dive into the code and learn how this web framework works.

Project Creation

To get started with Feathers, you’ll need to install its command line application globally:

npm install -g @feathersjs/cli

Next, create a new API project using the commands below:

mkdir contacts-api cd contacts-api feathers generate app

Below are the options I chose. Feel free to choose any testing framework. Unfortunately, testing is beyond the focus of this article, so it won't be covered here. Personally, I like simplicity, and that’s why I went with Jest.

Once the installation is complete, you can open you favorite code editor to look at the project files.

If you’ve completed the Express tutorials I listed in the prerequisites section, you shouldn't be intimidated by the generated code. Here's a brief summary that describes the folders and files.

Don't be too concerned with what each file does right now. You’ll come to understand how they work in the course in this tutorial. For now, let's confirm that the tests are working.

Linting

To ensure our project is compliant with the defined ESLint rules, just run the command npm test. If you’re on a Unix or Linux platform, this should run fine. If you’re on Windows, there are few things you need to adjust for the tests to run successfully.

First, go to package.json and look at the scripts section. Change the test line to this:

"scripts": { "test": "npm run eslint && SET NODE_ENV= npm run jest", },

Next, if you’ve installed Prettier in Visual Studio Code, you'll need to change the single quote setting to true in the Workspace settings tab:

{ "prettier.singleQuote": true }

Finally, make sure that, when you create or edit any file, the line ending is LF. If you’re using Visual Studio Code or a similar editor, you can check the current line ending style at the status bar. If it says CRLF, change to LF. Making those changes will help you pass the lint tests. Unfortunately, to make the tests pass will require a bit more work, which won't be covered here.

Let's look at how we can generate a CRUD RESTful interface.

Generate Service

Building a Restful CRUD API interface in Express requires a bit of work. In Feathers, all you have to do is execute a single command, answer a few questions and have the code generated for you:

$ feathers generate service ? What kind of service is it? NeDB ? What is the name of the service? contacts ? Which path should the service be registered on? /contacts ? What is the database connection string? nedb://../data force config\default.json create src\services\contacts\contacts.service.js force src\services\index.js create src\models\contacts.model.js create src\services\contacts\contacts.hooks.js create test\services\contacts.test.js

We’ll be using NeDB database for this tutorial. Feathers does support both SQL databases such as MySQL and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB. However, installing a database system — whether on your machine or on a cloud server — requires a certain amount of time configuring it. NeDB, on the other hand, is an in-memory database that’s 100% JavaScript and supports a subset of MongoDB API. There’s no configuration needed; you just install it. It's a great database for prototyping and testing new applications. This is what we’ll use in this tutorial.

Let's briefly look at some of the files that have been generated using this command:

services/contacts/contact.service.js. This is a Feathers service that provides the CRUD API endpoints for /contacts. Pretty small, isn't it? This is because Feathers does the heavy lifting for us. It saves us from writing boilerplate CRUD code.

services/contacts/contact.hooks.js. This is where we customize how the CRUD logic behaves. We have the before section, where we can check or change data before Feathers reads or writes to the database. We also have an after section, where we can check or change the results from the database before it’s sent to the client application. We can do things like restricting access, data validation, performing join operations and calculating values for additional fields or columns.

models/contacts.model.js. This where we define a model and attach it to a database table. This is also where we define a schema which can be used to validate fields when a new record is inserted or updated. Unfortunately, NeDB doesn’t support schemas. However, I've provided an example of a model that’s connected to MongoDB, which supports the schema feature via the mongoose adapter:

"use strict"; const mongoose = require("mongoose"); const Schema = mongoose.Schema; require("mongoose-type-email"); const contactsSchema = new Schema({ name: { first: { type: String, required: [true, "First Name is required"] }, last: { type: String, required: false } }, email: { type: mongoose.SchemaTypes.Email, required: [true, "Email is required"] }, phone: { type: String, required: [true, "Phone is required"], validate: { validator: function(v) { return /^\+(?:[0-9] ?){6,14}[0-9]$/.test(v); }, message: "{VALUE} is not a valid international phone number!" } }, createdAt: { type: Date, default: Date.now }, updatedAt: { type: Date, default: Date.now } }); const contactsModel = mongoose.model("contacts", contactsSchema); module.exports = contactsModel;

Despite the limitations of using NeDB, it’s still a great database for prototyping. Most NoSQL databases will allow you to submit data using any structure without having to define a schema first. It’s wiser to implement a schema once the project requirements have been realized. With a schema in place, Feathers will perform field validation for you using the rules you’ve defined. You'll need a production-ready database such as MongoDB to be able to define a schema. Do note the configuration for the development database is defined at config/default.json:

"nedb": "../data"

This is where database credentials are provided. We also have another config file called config/production.json. This is the production database configuration that’s used when you deploy your Feathers app. It's important to use a separate database during development. Otherwise, you run the risk of deleting or corrupting business operational data on the production database.

