#boiling it down to it's barest essentials is basically just: | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

corvidcall · 1 year ago

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Fascinated by your sarah z hate- would love to hear more about this if you’d like to share. My experience of her is just that mediocre Homestuck vid or something she made.

lmao yeah sure i guess i can expound on it

i should preface this by saying that i dont think shes like. a bad person. and i dont have some secret knowledge of problematique things shes done that we should all Cancel her for.

tl;dr i just think her videos are really bad. she keeps making videos about stuff that i was there for and then being wrong about them, and it drives me crazy. on top of that, it just rubs me the wrong way to make your whole brand "the lady who talks about tumblr"

like, i think her homestuck video sucks (and i think its very funny that she admitted that she only spent a week making it, but ALSO got really defensive when people said she was wrong about stuff. like, i think the way whatpumpkin and andrew hussie responded to her video was Bad but also that doesnt retroactively defend the original video from being poorly researched and, in my opinion, in bad taste. it was weird to make a video where you talk about all the controversy about hs^2 not that long after the whole project got cancelled because too many of the trans women working on it were receiving daily death threats)

and i think the mcelroys video sucks (that was the last one i watched before i gave up entirely. its really long and very boring, and basically is just her listing a bunch of stuff they did that people had problems with, which essentially puts "travis was annoying on twitch" on the same level of seriousness as "taz: graduation used a lot of harmful native american stereotypes". i genuinely am not sure what the point of this video was supposed to be, because it feels like its her reading a tumblr callout post. also she was wrong about taz: amnesty. the ending WAS foreshadowed, it did NOT come out of nowhere, she just wasnt paying attention.)

but the onceler fandom video is honestly the absolute pits. i am still friends with a lot of the people that i was in the onceler fandom with, and i genuinely havent met a single former onceslut who thought her video was good, or the least bit accurate. her thesis basically boils down to that the onceler fandom was just a bunch of young teen girls projecting fantasies onto a nonthreating decently attractive fictional guy, which isnt that weird and people are only making a big thing about it because they hate teenage girls. and her conclusions arent WRONG, per say, since people DO hate teen girls and this is a thing theyre known to do... its just. thats literally not what the onceler fandom was at all?? first off, when i got into it i was 17 and i was the youngest person i knew by far. almost everyone i saw in the fandom were in their 20s, and a lot of them were not girls at all. and as far as any of US remember, the thing sustained the fandom wasnt 13 year old girls exploring their nascent sexualities, it was people using the barest pretense to make OCs, and then craft stories with and about their friends OCs. it was a really cool unique experience because it was a fandom for the things the fandom built. a lot of the people i knew had never watched the movie The Lorax at all, or didnt really care about it one way or another, but DID get really invested in the dynamic between Swag and One, or got really invested in the two big AUs the fandom had. By the time i got there, most people had kinda moved away from the canon onceler anyway, and were focused almost exclusively on the AUs (there was a high school AU and a zombie apocalypse AU, and then during the summer the high school AU blogs would do a child summer camp AU. i liked the zombie one best because i love melodrama, but the high school one was most popular). i know she was IN the onceler fandom (allegedly...) but as far as i can tell, she was just there at the very start, because it changed WILDLY even just a few months after its inception. and there's no way anyone who saw the fandom that I was actually in would make the sweeping statements about it that she did.

broadly, her videos are too unfocused and not really well-written. her one on Oppa Homeless Style was a genuinely good video!! I know she CAN do good videos!! But so many of her more fandom-focused videos dont really seem to have a thesis beyond "this happened" or maybe even "this was kinda weird right?". like what is the viewer supposed to take away from the video about the mcleroys? that they made a podcast that was really popular and then got less popular? why did that take you TWO HOURS to say? and even when she does have a strong thesis, its always muddied by the fact that she feels compelled to add in really long, boring digressions. I think the video about All or Nothing was good, and made an interesting point about how pan and ace people are really starved for meaningful rep, but i dont understand why she felt compelled to recount the entire plot of the webseries someone made? what did that contribute to the thesis? its like shes reading a wikipedia page, and not like. an actual ESSAY. that someone structured to convey a POINT.

but overall i just take umbrage with her whole "tumblr historian" shtick. i think its kind of gross to put really niche (generally woman-dominated) subcultures on display so people can come gawk at the freaks. ive heard the defense that "she IS a fandom person!! these videos are FOR fandom people!!" but 1. if its supposedly supposed to be for me and NOT an audience of people unfamiliar with the thing shes talking about, then there would be no need to spend so long explaining what everything is, and 2. i can at least say, in my own subjective experience, that i said basically all this to my sister, who told me that thats why she likes sarah z at all, because the videos let her come gawk at all the fandom freaks on tumblr. so its cool that sarah z is giving the person who bullied me my whole life (specifically because the way i engaged with media was too cringe) more reasons to bully me for being cringe. big preesh sarah. glad youre making money off of the free content all of us put out, and even more glad that youre profiting by taking all that free content and presenting it to a largely hostile and judgemental audience who already thinks im a fucking idiot. why dont you make a video about my popular hamlet post next, since you seem to make videos exclusively about things i did.

anyway if i want to watch video essays about fandom, i'll watch princess weekes, whose videos are substantive and not... idk very juvenile. not that i think there cant be more than one youtuber talking about fandom!!! its just that sarah z's videos are mid at best and actively bad at worst, so im not gonna bother.

(all that being said, i occasionally look at her blog and reblog stuff. while shes working down in the tumblr mines looking for content to steal, she does frequently find some decent posts to reblog)

#this answer is so long and for WHAT #this is so inconsequential LMAO. but sometimes i gotta be a little hater. and i was directly asked.#also i cant stop thinking about how a friend and mutual of mine described her as a 'failed tumblrina'#anyway. thanks for asking. i am ready to defend my opinions at all times but no one ever asks #...do you all still like me even though i took the time to write all this nonsense

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twistedtavern · 2 years ago

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I would love to hear about your fairy tale au!!!

YES OK SO

I basically took some basic fairy tale villain archetypes and applied the dorm leaders, those archetypes being:

Stepmother (gender neutral): Vil

Giant: Riddle

Just a straight up talking lion: Leona

Witch: Azul

SATAN HIMSELF: Kalim

Dethroned king: Idia

Dragon: Malleus

Everything is under the readmore because good GOD

And I made them all the core cast. I hear you asking, "But Deli!! If all the villains are the heroes, who's the antagonist?"

No shit it's gonna be the fucker who's usually the protagonist in these fairy tales. By way of what he stole from everybody else, he's a prince now. Also he's Neige. This becomes important later, but for now, take note of the general behavior of your typical Grimms' edition fairy tale protagonist, what's the pattern here? They're all assholes and thieves 90% of the time and should probably have gotten murked. They steal shit, they kill things they shouldn't, they just wreck shop wherever they go and run off laughing like the gremlins they are with little consequence. Trust me, I have witnessed protagonists do some fucked up things and get away with it or be called right, I have a book of these things abt as thick as my arm. TLDR: Neige is a motherfucker. Well. Stepchildfucker. If you want to be specific. Almost. Let me go into detail about that.

