This week’s reads: The Future of Online Publishing, an SEO “must”, and more

This week’s reads: The Future of Online Publishing, an…

November 21, 2016March 29, 2017
by Paul Hammons

I’d like to start by weighing in on the question of content timing by saying that it is, in fact, possible to post too frequently.

In the age of content marketing, companies aren’t asking whether they should blog or otherwise curate content. That’s a given at this point. The question is: How often?

Let me humbly submit — on behalf of all RSS subscribers everywhere — that if my feed icon looks like this after 10 minutes:

and all of them are from you… I will probably not be following you from then on.

Having said that, here are a few things I thought were interesting this week:

I won’t have to give up my web browser, will I???

Why WordPress Isn’t Scared of Facebook, Snapchat, or the Future of Publishing

I guess I’m dating myself when I say that I hope websites never go away. As convenient as it is being able to use a smart phone as an instant-access reader wherever I happen to be, I’m holding out hope that I’ll never get to the point where I just can’t haul myself off that coach, wander 10 feet across the room and sit down at a larger screen where I can type like an old person: on a keyboard.

Contently’s article (by Cameron Albert-Deitch) from Nov. 8 on the future of websites in a mobile age offered a little encouragement on that front. Essentially, you have a symbiotic relationship between publisher and platform. As a content provider (whether you’re a pure publisher such as the Times, or a de facto publisher like basically every company in the world), you need syndication to get your message out to the maximum audience.

But the platforms themselves can’t really absorb that function, because they can’t fill the massive demand for content (yet), and it’s a lot easier to have people out there churning it out for them. What would Facebook be without an endless scroll of listicles and cute animal videos, after all?

That leads to the cache-22:

Modern publishers will eventually come to a crossroads. If they want to maximize growth, they need to be where their audience is, staying on top of the social media world’s ever-shifting power struggle. If they want to control their user experience and avoid paying for traffic, they’ll have to invest in their own web presence.

The SEO “no-brainer” on keyword usage

Biznology’s article, Design: The top SEO ranking factor, made a great point that probably ought to be obvious, because it’s how I search every single time:

When users land on your page, they scan it for keywords related to the words they used in the query. The words they find don’t have to be the exact phrase. But the closer to the query, the better your chance of convincing them not to bounce. And it needs to be obvious. If they don’t see those words within four to six seconds of landing on your page, they will bounce. This is the main reason why having the keywords in the title tag, URL, H1, and first paragraph of your body copy is so important—because these are the signals humans look for to determine relevance. Bots do look at these things, but so do humans.

But the most important thing is that you don’t bury the words below the fold, underneath big splashy images. By “below the fold” I mean whatever you force people to scroll for. That includes tablets and phones, with a much smaller window for content above the fold. When users land on your page, they scan for words, not images. Most will not scroll to determine if the page is relevant. You have to hit them between the eyes with text.