Now that we have our CRUD service for contacts set up, it's time to take it for a spin. You can start the Feather server using the command npm start. Do note that this server doesn’t support hot reloading. So you'll need to restart it every time you make a change to the code. In order to interact with our Feathers app, we’ll need an API browser tool such as Postman or Insomnia. I'll be using Insomnia in this tutorial, but you can follow along easily with Postman or any other tool.

Create a new GET request (press Ctrl + N) and give it the title “List Contacts”. In the URL section, enter http://localhost:3030/contacts. When you hit the Send button, you should have the following view:

Nothing! Our database is currently empty, so we need to create some new contacts. Create a new request called Create Contact. Fill in the rest of the fields as shown below:

In case you forgot to change the METHOD to POST in the above form, you can do so later. Change the method to POST and change the Body tab to JSON. Copy the following data in the JSON tab:

{ "name": { "first": "Jack", "last": "Bauer" }, "email": "jack@ctu.mail", "phone": "+1234567" }

When you hit the Send button, you should get the following response. Notice that an _id has been generated for your new contact.

Go back to List Contacts and hit the Send button again. You should get the following result:

{ "total": 1, "limit": 10, "skip": 0, "data": [ { "name": { "first": "Jack", "last": "Bauer" }, "email": "jack@ctu.mail", "phone": "+1234567", "_id": "ybnRxL6s2QEGhj4i" } ] }

Go back to Create Contact and post a couple of new records:

{ "name": { "first": "Chloe", "last": "O'Brian" }, "email": "chloe@ctu.mail", "phone": "+1987654" }

{ "name": { "first": "Renee", "last": "Walker" }, "email": "renee@fbi.mail", "phone": "+150505050" }

Let's now perform an update. For this, we won't use the UPDATE HTTP method. This method will completely overwrite a record. What we want to do is just overwrite a single field, not the the whole record. For that, we’ll use PATCH. Create a new request, Update Contact as illustrated below:

In the URL field, put http://localhost:3030/contacts/{_id}. Replace {_id} with the ID of the first record. Place the following data into the JSON tab:

{ "email": "jack.bauer@gmail.com" }

Hit the Send button. You should get the following result:

Notice how the the rest of the fields remain intact. Next, we’re going to delete a record. This one is easy. Just create a new DELETE request and name it Delete Contact. In the URL field, use the format http://localhost:3030/contacts/{_id}. Just like before, replace {_id} with the ID of the record you want to delete. Hitting Send will delete that record for you. You can confirm by running the List Contact request again.

We've just verified that all CRUD operations are running okay. In the next section, we’ll learn how to set up authentication.

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Feathers.js appeared first on SitePoint.

by Michael Wanyoike via SitePoint https://ift.tt/2OjpNpu

[thesmallworldofsamizayn]

An analysis of John and Paul’s artwork

I haven’t seen any analysis or comparison of the visual art of these two anywhere, and I do think it’s an interesting topic. So, I got a little carried away with the idea. Not a comparison of quality, mind, but an emotional one, and one which reveals their attitude to this kind of creative process.

Firstly the similarities: John and Paul both employ that kind of scraggly humour you see them use in their early interviews, and in In His Own Write in their art. It’s witty in a languid, musing way, particularly in John’s case, but I think there is an element of it too in the surrealist style of Paul’s work. With fairness to both of them being musicians first and artists quite a low second, their master of the medium is not the highest it could be, but that is not really the point. Certainly neither one cares much if a likeness is correct, and both of them create emotive works rather than representational works (well, Paul might have done some representational stuff I haven’t seen because it’s not online... but I doubt it’s really representational).

Let’s start with Paul. Technically, he has the upper hand in terms of craftsmanship of an artwork, if only due to the fact that the media he grapples with are far more complex than the pen and ink John prefers (oil, for instance). He fills every inch of his canvas with colour, he shades, he creates whole scenes rather than sketches. Every one of them feels in some way like a project, never a throw-away scribble as no doubt John considered much of his work. Every scene is also different, and many focus on different subjects, if any. Some depict real objects, others do not, and all of them have a piece of soul trapped inside. There is an anxiety in several, in the sickly bright colours, indefinable shapes, smeary brush strokes, and sometimes in the facial expressions of his figures. I actually find a fair number of his paintings uncomfortable to look at: they do weird things with colour, and they look, as I said, restless. But this is not a criticism: they are challenging paintings, and if not to the rest of the world, they are very important to him.