~✨ The Actual Story ✨~

We set our scene long ago in a pleasant little village with a family of two. Vil and his nearly-the-same-age-because-marriage-back-then-was-fucked-and-we-AREN'T-getting-into-it stepchild Yuu, who he treats very well actually, are on a pleasant little walk to the market to go buy some essentials for the household, chatting and laughing and remembering what they needed, when suddenly a beautiful white horse bursts out from the treeline and its rider snatches Yuu right up off the street and whisks them away. Obviously in shock and anger because his stepchild was kidnapped right in front of him, Vil tries to give chase, running after Yuu's cries. He managed to get the barest glimpse of the kidnapper, recognizing the face of the newly crowned Prince Neige, just before he escapes into the wood.

From that point, Vil just basically goes on a quest that boils down to him going "hey you. if you've gotten your shit snatched by this fucker in particular, you may be entitled to coming with me to jump him." six times before rolling up on Neige to get his baby back. The following things everyone wants from Neige are as follows:

Riddle: Green goose that bakes golden cakes that Neige stole from him

Leona: Decapitate the bastard and take his head back to the woods so he can claims his brother's throne as forest king

Azul: Neige's firstborn (he ends up settling for some magical artifacts because he can't have a firstborn if he's dead lmao)

Kalim: Neige's soul

Vil: His stepchild (that Neige also stole from him)

Idia: His castle (outright swindled rather than stolen)

Malleus: Dragon egg (yoinked baby #2)

As you can see, there's a Lot that he's gonna get his shit kicked in for

#twst fairy tale au

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hyp3rfixation-h3ll · 1 year ago

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"The Brick"… So basically, for the context to your audience, it's a low nutrition snack with a shell of beef fat ( Thus the "slime" ) & a filling of edible, but plain, bread dough. Supposed to be cooked well, but is instead boiled to the bare minimum. ( There are later updates to this dish, one being an banana-oat shell around a berry-reminiscent yogurt-like filling, and eventually a completed beef-surrounded cornbread, but to start off, it's apparently not too appealing ^^' )

Due to this being lab-made, some preparations will end up incubating life, instead of properly boiling, resulting in a motion-curious thing without any natural braincells.

( I hope everyone is okay with this explanation, as I am not very good at typing words </3 )

IF ANYONE WAS CURIOUS. THIS IS THE BRICK. IT ISNT EVEN SOMETHING THAT CAN BE CLASSIFIED AS GIRL DINNER IT'S JUST DISGUSTING (featuring a picture of me & my son thingy/yogurt/glorp who is a single celled organism . i love him) . AND IT'S BOILED. oswald youve done it youve broken down prison food to it's BAREST essentials . "APPARENTLY NOT TOO APPEALING" NO FUCKING SHIT SHERLOCK IT'S NASTY!!!!! (pictured below: sunny's first encounter with The Brick on Day 1 of being in this wretched labyrinth)

(unseen after was sunny having 5 different sensory meltdowns after biting into it (and also zac eating more than 1 because he's a Freak))

#you've got mail 📬#pacman and the ghostly adventures tag ! 🟡🍒#pacman and the ghostly adventures #pmatga #pmatga au #the ghostly labyrinth #<- name Pending but i literally cant think of anything else #sunny pmatga #i love you thingy you are my favourite little scrimble #HATE the brick though #something about the fact that it's BOILED is so much worse though #like how in yhe fuck do you make a food that's ALREADY AWFUL #AND MAKE IT WORSE WIUTH THE SIMPLE CONCEPT OF THEM *BOILING IT*#THIS IS THE GUY I HAVE TO WORK WITH AND THEYRE OUT HERE MAKING HORRIFIC FUCKING MEALS FOR MY BLORBOS TO EAT #IN SPACE ALIEN JAIL. GIVE IT UP FOR OSWALD EVERYBODY 🔥🔥🔥🔥#i jest i jest i prommy ily /p i just . that thing makes me feel Malice

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floripire · 2 months ago

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❛ you are the best and the brightest of us all. ❜

midnight sun, ch 1-7 / @baby-royalty

sometimes floribeth thinks about her parents, thinks about their reactions to the enigma that is lizzy. sometimes floribeth thinks about her parents, thinks about their reactions to her reaction to the enigma that is lizzy.

because it's not fair, is it? lizzy never asked to be conceived, to be born, to be thrust into a world filled to the brim with monsters and magic, blood and bone.

so why hold all of that against her? it's not lizzy's fault that she doesn't make sense. it's not lizzy's fault that she looks older than she really is but acts younger than she truly appears.

(logically, lizzy shouldn't exist. but if one follows that train of thought, then neither should floribeth and neither should everyone else.)

because it's basically vampire 101 that vampires cannot conceive. depending on the strain, venom either triggers the transformation and freezes you at the age you're turned or you die with vampire blood in your system and that turns you into a magically reanimated corpse.

and magically reanimated corpses shouldn't be able to conceive much of anything, much less a kid.

(flori herself cannot conceive, either, which is all well and good, because she can't see herself becoming anyone's mother anytime soon, if ever, but that's neither here nor there.)

even so, stranger things have happened in mystic falls and beyond.

hope mikaelson's birth was, technically, a magically induced loophole; josie and lizzie saltzman's births were technically magically induced loopholes too, so was lizzy's birth a technical magically induced loophole as well? did a lost bennett witch do a fertility spell so katherine could give birth? was bonnie roped into it?! oh, gods, she hoped not!

it makes no sense. that's the long and short of it. that's the crux of it. it makes no sense, and it shouldn't be possible. it makes no sense, and floribeth hates it when logic doesn't apply and things don't make sense. she hates it when she can't strip away layers at her own convenience; she hates it when she can't boil something down to it's barest essentials and build it back up again.

(that, and it's not lizzy's fault that floribeth hates her father; she's not supposed to know what happened to caroline. but everybody knows what happened to caroline. everyone knows what damon did. it's unfair then, is it not? she gets the trauma, he gets the kid.

and certainly, sins of the parents shouldn't be placed upon the shoulders of their children, but klaus wanted a hybrid army, and it's not like floribeth doesn't get the need to belong, everyone has that, but klaus' need to belong turned the tennessee wolf pack extant and turned derek machado into something he never wanted to be.

it's unfair then, is it not? derek loses his family, and has to bury the love of his life, while klaus gets to parent this rambunctious bundle of joy.

actions have consequences. the bill always comes due but it never seems to for these white people. they hurt others and get rewarded for it! floribeth hates that, too, because it's not a problem she can solve; it's just something she's going to have to learn to live with if she is to share mother earth with them for all eternity.)

lizzy's compliment brings her back down to earth, though, and with it comes the realization that she's supposed to make her move, instead of staring at lizzy like she's a code to be cracked or a puzzle to be solved, so she does.

"thank you for the compliment, it's sweet, and likewise. but i'm afraid that's not going to win you anything other than this---" she moves her chess piece, captures lizzy's king. "---checkmate, liz. thanks for playing."

