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Category Archives: Copy & content
Stuff I’ve read lately: social media search tools, local search prominence and more
I haven't done one of these 'round ups' for a while, but here are some interesting articles I've come across recently, thanks to my Feedly digest…
Social + search:
Does great content really mean great results? by Pete Young. Nicely argued piece about how SEO practitioners need to distance themselves from the rest and become marketers rather than 'search' specialists. A guide to SEO for editorial teams and journalists, by Mark Nunney on the Wordtracker site. A nice, straighforward intro to SEO basics for those who're more interested in content than tech.
Three nice infographics
You can't really avoid infographics these days, they're everywhere. But if you have managed to escape them so far, an infographic is the represention of data in a visually interesting way. They can be surprising, revealing and fun. But they can also be daunting, and sometimes downright confusing.
If you're better at processing visuals (photos, video, exploded diagrams) rather than words or data then the infographic will probably appeal.
Anyway I thought it would be fun to do the occasional round up of interesting infographics I've seen lately.
Keep it simple if you want to get your message across
On Saturday I saw an interesting comment in the Guardian from a tutor on a creative writing course. She claimed that to write a commercially successful novel you need to keep your language and structure very simple. Simple enough for an 11 year old to understand, since that's the average reading age of adults in this country.
I've never really understood what 'reading age' meant, but can this really be true? To find the answer I went to the website of the National Literacy Trust, where it's stated that in fact one in six adults in the UK have the reading ability expected of an 11 year old, or less.
Banning cliches from business: a thankless task
I was watching the Mary Portas show recently in which she persuaded a firm of estate agents to better serve house buyers, principally by being honest in their product descriptions and preparing properly for viewings. I like Portas's approach, and of course it's good TV, but I wasn't sure about how she tackled the issue of misleading product descriptions, by banning estate-agent-speak.
It has always astounded me how estate agents' particulars are so mired in cliché. Even the word particulars is itself part of the problem.