They are expressions of his feelings, and a product of his age (he only started painting in 1983). It seems to me that a lot of Paul’s demons go into these pictures, where they normally do not go into his words. They are almost entirely indecipherable, abstract looks at his subconscious, and like Paul himself they betray an inner depth without telling you what exactly that inner depth IS. Therefore they are harder to unpick than some of John’s work. The gloominess of some of them takes me a little by surprise, as does the sound understanding of the medium. Like many I assumed that John was the artist and no one else. There are a few paintings which have more logical backgrounds, like his pictures of the queen or of Linda. As in his music, empathy is the driving force: he draws as he writes, eternally inspired by the lives of others and coy (or perhaps just unsure) about his own life. If there are any self-portraits I cannot find them.

Now we move onto John, the minimalist. His drawings are almost brutally quick in some places, and achingly tender in others. He prefers blank ink to any other medium, presumably as it enables him to get something out quickly and with little hassle or practice: a direct pipeline to whatever he’s feeling in that moment. He tends to draw portraits or people more than anything, and unlike Paul he is prone to draw the same composition repeatedly - rather like how he “finds a note and hammers it home” when writing music, in his own words. Oh, and nearly all of these compositions are self-portraits or portraits of his family. So far I’d say these discrepancies between Lennon and McCartney are to be expected. But also, unlike Paul, there is an abiding sense of peace and simplicity in John’s drawings, particularly his family pictures, which were drawn in the late ‘70s. I find it hard not to smile a little looking at some of them: him and Yoko embracing, Sean between them, his own face looking passive and peaceable with round glasses, and often a soft wry smile. What is wrong with this picture? Is the title of one. It’s a challenge: nothing is wrong, you’re supposed to say, it’s a happy family.

There are two ways to interpret this. One is that John was genuinely experiencing peace and joy with his wife and son, and wanted to capture that joy through pictures. Every time he felt grateful for his life, he drew another portrait. The self-portraits are introspective, questioning, and despite being full of energy and character, are hopelessly blank as the eyes are invisible behind the glasses. The other way to interpret, the more cynical way, is that these are attempts to soothe himself, convince himself that things really are great. There is much to suggest that he was not really feeling on top of the world between 1976 and 1980, being away from music, and away from Yoko a lot of the time, shut inside his apartment. As usual with John’s frustrating mind, I am inclined to believe a little of both interpretations. It is also possible that for every happy drawing there are three angry or depressed ones, which Yoko prefers not to show the world. But it seems to me that these pictures are John, unusually, looking for the good in his situation, rather than the bad. He counts his blessings, and his blessings take the shape of Yoko, Sean and himself.

It’s strange that even in their art, there is this fearful symmetry. Where Paul is charming and upbeat in music, John goes growly and bluesy. Where Paul is frenzied and enigmatic in his art, John becomes open, unburdened and simple. But I don’t think that this is to be taken as a contradiction to their personalities. Because in John’s artwork there is, amidst the peace and weirdness, that knowing smirk, the wit and awareness that he is right. He doesn’t need to draw different things. He knows what he wants, he knows what he knows, and nothing’s gonna change his world. And in Paul’s work, the dominant flavour is one of experimentation: what if I tried this, or that, or these together. He pushes himself out, technically and physically exerting himself (those paintings are massive, John’s are probably about A5 in size) to create what he can.

I’m sure there is more to say on this. I haven’t really expressed it as well as I could, so I’ll just leave a couple of pictures for comparison. Here’s Paul’s painting, Unspoken Words, and John’s drawing, Real Love. They both give satisfaction in their own way, Paul’s in the proof of his emotional complexity and John’s in the honest expression of peace and happiness… And both (unsurprisingly) in their natural ability to translate feelings into art so fluidly. Personally I prefer John’s stuff, just on an aesthetic level, but that’s just my personal taste.

[yankeesabralimey]

Demo Day? Don’t

One of my portfolio company founders recently asked me if he or she should participate in a demo day.