#babyroyalty #floribeth dalisay / answered.#floribeth dalisay / main verse.#//i think it's so funny that flori was like nope i'm not gonna spend energy and time to figure out lizzy #//and then smashcut to flori doing that anyway #queue.

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coockie8 · 7 months ago

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tf is an epharym?

I expected this one lol I think I've explained this before, but I'll explain it again.

An Epharym is just the child of a Voidling (Eldritch Being or Cosmic Entity) that was born within a reality. This can occur asexually by the Voidling essentially "impregnating" itself, or by having sex with either another Voidling or any other living being.

When Voidlings "breed" in the Void, they just create more Voidlings, because they have to breed asexually by basically just splitting themselves in half, like an cell. Because, boiled down to it's barest bones, that's basically what a Voidling is; a very big, powerful cell with the ability to either create a reality from nothing (Cosmic Entity) or mould reality to their will (Eldritch Being) lol

#Cosmic Legends #original lore

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gerardpilled · 2 years ago

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yo what’s the deal with mcrtwt? i don’t go there so idk what they get up to lol

Basically, I think the main issue is that no 'fandom' is destined for greatness when it is primarily held on a short-form based social media platform. You simply can't engage with anything meaningfully or with any sort of nuance. This is probably fine if you're just posting pics (like 'Hourly x" accounts) but once you introduce any sort of opinion or display bias it becomes hellish. No one learns anything from each other and the people the accounts are based around are boiled down to their barest essentials for the sake of briefness. For instance, if you were to ask this in a reply on twitter instead of saying all this someone might have just said "well because everyone is toxic and problematic" and you would need to take it at face value.

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coreytasticc · 3 years ago

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Currently on an exploration of the shit mobile games that are advertised on mobile tunglr

I should've screencapped the ads and compared them to the game but the main thing I'm looking for is whether they actually play like the ads show and if they don't they immediately get deleted.

the summoner thing is a veeeeeerry basic tower defence, mild microtransactions, not pushed at all. Can watch ads for extra currencies, but all optional, hypothetically u could play the whole game without watching a single ad or paying anything. I downloaded this one before I was looking for how similar ads are to the end game.

Water sort is exactly what it says on the tin. u have waters of various colours, u sort them, u get 5 free undo moves bada bing bada boom. It'll ask you every now n then for £2.99 for an ad-free version, otherwise completely covered in ads. Finish game, watch an ad. Use ur 5 move undo's, watch an ad. Want an extra vial, watch an ad. Ads ads ads. But it's very satisfying to sort water. Advertised as sorting water in all kinds of beakers, bottles, and other stuff, but it's just little vials. But that doesn't matter.

This is a weird one and I don't think it's gonna last very long. Drag finger across screen and collect people, avoid traps, and kill things, end of a level the more people u have the bigger bonus u get. Absolutely covered in ads; want the bonus u earned, watch an ad. Want an upgrade, watch an ad. Constant ad at the bottom of the screen. Game is exactly as advertised and honestly has more stuff in it then shows up in most ads.

This is the best one. Purely because it allows you to live out your fantasies of invading the world. A very basic strategy game boiled down to it's barest essentials, muster forces, invade place to get more forces to invade more places so on and so forth until you win. It's got a lot of ads but most of them are optional; an ad to get an upgrade or get an extra bonus when you first open the game. Unfortunately also a permanent ad at the bottom of the screen while you play. But I cannot stress how fun it is to have a thousand men represent as little heart go to crush all resistance left in Washington or Texas or Spain. Also game is exactly as advertised, nothing more, nothing less.

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boasamishipper · 4 years ago

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How do you exist/thrive in ATLA/LOK shipping a rare pair? Tips? Every time I go into the tags for my preferred ship is bullshit about who one person should have ended up with and how horrible the other person is as a person (spoiler: they aren’t horrible at all). Or is this just fandom now?

i joined the lok fandom when i was 12, shipping (as my username indicates) bolin and asami. i won’t lie, when s3 premiered and it became evident that asami and bolin were not going to end up together (based on the threads of korrasami being woven and opal being introduced as bolin’s love interest), i was really upset. i’d had a lot of fun writing bolin/asami and reading others’ bolin/asami fics / looking at bolin/asami fanart / etc, and by the time the show ended, i was basically the only one left shipping boasami. (i joke often about how the bolin/asami fandom basically consists of just me and a used kleenex.) i was feeling alone, and didn’t like that some shippers were willing to tear down anything that wasn’t related to their ships. (there are always assholes in every fandom, but that is by no means how all fandoms are now.)

but i still liked lok as a show, and bolin and asami as characters, and even though i was pretty much the only generator of boasami content left on ffn, i was still having a good time in fandom, so i stayed. i kept writing them in fics, romantic and platonic, and i made friends who i could talk about boasami with, even if they didn’t necessarily ship them too. i joined tumblr and stayed away from posts tearing down my ship and filled my blog with the boasami content i wanted to see. i curated my own fandom experience, and as a result, participating in that fandom was still fun for me. the second i was no longer enjoying myself (once i finished my kainora fic Sometimes You Hear The Bullet and got really into Star Wars), i left.

shipping rare pairs in a large fandom isn’t always fun, and can be lonely; almost all of my ships are rare pairs with very little content - trust me, i feel your pain. i’m sorry your experience with the atla/lok fandom hasn’t been so great. fandoms have gotten a lot more vitriolic since i first got into them, but i promise they still have the capacity to be fun, even if the content you’re looking for is few and far in between. so my one tip for you is this, anon: if you enjoy being in the atla/lok fandom, keep participating in any way you want to. make fanart. write fic. write meta. make edits. make endless posts where you ramble about your faves and fill the ship tag with positivity. reblog content and try and find friends with similar interests as you. (you never know: by making the content you want to see, other, quieter fans of your preferred ship who were too nervous to post anything might start posting things too, and you can make friends that way.) and if none of the above brings you joy - because fandom is, boiled down to its barest essentials, all about having fun - then don’t participate in the atla/lok fandom anymore. find other books/movies/tv shows with similar themes that you can get into (i highly recommend The Dragon Prince) and friendlier, more welcoming fandoms. do whatever you need to do to have a good time.

#thanks for asking!#my stuff

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thegeminisage · 5 years ago

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what do you do when you need to figure out a bit of your story but nothing makes sense no matter how much you turn it around? i've tried walking away from it, pitching ideas to other people to sound it out and writing around it, but it's a p big part in this fic and i can't move on without it.

