Simplicity, Clarity, Singleness: Goals for Bloggers to Achieve

February 25, 2010

Every day I receive an email with motivational quote from HeartMath and I’ve saved many of them because they resonated at a particular time in my life.  Last week, I received this one and it seemed totally appropriate for bloggers, so let me share it with you:

“Simplicity, clarity, singleness:  these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.”

—– Richard Halloway

As I originally wrote for The Bloggers’ Bulletin , these are the attributes that bloggers strive for in their writing.  I know that I do.  Sometimes I find myself including too much information in a post.  And I especially think that trying to stuff a post with key words so the search engines can find you can ruin a post – from the readers’ perspective.

This applies to large businesses, too, that have the resources to research the information needs of their customers.   Maybe the words customers use are not the words the company is using in its advertising and promotional materials — and this includes blogs.  What is great about blogging by companies is that they can generate immediate feedback from customers, if you hit their hot buttons — or key words.

Whether you are writing for yourself or your employer, ask yourself these questions:  Are the key words really relevant to your content?  Are you writing for your readers with simplicity and clarity?    Are you articulating one key idea in the post that is easy for the readers to understand?  Is the idea likely to stir comments from readers?

It’s easy to get discouraged when a brilliantly written blog (in your view) falls flat with readers.  Let’s all keep at it with a will to getting better and enthusiasm for our ideas.  I will leave you with another quote that I hope will make your blogging a happy and productive experience.

“Begin growing from where you are – not from where others think you ought to be by now.”

—— Steven Douglas Lawrence

F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content Could Enhance SEO Rankings

October 10, 2009

I’m not exactly sure how I came upon the study done by Jakob Nielsen about how people read web content.  The study claims eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.  This could be helpful information in enhancing SEO rankings for your website or blog. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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