My answer was a clear no. Here’s why:

What is a demo day? Definitions might vary, but I’ll define a “demo day” as any situation where a founder is asked to publicly pitch his or her startup to an audience of investors. This could be on-stage or online. It could be organized by an accelerator, an early-stage investor, a corporate, an angel group, a law firm, or anyone else. It can range in format from 2–5 minutes to much longer. And, critically, it can involve a demo(nstration) of the actual product/technology or not. Most importantly, a “demo day” is an event organized for the purpose of pitching a company (1) as an investment opportunity and (2) to investors. When you get up on stage at an industry conference or a “tech” conference (TechCrunch Disrupt, for example) to show your product to potential customers, that’s not a demo day. But getting up on stage to pitch your company as an investment most surely is.

Never participate in a demo day. Ever. Basically, my advice to anyone who wants it is never participate in a demo day. Ever. A few reasons why not (and then two highly specific caveats).

Why not?

Demo days declare that you are fundraising to the world. By getting on stage and telling the world you are fundraising — guess what? Everyone now knows you are fundraising. In my experience, that is not a good thing. Your cash position, your valuation, your stage, your traction — these are pieces of information that you want to share only with investors that you trust. And you’ll want to share them gradually over time in a controlled way. By getting on stage at a demo day, few of these things will remain a mystery for long. VCs prefer to see deals that have not been shopped around the entire planet. Like everyone else, they want to deal with people and opportunities that are perceived to be exclusive and special. Getting on stage and telling the world what you are doing flies in the face of that logic.

Demo days expose you needlessly to the risk of perceived failure. One of the biggest problems with declaring to the world that you are fundraising is the possibility that you may not succeed at first in your fundraising. For any number of a long list of very good reasons, it may take you longer to fundraise than you were expecting. But getting on stage and obviously and publicly trying to fundraise, you automatically create a situation where any (normal, natural) delay in fundraising will get perceived as a failure. (“Wait…didn’t I see that company on stage a year go? And they are still trying to raise a seed round?”) The same applies to business and product decisions: You get on stage and say you will have 100 paying SMBs in six months and — guess what — you shift to an enterprise strategy. Or perhaps that huge beta customer you talked about on stage decides to pull the project… None of this will stop a good investor from investing — but it creates confusion and just makes your fundraising job harder on the margin.

Demo days rarely if ever get you in front of any investors you can’t get to otherwise. VCs and other investors are some of the most highly networked people around. It’s very easy to get your company in front of them. And you are always better off getting a warm introduction from a founder, fellow investor, or other connection. Yes, VCs show up at demo days. But they do so, in many cases, mostly to network with other VCs and not really to listen intently to the pitches on stage. Demo days, therefore, are not really a short cut to getting in front of investors. If anything, they make it that much harder for you to control who sees you, with what intro, and when.

Demo days waste your own time by democratizing your process when you should be doing the opposite. Not all investors are created equal. It’s your job as CEO to find and select the best investors for your specific company. Getting on stage is basically an open invitation for investors of all kinds to reach out to you and start wasting your time. This could lead to a fundraising process driven by your inbox as opposed to your strategic objectives.

Demo days fail to communicate your uniqueness. Most demo days try to cram 5–25 startups into a few hours of pitching. That typically leaves a founder with 2–10 minutes to explain why their company is viable, unique, and potentially very valuable. Most of the genuinely interesting startups I’ve encountered in my career have taken at least an hour to begin to understand. If you can explain your company’s unique value proposition in 3 minutes, it’s probably not that unique. You should have a killer five-sentence elevator pitch, and you should use that to get a series of long, serious meetings with relevant investors who want to dig into the details.

Demo days create a false perception of understanding and relationships. As a result of the difficulty of conveying anything of substance in the demo day format, demo days create a false perception among entrepreneurs that “they have pitched” and a false perception among some investors that “they have heard the pitch.” These false perceptions destroy value. Entrepreneur are denying themselves the opportunity for a real pitch and investors are denying themselves the opportunity to hear a real pitch. There is nothing wrong with saying: “I would love to explain to you why our approach to zero-day information leakage prevention is a game-changer, but in order to do that properly, I’ll need an hour of your time.”

Demo days commoditize you and your company. Another painful side-effect of the demo-day format is the commoditization of companies and founders. Since you can’t really explain what your company does in five minutes, what are you going to do in those five minutes instead? All too often, you are going to use those five minutes to convince the world that you are the next Steve Jobs. Instead of helping founders show the world their uniqueness, demo days encourage founders to try to fit into some vague pre-conceived canned notion of what a “hot” founder looks like. This normally involves dramatic pauses, slick minimalistic slides, graphs going up and to the right with no numbers, vague technical claims, and — sometimes — black turtlenecks and phrases like “for the first time ever.”