ANON UR BACK :D i hope that’s you at least, sorry if this is a totally new anon. ok anyway

if this is a logistics issue (and they usually are) the thing i do ultimately is be like matt damon from the mars movie and work👏 the👏 problem👏, by which i mean boil my big complicated mess down to the barest possible essentials, so i can see it clearly (this is why i am so fond of outlining, it a nice way to zoom out and see the forest instead of the trees), and solve one issue at a time. the very big important question is what do i NEED this scene/plot device to do? why can’t it do that? “because of x thing or fact” - well fortunately, i’m the writer, so i can wiggle around the universe and characters to suit my needs rather than forcing my plots to suit the universe (yes even in fanfic)

that does not make a whole ton of sense so i’m gonna use an example (my own fic again, sorry)

ok, so in the thing i’m currently working on (for merlin), magic is reviled and outlawed but EVERYBODY IN CAMELOT has suddenly been cursed to have it. the whole point of the fic is for everyone to spend time living with magic, but practically speaking, merlin would be extremely motivated to reverse this curse and once he figured out what to do he’d go about seeing it done at once

the big problem with this was: originally, all merlin has to do to figure out the spell/how to counter it is 1. speak to a dragon 2. dragon tells him what the spell is because that’s what the dragon does in canon 3. merlin goes to some janked up island in the boonies and destroys a cursed knife to break it.

that does NOT take long, and there’s no good reason that once he’s done one of these things he cannot immediately move on to the rest (and it would be out of character for him to idle in this task when there was definable action he could take, and push the suspension of disbelief). that’s REAL BAD for me because that leaves me NO time for all the hijinks and navel gazing i wanted to write about, which was the whole purpose of this fic anyway

so the basic thing i NEEDED, if i could only boil it down to ONE thing, was: i need this task to take more time.

there are a few ways i came at it:

make the task more difficult - instead of the dragon knowing EXACTLY what the spell was and how to break it, i decided to have him give merlin less information. i could have had him do this out of spite (the two of them aren’t on the best terms) but it was also perfectly within the realm of believably that being chained up in an underground cave he just didn’t actually know what happened. i had him give merlin an educated guess about WHERE the spell was cast, and left the rest of up to merlin to figure out. in order to check out the spell’s location, the island, merlin needs to physically go there. so i made it winter, and made the mountain pass unpassable. now he has to use a scrying spell to check it out from a distance unless he wants a two-week round trip in the snow. that’s no problem, he’s an accomplished magician! but he’s also very clumsy, so i had him knock over a cabinet full of vital ingredients needed for a scrying spell - ingredients that are very difficult to replace during the winter. now i can have him be replacing the stuff in the background while i’m writing my hijinks and navel gazing. and once he DOES do the scrying spell, he’s going to have to go BACK to the dragon to tell him what he saw and ask how to reverse the curse. turns out you have to destroy a cursed knife, but oops! the knife is indestructible…

make merlin less capable of doing the task - …without arthur’s help specifically, so now merlin has to involve arthur (someone very important to him, and also someone who upholds the law) in this whole curse-breaking business without revealing that he’s been breaking into the castle dungeons (illegal), that he’s buddies with the dragon they have trapped there (super illegal), or that he has magic (SO illegal it’s punishable by death). not only does all of this make things take longer, it also gives us the sense that the protags actually ARE trying to solve their own problems instead of just lazing around for no reason other than “the author wanted them to” while camelot falls to pieces around them

place restrictions on when the curse can be broken - this one is a little more specific, but maybe worth a mention…originally i had the idea that since the spell was cast on the solstice, it could only be broken on the solstice, but 6 months was longer than i wanted to deal with. i did like you and pitched it to a friend and she came up with the idea of using the moon, so now my spell is from one new moon to the next (thanks cathy!). your specific situation will also have its own little ins and outs, so if you can use one of those to ur advantage, all the better

make merlin less motivated to do the task - maybe he likes everyone having magic? maybe he was lonely and finally feels understood? i ultimately ditched this idea because i couldn’t really see him digging magic being FORCED on anyone; he has way more integrity than that. but that doesn’t mean you can’t tweak how characters would react if you can find a good reason. if i really wanted merlin to act in a way that i thought was against his nature, i would give him consequences for doing what he would normally do - if he breaks the curse someone will get hurt or die, if he breaks the curse someone will find out he has magic (which is punishable by death), if he breaks the curse his own magic will also be taken away (which would be devastating to him on a personal level and for his own life goals), stuff like that. if your problem is “but that character would NEVER do this thing,” then come at it from the angle of “WHAT WOULD MAKE that character do this thing and still be believable?” this has the added bonus of creating CONFLICT which adds SUSPENSE to ur story

this isn’t the best example because my problem ultimately had a pretty easy solution (even if it didn’t feel like it at the time) but i hope it sort of makes what i was talking about understandable - if the problem is merlin would solve things too quickly, merlin isn’t this rigid immovable plot problem to write around, he can be tweaked and manipulated - he can be slower because he wants to be, or because things are getting in his way, etc.

it works the same in a lot of situations - if you need a character to leave on a monday and arrive on a wednesday when travel time is only 1 day, then have them forget their keys, have them forget something and double back - if that character isn’t forgetful have their car break down, fuck with the weather, give them a family emergency, etc. if you need a character to NOT immediately call 911 when they realize there’s a killer clown in the house, have them mention earlier in the story that their phone is always on the fritz, break the phone, have them forget the phone, etc. if you need a character to want something they wouldn’t normally want or do something they wouldn’t normally do, come up with a good reason for them to act out of character. if you need a character to be missing from a scene find a reason to waylay them; if you need them be present where they wouldn’t normally then come up with a coincidence to bring them along…you get the idea

the point is there is no element in any story that is so immutable it can’t be played with, even if it seems that way. it’s about bending the universe and characters to suit your purposes, and if in accomplishing that you create more problems (plot holes, people being ooc, etc), then you just tweak more stuff to solve THOSE problems, and so on and so on until you have ironed out your mess!

lol easier said than done, i know - but once you get used to thinking of all the pieces of your story as moving parts (instead of immovable obstacles you have to write around), it becomes a lot easier to attack plot problems from a lot of different angles and turn them into DUST which is what i really hope you wind up doing with ur WIP someday!! (pls feel free to keep me updated, i’d love to know how it goes!)

[fic advice masterpost]

#personal #liz answers asks #anonymous #liz loves writing #writing #IM SORRY FOR PUBLISHING THIS AT MIDNIGHT AGAIN #i'll schedule it to reblog itself tomorrow #brit marling anon

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theonlywayoutisforward · 7 years ago

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I haven’t finished Yu Yu Hakusho yet, but I did just finish the Sensui(?) Arc, so enjoy these thoughts on how that went.

Let me start with a simple statement: Sensui is the living embodiment of bullshit. Spoilers through roughly the end of YYH.

The fight with Sensui took a long ass time. Like I swear we spent less time consecutive time with Goku fighting Frieza than we did in the actual fight with Sensui (This is likely not true, Frieza took a VERY long time, but Sensui felt like a long time and that’s just as bad.) We spent as much time actually fighting Sensui, as we had time between finding out Sensui exists and getting into the cave to have the Final Showdown(TM).

Long fights aren’t necessarily bad, for example parts of this fight had the best actual kung fu I’ve seen out of the series, out of any series of the era for that matter. There were also many examples of the characters learning to fight smarter and not harder, which I really like to see in Anime fights, especially late-series fights.

but let me explain to you why this is not a fight I enjoyed, in bullet points.

