Tumblr brings in editorial team to run staff blog
Tumblr, the blogging platform valued at $500m, has hired an editorial team to cover the goings-on within the company.
Putting a not-exactly-new but certainly notable slant on the ‘company blog’, the team will document changes in Tumblr's services in an updated blog that will be accessible to the company’s 42m users.
Three new ways to visualise your SEO performance
SEO practitioners don’t typically share their operational methods. Our sector is reliant on gaining competitive advantage through hoarding methods and techniques for just long enough to benefit from them, and then sharing them to gain some love and respect as a bonus.
This also extends to methods for displaying SEO data and visualising performance. For instance, search agencies never willingly allow their reports to be seen by their competitors.
Therefore, I want to break rank somewhat and present three interesting ways to display SEO data and information, methods that I’ve not seen others use out there and that are increasingly becoming standards within my own companies.
The marriage of web writing and user experience
Web writing, while basically an extension of its offline counterpart, will always be driven by visits, which will always be driven by SEO.
And as SEO becomes more about a user’s overall experience on a website than the number of keywords in the content, it’s clear that a well-ranked website can’t survive without a happy mix of the two.
The hard slog of brand journalism
Producing content for a non-traditional publisher is hard. For a start, consumers still don’t trust content produced by non-traditional publishers. They see it as advertising and this is one huge hurdle in itself.
Having taken the jump from working in online journalism for traditional publishing houses two years ago, to working for a non-traditional publisher (Confused.com), it has been, at times, a challenge, though I do like a challenge.
Website errors corrupt marketing efforts from within
The shockingly high level of errors on large-company websites points towards immature web governance processes and a general over-reliance on content management systems (CMS) for quality control.
And yet, the levels of automation and sophistication possible in web governance have never been higher...
We recently conducted a survey examining the quality of web content on the websites of large companies. A staggering 87% of the website owners polled admitted there were likely to be a significant number of errors on the websites they manage.
As any web marketer will tell you, this will have a significant knock-on effect. Website errors seriously undermine the user experience, erode trust and confidence, and impact return on marketing spend.
Seven common web governance mistakes and how to avoid them
Marketers and communicators are creating more content than ever before and publishing to a greater diversity of platforms and digital channels, and the errors are starting to pile up.
The business value of today’s digital communications is being undermined by out-dated, erroneous, broken and incompatible content. This is damaging the customer experience, causing sinking rankings in web search, and putting revenues at risk.
So how do you avoid these costly website governance pitfalls? Companies need to address their approach to governance in order to embrace today’s challenging multichannel environments while dealing with quality issues effectively.
Below we take a look at the seven most common web governance mistakes, and how you can successfully avoid them.
Five questions your corporate blog should answer
Too many corporate blogs are the answer to a question nobody asked, serving up generic, me-too posts or even syndicated second-hand content.
Give your content a kick up the social by writing to answer these five searching questions...
Five great examples of product page copywriting
While product page design has improved in the past few years, an often neglected area is sales copy.
A common mistake is to simply place the manufacturer’s product descriptions on pages. While this approach is easier, a more personal touch and unique tone of voice can help your product pages stand out and really sell the benefits of products.
I'm going to explain why good sales copy is so important, and look at some examples where retailers are getting this spot on...
Landmark EU ruling moves the boundaries for publishers
Last week we saw Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) lose its appeal to overturn a privacy action in the French courts by actor Olivier Martinez.
Martinez successfully sued the publishers of the Sunday Mirror in 2008 over an article that was published online about the actor’s then relationship with Kylie Minogue, saying that it negatively affected his reputation in France.
How to optimise headlines using the 65 character rule
I’m currently developing some wireframes as we pave the way for a revamp of this blog later this year. There are lots of things to think about. One of those things is typography. Closely related to that is optimal headline length.
I always try to write headlines that fit on one line, though I don’t always succeed. Nevertheless, short headlines beat longer ones for lots of reasons. As such I’d like to introduce the 65 character rule. Actually it’s 65 or less, to be precise.
Here’s why...