Demo Day Fatigue. As an investor, I get at least one demo day invitation a week. Sometimes more than one. I suspect most investors are, by now, totally fatigued by the plethora of demo days demanding attention. Reach out to the right investors, one by one, with a cold email or (preferably) a warm introduction that speaks to why the match actually makes sense. Demo days were cool five years ago, but not any more.

To this list of why not to demo day, I want to add two caveats:

Y-Combinator. It’s probably a subject for another post, but Y-Combinator is the clear exception to this rule. Y-Combinator organized one of the original demo days, and has emerged as — by far — one of the most successful accelerator programs in the world. Most of the YC companies that pitch on demo day have already raised money in some form. In many ways, the YC Demo Day is a bit of a fiction (few actual demos, all the good startups have already raised), but it’s a useful fiction. YC’s impact on a startup’s network and brand is so profound that the demo day is a justifiable cost.

If you are already committed to an accelerator program. Naturally, if you are already committed to an accelerator program, political realities might mean you have to participate in a demo day. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as you do so with your eyes open.

So if you have to “demo day”, how do you do it?

Admittedly, it’s a bit naïve to assume that start-up CEOs will be able to resist the need to participate in demo days from time to time. Here’s how I would approach it.

Be yourself. It’s fine to benefit from some public speaking coaching. But resist any and all advice to be anything other than yourself. You don’t want rock music, refuse to go on stage to rock music. If you don’t want to speak in crazy superlatives — just don’t do it. You are not Steve Jobs. You are you. Relax and enjoy it.

Reframe the demo day as a public speaking practice opportunity, NOT as a fundraising exercise. As a CEO, public speaking is part of the job. Consider the demo day as an opportunity to practice that skill: an opportunity to explain what you are working on, why it is interesting, and why people should be excited about learning more. Talk about technology, customers, validation, product, learnings. Just be interesting. Make people want to learn more.

Recognize the limitations of the format. Under most circumstances, even the best investment opportunity will not be able to convince any serious investor to invest in a 5 minute speaking slot. So don’t even try. Don’t talk about fundraising, cash balance, valuation, milestones, etc. Put enough useful/interesting information on the table so that a smart investor can decide to reach out to you. That’s all you need to do.

Teach, don’t beseech. Take the opportunity to teach your audience something genuinely interesting about the world that they could not find out for themselves in a five minute Google search. (If you do not have any to teach, you probably haven’t figure much out…). This is your opportunity to be genuinely interesting and novel. Avoid the impulse to beseech your audience for their love, interest, or investment dollars. Instead, win their interest by establishing yourself as an expert in something.

I hope that was helpful and not too depressing…

As for me, I’ll still get all those demo day emails, and I’ll still go occasionally. But I’ll always believe that the best way to meet a startup is eye-to-eye over a coffee. Reach out. Let’s talk.

My AngelList syndicate to back the best in European & Israeli enterprise companies is now one of the largest syndicates based outside the US. We are now at well over $1.3M in backing per deal.

The syndicate has made six investments so far: all oversubscribed and all with quality co-investors. I’d be honored if you’d consider backing the syndicate — you’ll be in pretty good company and there are quite a few awesome companies in the pipeline…

[brie-haus]

Shorts and Hoodies and Tops, Oh My!

A few years ago, shortly before the Marie Kondo craze happened, I read the book ‘Seven’ by Jen Hatmaker. To say it was eye opening for me is an understatement. I’ve been a lifelong hoarder of all sorts of crazy stuff. I am definitely one of those people that assigns a sentimental value to objects and then because of that sentimental attachment keeps things way past their useful stage in my life. For example, I had a skirt that I wore for Career Day in elementary school when my mom let me dress up as Baby Spice. I still had this skirt a few years ago when I started to do what I call closet cleanses. To compound this hoarding issue, I married a guy who still has the bulk of his middle and high school wardrobe and nearly every possession from his childhood, in our home no less. Both of us have closet space in the closet off of master bedroom but we also each have a dresser in a guest room that we fill how we wish and I have dresses and long skirts hanging in a guest closet. One of my biggest goals in doing these cleanses is to eliminate the need for the additional storage space throughout the house.