Sensui as a Character- Sensui is a good ass premise. Like, I would gladly watch an OVA or miniseries about Sensui as a Spirit Detective and “Pre-fall”. The so-called “Psychic Arc” had a great deal of a running theme about the darkness of humanity and good vs. evil, and a lot of really GOOD PHILOSOPHICAL SHIT that I love. Sensui as an absolute utilitarian archetype is something that I liked and understood from a character perspective, and how he showed his true colors throughout the arc, through his treatment of his allies especially, was good stuff.

However, the embodiment of this ideology and Sensui’s evil is ultimately very straightforward. “Humanity is bad, it must be destroyed, here have some demons.” And yet, once our Spirit Detectives come to blows, this ideology isn’t advanced at all. We get basically a rehash of the simple premise of “I am stronger than you, I am right, I will destroy humanity.” repeatedly for what I’ve already stressed is a very long fight. Maybe this came out better in serialization, but for a marathon it got old pretty quick. Sensui’s Ideology, while complex, was boiled down to its barest bones and repeatedly fed to the audience without advancing character or plot.

Sensui as a Powerhouse- This may be the most egregious use of what a friend of mine has called “Anime Bullshit” I have seen in some time. I loosely interpret this phrase “Anime Bullshit” as those times that new powers come to light, that essentially just exist to make the Big Bad that much more untouchable. This is the most evident in Sensui’s absolutely spontaneous creation of “Sacred Energy”. The show had barely touched on the various Brands of energy, for lack of a better word, though precedent was definitely set. (See Toguro’s quote about Demon energy being “Weaker than Spirit Energy but far more pleasurable to use.” From that time he killed Genkai). That being said, when Sensui starts his one man laser light show and Koenma starts screaming how Sacred Energy is this New and Better Thing that No One Can Do, I really have to call it what it is.

Sensui did not earn this power. Nothing we’re shown before this point even hints that Sacred Energy is a thing, that Sensui- God just no, Sensui should not be having this power. Sensui continues powering up over the course of the fight, from Sacred, to Sacred armour, to whatever the fuck blue armor was, seemingly without limitation or cause. He just kinda decided to power up so he did.

Let me emphasize, Yusuke was going toe to toe with (admittedly “weaker” Kamiya) Sensui at the beginning of the fight. Both get beat up, both repeatedly regenerate, Now-God-Tier Hiei, Kurama, and Kuabara take him on simultaneously, YUSUKE EVOLVES INTO A DAMN DEMON GOD, all before Yusuke finally gets into a position where he can STILL BE GOING TOE TO TOE WITH SENSUI.

I will willingly forgive Yusuke’s “anime bullshit” transformation for now because we still have 3/4th of a season to talk about what that is and what it means. Just put that on the back burner and let it simmer.

Also rolled into the “Anime Bullshit” trope is Koenma’s Mahuken(?) Pacifier. I will accept everything about that Pacifier, and I mean literally all of it, up until it is used and promptly annihilated by Sacred Energy Sensui. It was a funny joke for a while, and also a really serious WTF moment when you think “Aw, man, that thing is actually a THING.” But the moment it ended up being absolutely useless is the moment that I lost interest. It was ultimately just a thing to show how bad ass Sensui is.

And I apologize for this but we’re also going to do my old spiel on Character Death here. WHEN A CHARACTER DIES, IT BETTER BE TREATED AS GOD DAMN IMPORTANT. One of my favorite moments in this whole Psychics arc was when Gamemaster died. Realizing that he WASN’T immortal, that his life was VERY MUCH going to end, and that he was FUCKING TERRIFIED. THAT WAS SOME GOOD SHIT! Not because he died, but for what it meant for Kurama that he had to do it. The kid pleads for his life, in a super sincere and heartbreaking way, but to save the world old softy Kurama has to make the decision to pull his plug. It’s like that Scene in new ATK where that one girl was eaten by the titans and her last, manic words are “No daddy, please I’ll promise I’ll be better.” That one line gave me the deepest chills over a character I previously gave few shits for.

BUT the fact that Koenma ultimately brings him back using the Pacifier magic TAKES ALL OF THAT AND THROWS IT OUT THE GOD DAMN WINDOW. Not least of my questions is why the Kakai barrier making, Deus Ex Pacifier is now Koenma’s only way of bringing people back to life when he brought Genkai back to life last season? What? But no back to character death. Kurama’s choice doesn’t mean shit. His rage and frustration that we see in the Gourmet fight doesn’t mean shit. The Resurrection of Gamemaster is a terrible thing for character development.

AND FUCKING THEN! (HOW DO I EMPHASIZE THIS MORE?) SENSUI CLAIMS IT WAS ALL PART OF HIS GLORIOUS KIKAKU!* (*Kikaku means plan.) No it wasn’t you piece of trash. There’s no way you could possibly have known that any of this was going to happen. There are too many wheels you couldn’t feasibly have been aware of to make sure that decision would be made in time to save you from being Kekai shielded. Sit back down you lunatic. You’re still not the good guy and I hate you.

Sensui’s Multiple Personalities- I don’t know if I should even talk about this. But I will. On some level, the fracturing subconscious story is something I can get behind. He did it to protect his precious sense of justice. But there is just SO MUCH that is off about this little detail that I don’t like. Why seven if we only ever see three(?)? Why does only Shinobu have access to Sacred power if he’s still a steaming mess. How does it fit into protecting his innocent Psyche if ALL SEVEN OF HIS PERSONALITIES WERE IN AGREEMENT ABOUT THE DEMON INVASION PLAN? The only reason one of his splintered personalities is “a girl” is not out of any legitimate transgender statements but so that personality “Can just feel so awful and tearfully confess the sins of the boys.” and “Be in love with Hitsuki (From Hitsuki’s viewpoint.)” TLDR None of that is really a thing that needed to happen for me to feel better or worse for/about/because of Sensui.

Elder Toguro Gets to Talk More!?- So I’m straying from the topic of Sensui to talk about another piece of shit- nay a shitlord in the truest sense of the word, Elder Toguro. So unimportant the bastard never gets a name. So much bullshit that they had to ROB US OF HIS DEATH SCENE TWICE in the Dark Tournament arc, Robbing Kuabara of the privilege of winning and showing him what a piece of shit he is, and robbing Toguro of the additional badass points for beating his infinitely regenerating brother in one punch, all to do...what? Elder Toguro is rescued by Sensui at the end of Dark Tournament arc as a bit of foreshadowing I guess? Goes on to do literally diddly squat as a talking head, until he’s eaten, only to once again retroactively show how bullshit he is and become a head on a head with the power to eat people and gain their powers. THE ONLY SOLACE WE HAVE IS THAT HIS ARC FINALLY ENDS WITH HIM IN THE CLOSEST THING TO HELL AN INFINITELY LIVING THING CAN EXPERIENCE AT THE HANDS OF A REALLY ANGRY KURAMA. Arguably worse than real Toguro’s self-imposed 10,000 years in Limbo.

(Serious side note: What is Elder Toguro’s role in the story period? Young Toguro and Genkai have this whole thing, and Young Toguro has this whole backstory about why he became a demon, and Elder just...is a demon because he was there? I don’t fuckin’ know.)

And Finally? Why are you So Sad Sensui’s Dead?- It’s the end of the fight, EVERYONE has spent the last three episodes trying to kill this guy for vengeance. Yusuke dies at his hand and comes back to fight him FOR VENGEANCE. And at the end of the fight we get, “Oh shit, Kurama, you gotta heal him, I didn’t mean to hit him quite that hard.” Nothing says it better than Kurama saying “I can’t heal him, I used all of my energy kicking his ass.” and Koenma saying “Oh wait, I can’t resurrect him because he killed my Resurrecting Pacifier when I used it to prevent him from destroying the world.”

In All seriousness, there is a thing in fiction in general that really gets on my nerves about killing the bad guy. The good guy never gets the chance to kill the bad guy because it makes them “the same”. We see this in Lord of the Rings when Gollum launches himself into the fire and Saruman jumps off his Tower. We see this in FullMetal Alchemist when Roy isn’t allowed to kill Envy. We see this theme in so many things, and sometimes I just can’t justify it. Especially here in Yu Yu Hakusho.

Sensui and his band of (mostly) serial killers are ready to kill anyone and destroy the entire world because they’re evil and humanity is evil. They demonstrate this AT LENGTH. Yet when Yusuke is confronted by the Doctor early in the arc, the plot makes him hesitate to use his full power because MORALS. There are hundreds of lives on the line, several of them absolutely precious to Yusuke, but he’s not allowed to cross that final line on one of the most low-down villains he’d crossed to date. There are times to play the morality card. That isn’t one of them.

Yusuke is a character I love, partially because of his ability to quip at ANY TIME, but also because he can seriously say. “For everyone of my friends you hurt, I’m taking a limb,” And you know that he’s not just talking. He’s serious. He would ACTUALLY CUT A MAN’S LIMBS OFF FOR HIS FRIENDS. Yet when it comes down to that final moment, he has to beg to have his enemy healed so he looks like he’s still moral and good.

Kuabara’s Power-up- Kuabara’s power-up in this arc was just kinda...useless? “My new sword can cut through dimensions Urameshi. Hah Hah.” Almost like it was created solely for this arc, solely for the bad guys to need it to cut the multi-dimensional Kekai strings. (Which Kuabara does. Ultimately, for no extraordinarily good reason. But I won’t pick on that too much.) Kuabara could have been a much more useful character, seen at least his usual level of treatment, if he’d been allowed to show even a little Spiritual improvement because of the Dark Tournament like everyone else. Hiei ate a god damn dragon, Kurama learned how to fox out, and Kuabara got a neat new sword. And yet they still took away Kuabara’s modest power up in the tournament for...plot?...reasons? I don’t know. I like Kuabara, he’s always going to be fourth banana behind MC Yusuke and Actual Gods Kurama and Hiei, but his mistreatment still upsets me.

Also, the normal anime problem of strong characters standing around not doing much. I’m looking at you Genkai. You could’ve at least punched some bugs or something I don’t know.

End Criticisms.

Please don’t take this to mean that I don’t like YYH or even that I didn’t like this arc as a whole. I do so far and I did. However, it’s because I like it that the things I’ve listed irked me so much I felt like I had to talk about it. Expect a full review after I finish the series that will probably be much better toned, but I’m all out of things to say for now. It’s 4 a.m.

#YYH #Yu Yu Hakusho #Spoilers #Sensui #Shinobu Sensui #Rage #Andy Reviews Anime #Anime

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marilynreinhold21 · 5 years ago

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Goodbye, Generic SEO Audit – Say Hello to Customization & Prioritization - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

It's too easy to fall into a rut with your SEO audits. If it doesn't meet best practices it ought to be fixed, right? Not always. Though an SEO audit is essentially a checklist, it's important to both customize your approach and prioritize your fixes to be efficient and effective with your time and effort. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins teaches us her methods for saying adios to generic, less effective SEO audits and howdy to a better way of improving your site.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and today we're going to be talking about the SEO audit. We're going to be talking about how to take it from its kind of current generic state to something that's a little bit more customized and it has prioritization baked in so hopefully we're going to be doing these SEO audits for higher impact than we're currently doing them.

What is an SEO audit?

So I think it's safe to start with a definition of what an SEO audit is. Now, depending on who you ask, an SEO audit can mean a lot of different things. So if you were to boil it down to its just barest of bones, here's what I would say an SEO audit usually is. This is what someone means when they say SEO audit.

An SEO audit is a checklist to see if your site is compliant

So it's a list of checks basically. You have all of these things that are SEO best practices, and you run your site through this sieve and you try to see is my site compliant or not compliant essentially.

So you have things like: Missing H1s, yes or no? Broken links, yes or no? Duplicate title tags, yes or no? So you end up with this whole big, long list of things that are wrong and not according to SEO best practices on your site.

Purpose = improving SEO metrics

The whole purpose of this is usually to improve some kind of SEO metrics.

Maybe you're trying to correct a traffic drop or something like that. So you have this whole laundry list of things now that you need to fix as a result of this SEO audit. So usually what you end up saying is, hey, dev team or client or whoever you're giving this to, "You need to fix these things because they're SEO best practice." What's wrong with this though?

"Fix it because it's SEO best practice." What's wrong with this picture?

I think there are a couple things wrong with this.

1. May or may not be hurting you

Number one, it means that we're addressing things that may or may not actually be the culprit of whatever issue we're facing. It's just a list of things that didn't meet a best practices list, but we don't really know and we're not really sure if these things are actually causing the issues that we're seeing on our site.

2. May or may not have an impact

So because we don't know if these are the culprit and the things that are hurting us, they may or may not have an impact when we actually spend our time on them.

3. May be wasting time

Number three, that leads to a lot of potential wasted time. This is especially true, well, for everyone. Everyone is very busy. But this is especially true for people who work at enterprises and they have a very large website, maybe a really strapped for time and resources development team. If you give them a list of fixes and you say, "Hey, fix these things because it's SEO best practices,"they are just going to say, "Yeah, sorry, no.I don't have time for that, and I don't see the value in it.I don't really know why I'm doing this."

So I think there's a better way. Move over to this side.

How to customize

Customization and prioritization I think are a lot better alternatives to doing our SEO audits. So there are three kind of main ways that I like to customize my SEO audits.

1. Don't look at everything

Number one, it may sound a little bit counterintuitive, but don't look at everything. There are plenty of times when you do an SEO audit and it makes sense to do a kind of comprehensive audit, look through all kinds of things.

You're doing links. You're doing content. You're doing the site architecture. You're doing all kinds of things. Usually I do this when I'm taking over a new client and I want to get to know it and I want to get to know the website and its issues a little bit better. I think that's a totally valid time to do that. But a lot of times we're doing more work than we actually have to be doing when we look at the entire website and every single scenario on the website.

So maybe don't look at everything.