Among other stages of deep cleaning such as diet, etc., Jen Hatmaker’s book calls for you to pick out seven different outfits that you are meant to wear in rotation during this experience. That’s right: seven pieces of your wardrobe that you are allowed to wear, and nothing else. The idea is that this forces you to realize what you actually need to keep to have an adequately robust wardrobe and what in your closet you’re holding onto that you will never actually use. It’s a more effective plan, in my opinion than the traditional advice of turning the hanger backwards on all your clothing and then turning them back as you wear it. Because if you’re me, you lose track of when you did that and have to start all over. While I didn’t go quite as drastic when following the journey outlined in the book (I cheated and picked 7 wardrobe items from each category), I was still very inspired to then go through all my clothing.

I did my first of many clothing cleanses right after I wrapped up that experience. I went through each item in the closet and asked myself when the last time I had worn the item in question was and if it was something that I could and would actually wear again. I donated the clothes that met a certain size requirement to someone who was in desperate need in town, sold the items that I could, and donated the rest to charity. I have since done this many times. I now actually make it a habit to go through this process each time the season changes in an effort to keep the closet to a reasonable level. I truly want to be more of a “closet minimalist” but I do not know if that is in the cards for me. However, I am working on it.

Those that have been following me for a while know that I am on a weight loss journey. When I was prescribed the depression medication and ballooned up to my biggest, it happened rather rapidly. One day I was a size 16 (and all of my clothes were, too) and 3 weeks later only LLR leggings would fit me (when I later did buy clothes to fit I was a size 22). Because I had invested a small fortune in my smaller wardrobe, I didn’t want to just sell it off or donate it. Instead I bought some under bed storage totes and packed them with the clothing that no longer fit me. My goal was that if I was ever able to lose the weight, the clothes would be there waiting for me.

I have managed to lose quite a bit of the weight, but still have a long way to go. I am now in a weird grey area where I am trying to hold on to one clothing size up in a few items from what I wear comfortably now in case I do backslide and gain back some of the weight. In addition to this, I am regularly adding back old items to my wardrobe that I am newly able to wear again. The reintroduction of these items back to the closet often makes the closet a little overwhelming so as I do this I try to go back through both the items I am reintroducing to the closet as well as what is currently in there to make sure there are not items that I should donate.

When I first began doing these closet cleanses, it was extremely hard for me to let go of a significant number of items. Like I previously mentioned, I tended to attach a sentimental value to the items in my possession, sometimes holding onto items that were not even logical to hold onto. After years of practice, I can confirm that this practice is now therapeutic to me. As I go through the items I allow myself to reflect and acknowledge how far I have come from the time when I wore those items. I also remind myself that it is clothing, not the memory itself that I am letting go of. Above all, I remind myself that if I accrue so many items that I cannot glance through my closet easily, I am bound to overlook good items that I enjoy wearing.

I now often find myself when I am looking for a specific top to wear for a certain occasion, for instance, pulling ALL of my shirts out and going through them, asking myself which ones I should truly hold onto and which ones I am just holding onto for sentimental reasons.

The experience with ‘Seven’ also showed me just how versatile most of my clothing can be. A simple black top can be dressed up with a cardigan for work, or I could add some glamour via a bold statement piece of jewelry to make it night out-worthy. The same top could be paired with a skirt and heels for a formal event, or dressed down with a pair of shorts for a baseball game or a day of exploring on vacation. The possibilities are endless for how to use some of these more timeless pieces and it’s important to me to make sure those are the types of items I invest in. I am super obsessed with Lilly Pulitzer clothing but there again I always make sure that I am getting a bargain on the item I am investing in as well as buying a piece that could be paired several different ways for different occasions.

This desire to be more minimalist has also spilled over into other areas of my life. In an effort to make the most of my time at home during quarantine, I have been going through each room in our house pairing down what we have as well as organizing things so we can make the most of what we are deciding to hold onto. So far we have gone through our bathroom closet, the cabinets under the sink in all of our bathrooms, the office, the bookshelves, and the laundry room. Each completed area brings a feeling of satisfaction as well as the accomplished feeling that lots of the items we are getting rid of are going to help others.

I challenge you to implement a closet cleanse day into your rotation a few times a year and share how your experience goes!

[supervillainproject]

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously SEO Blog9T Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of blog9t SEO social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

[unlovedaddict]

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google SEO Blog9T Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about Blog9T things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

[bluejanuarysky]

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the SEO Blog9T criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do Blog9T know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

[mctvcker]

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product Blog9T called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After SEO Blog9T all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

[itsmyrayeraye-blog]

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't SEO Blog9T you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You Blog9T should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

[kivircikedebiyatii]

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop SEO Blog9T searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I blog9t SEO recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.