2. Start with a problem statement

Instead I think it could be a good idea to start with a goal or a problem statement. So a lot of times SEO audits kind of come in response to something. Maybe your client is saying, "Hey, our competitor keeps beating us for this. Why are they beating us?" Or, "Hey, we've had year-over-year decline in traffic.What's going on? Can you do an SEO audit?"

So I think it's a good idea to start with that as kind of a goal or a problem statement so that you can narrow and target your SEO audit to focus on the things that are actually the issue and why you're performing the audit.

3. Segment to isolate

Number three, I think it's a really good idea to segment your site in order to isolate the actual source of the problem. So by segment, I mean dividing your site into logical chunks based on their different purposes.

So, for example, maybe you have product pages. Maybe you have category pages. You have a blog section and user-generated content. There are all these different sections of your website. Segment those, isolate them, and look at them in isolation to see if maybe one of the sections is the culprit and actually experiencing issues, because a lot of times you find that, oh, maybe it's the product pages that are actually causing my issues and it's not the blog posts or anything else at all.

So that way you're able to really waste less time and focus, take a more targeted, focused look at what's actually going on with your website. So once you've kind of audited your site through that lens, through a more customized lens, it's time to prioritize, because you still have a list of things that you need to fix. You can't just heap them all onto whatever team you're passing this on to and say," Here, fix these all."

How to prioritize

It's a lot better to prioritize and tell them what's more important and why. So here's how I like to do that. I would plot this out on a matrix. So a pretty simple matrix. At the top, your goal goes there. It keeps you really focused. All of these little things, say pretend these are just the findings from our SEO audit.

On the y-axis, we have impact. On the x-axis, we have time. So essentially we're ordering every single finding by what kind of impact it's going to have and how much time it's going to take to complete. So you're going to end up with these four quadrants of tasks.

Quick wins

So in this green quadrant here, you have your quick wins.

These are the things that you should do right now, because they're going to have a really high impact and they're not going to take a lot of time to do. So definitely prioritize those things.

Schedule & tackle in sprints

In this blue quadrant here, you have things that are going to make a really high impact, but they also take a lot of time. So schedule those after the green quadrant if you can. I would also suggest breaking those larger, time-intensive tasks into smaller, bite-sized chunks.

This is a good idea no matter what you're doing, but this is especially helpful if you're working with a development team who probably runs in two-week sprints anyway. It's a really good idea to segment and tackle those little bits at a time. Just get it on the schedule.

Deprioritize

In this orange down here, we have things to maybe deprioritize. Still put them on the schedule, but they're not as important as the rest of the tasks.

So these are things that aren't going to make that high of an impact, some impact, but not that high, and they're not going to take that much time to do. Put them on the schedule, but they're not as important.

Just don't do it

Then in this last quadrant here, we have the just don't do it quadrant. Hopefully, if you're taking this really nice targeted look at your site and your audit through this lens, you won't have too many of these, if any.

But if something is going to take you a lot of time and it's not going to make that big of an impact, no one really has time for that. We want to try to avoid those types of tasks if at all possible. Now I will say there's a caveat here for urgency. Sometimes we have to work on things regardless of what kind of impact they're going to make on our site.

Maybe it's because a client has a deadline, or it's something in their contract and we just have to get something done because it's a fire. We all have love/hate relationships with those fires. We don't want to be handling them all of the time. If at all possible, let's make sure to make those the exception and not the rule so that we actually get these priority tasks, these important things that are going to move the needle done and we're not constantly pushing those down for fires.

One last thing, I will say impact is something that trips up a lot of people, myself included. How do you actually determine how much of an impact something is going to have before you do it? So that can be kind of tricky, and it's not an exact science. But there are two main ways that I kind of like to do that. Number one, look for correlations on your website.

So if you're looking at your website through the lens of these pages are performing really well, and they have these things true about them, and they're on your list of things to fix on these other pages, you can go into that with a certain degree of certainty, knowing that, hey, if it works for these pages, there is a chance that this will make a high impact on these other pages as well.

So look at the data on your own website and see what's already performing and what qualities are true about those pages. Number two, I would say one of the biggest things you can do is just to start small and test. Sometimes you really don't know what kind of an impact something is going to make until you test on a small section. Then if it does have a high impact, great. Put it here and then roll it out to the rest of your site.

But if it doesn't have a good impact or it has minimal impact, you learn something from that. But at least now you know not to prioritize it, not to spend all of your time on it and roll it out to your entire website, because that could be potentially a waste of time. So that's how I prioritize and I customize my SEO audits. I think a lot of us struggle with: What even is an SEO audit?

How do I do it? Where do I even look? Is this even going to make a difference? So that's how I kind of try to make a higher impact with my SEO audits by taking a more targeted approach. If you have a way that you do SEO audits that you think is super helpful, pop it in the comments, share it with all of us. I think it's really good to share and get on the same page about the different ways we could perform SEO audits for higher impact.

So hopefully that was helpful for you. That's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday. Please come back again next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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seomiamiseo · 5 years ago

Text

Goodbye, Generic SEO Audit – Say Hello to Customization & Prioritization - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a checklist to see if your site is compliant

Purpose = improving SEO metrics

The whole purpose of this is usually to improve some kind of SEO metrics.

"Fix it because it's SEO best practice." What's wrong with this picture?

I think there are a couple things wrong with this.

1. May or may not be hurting you

2. May or may not have an impact

So because we don't know if these are the culprit and the things that are hurting us, they may or may not have an impact when we actually spend our time on them.

3. May be wasting time

So I think there's a better way. Move over to this side.

How to customize

Customization and prioritization I think are a lot better alternatives to doing our SEO audits. So there are three kind of main ways that I like to customize my SEO audits.

1. Don't look at everything

So maybe don't look at everything.

2. Start with a problem statement

3. Segment to isolate

How to prioritize

Quick wins

So in this green quadrant here, you have your quick wins.

These are the things that you should do right now, because they're going to have a really high impact and they're not going to take a lot of time to do. So definitely prioritize those things.

Schedule & tackle in sprints

Deprioritize

In this orange down here, we have things to maybe deprioritize. Still put them on the schedule, but they're not as important as the rest of the tasks.

Just don't do it

So hopefully that was helpful for you. That's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday. Please come back again next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

humbertovsheffield · 5 years ago

Text

Goodbye, Generic SEO Audit – Say Hello to Customization & Prioritization - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a checklist to see if your site is compliant

Purpose = improving SEO metrics

The whole purpose of this is usually to improve some kind of SEO metrics.

"Fix it because it's SEO best practice." What's wrong with this picture?

I think there are a couple things wrong with this.

1. May or may not be hurting you

2. May or may not have an impact

So because we don't know if these are the culprit and the things that are hurting us, they may or may not have an impact when we actually spend our time on them.

3. May be wasting time

So I think there's a better way. Move over to this side.

How to customize

Customization and prioritization I think are a lot better alternatives to doing our SEO audits. So there are three kind of main ways that I like to customize my SEO audits.

1. Don't look at everything

So maybe don't look at everything.

2. Start with a problem statement

3. Segment to isolate

How to prioritize

Quick wins

So in this green quadrant here, you have your quick wins.

These are the things that you should do right now, because they're going to have a really high impact and they're not going to take a lot of time to do. So definitely prioritize those things.

Schedule & tackle in sprints

Deprioritize

In this orange down here, we have things to maybe deprioritize. Still put them on the schedule, but they're not as important as the rest of the tasks.

Just don't do it

So hopefully that was helpful for you. That's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday. Please come back again next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

theh0ustonplacestobe · 5 years ago

Text

Goodbye, Generic SEO Audit – Say Hello to Customization & Prioritization – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

It’s too easy to fall into a rut with your SEO audits. If it doesn’t meet best practices it ought to be fixed, right? Not always. Though an SEO audit is essentially a checklist, it’s important to both customize your approach and prioritize your fixes to be efficient and effective with your time and effort. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins teaches us her methods for saying adios to generic, less effective SEO audits and howdy to a better way of improving your site.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and today we’re going to be talking about the SEO audit. We’re going to be talking about how to take it from its kind of current generic state to something that’s a little bit more customized and it has prioritization baked in so hopefully we’re going to be doing these SEO audits for higher impact than we’re currently doing them.

What is an SEO audit?

So I think it’s safe to start with a definition of what an SEO audit is. Now, depending on who you ask, an SEO audit can mean a lot of different things. So if you were to boil it down to its just barest of bones, here’s what I would say an SEO audit usually is. This is what someone means when they say SEO audit.

An SEO audit is a checklist to see if your site is compliant

So it’s a list of checks basically. You have all of these things that are SEO best practices, and you run your site through this sieve and you try to see is my site compliant or not compliant essentially.

Purpose = improving SEO metrics

The whole purpose of this is usually to improve some kind of SEO metrics.

Maybe you’re trying to correct a traffic drop or something like that. So you have this whole laundry list of things now that you need to fix as a result of this SEO audit. So usually what you end up saying is, hey, dev team or client or whoever you’re giving this to, “You need to fix these things because they’re SEO best practice.” What’s wrong with this though?

“Fix it because it’s SEO best practice.” What’s wrong with this picture?

I think there are a couple things wrong with this.

1. May or may not be hurting you

Number one, it means that we’re addressing things that may or may not actually be the culprit of whatever issue we’re facing. It’s just a list of things that didn’t meet a best practices list, but we don’t really know and we’re not really sure if these things are actually causing the issues that we’re seeing on our site.

2. May or may not have an impact

So because we don’t know if these are the culprit and the things that are hurting us, they may or may not have an impact when we actually spend our time on them.

3. May be wasting time

Number three, that leads to a lot of potential wasted time. This is especially true, well, for everyone. Everyone is very busy. But this is especially true for people who work at enterprises and they have a very large website, maybe a really strapped for time and resources development team. If you give them a list of fixes and you say, “Hey, fix these things because it’s SEO best practices,”they are just going to say, “Yeah, sorry, no.I don’t have time for that, and I don’t see the value in it.I don’t really know why I’m doing this.”

So I think there’s a better way. Move over to this side.

How to customize

Customization and prioritization I think are a lot better alternatives to doing our SEO audits. So there are three kind of main ways that I like to customize my SEO audits.

1. Don’t look at everything

Number one, it may sound a little bit counterintuitive, but don’t look at everything. There are plenty of times when you do an SEO audit and it makes sense to do a kind of comprehensive audit, look through all kinds of things.

You’re doing links. You’re doing content. You’re doing the site architecture. You’re doing all kinds of things. Usually I do this when I’m taking over a new client and I want to get to know it and I want to get to know the website and its issues a little bit better. I think that’s a totally valid time to do that. But a lot of times we’re doing more work than we actually have to be doing when we look at the entire website and every single scenario on the website.

So maybe don’t look at everything.

2. Start with a problem statement

Instead I think it could be a good idea to start with a goal or a problem statement. So a lot of times SEO audits kind of come in response to something. Maybe your client is saying, “Hey, our competitor keeps beating us for this. Why are they beating us?” Or, “Hey, we’ve had year-over-year decline in traffic.What’s going on? Can you do an SEO audit?”

So I think it’s a good idea to start with that as kind of a goal or a problem statement so that you can narrow and target your SEO audit to focus on the things that are actually the issue and why you’re performing the audit.

3. Segment to isolate

Number three, I think it’s a really good idea to segment your site in order to isolate the actual source of the problem. So by segment, I mean dividing your site into logical chunks based on their different purposes.

So, for example, maybe you have product pages. Maybe you have category pages. You have a blog section and user-generated content. There are all these different sections of your website. Segment those, isolate them, and look at them in isolation to see if maybe one of the sections is the culprit and actually experiencing issues, because a lot of times you find that, oh, maybe it’s the product pages that are actually causing my issues and it’s not the blog posts or anything else at all.

So that way you’re able to really waste less time and focus, take a more targeted, focused look at what’s actually going on with your website. So once you’ve kind of audited your site through that lens, through a more customized lens, it’s time to prioritize, because you still have a list of things that you need to fix. You can’t just heap them all onto whatever team you’re passing this on to and say,” Here, fix these all.”

How to prioritize

It’s a lot better to prioritize and tell them what’s more important and why. So here’s how I like to do that. I would plot this out on a matrix. So a pretty simple matrix. At the top, your goal goes there. It keeps you really focused. All of these little things, say pretend these are just the findings from our SEO audit.

On the y-axis, we have impact. On the x-axis, we have time. So essentially we’re ordering every single finding by what kind of impact it’s going to have and how much time it’s going to take to complete. So you’re going to end up with these four quadrants of tasks.

Quick wins

So in this green quadrant here, you have your quick wins.

These are the things that you should do right now, because they’re going to have a really high impact and they’re not going to take a lot of time to do. So definitely prioritize those things.

Schedule & tackle in sprints

This is a good idea no matter what you’re doing, but this is especially helpful if you’re working with a development team who probably runs in two-week sprints anyway. It’s a really good idea to segment and tackle those little bits at a time. Just get it on the schedule.

Deprioritize

In this orange down here, we have things to maybe deprioritize. Still put them on the schedule, but they’re not as important as the rest of the tasks.

So these are things that aren’t going to make that high of an impact, some impact, but not that high, and they’re not going to take that much time to do. Put them on the schedule, but they’re not as important.

Just don’t do it

Then in this last quadrant here, we have the just don’t do it quadrant. Hopefully, if you’re taking this really nice targeted look at your site and your audit through this lens, you won’t have too many of these, if any.

But if something is going to take you a lot of time and it’s not going to make that big of an impact, no one really has time for that. We want to try to avoid those types of tasks if at all possible. Now I will say there’s a caveat here for urgency. Sometimes we have to work on things regardless of what kind of impact they’re going to make on our site.

Maybe it’s because a client has a deadline, or it’s something in their contract and we just have to get something done because it’s a fire. We all have love/hate relationships with those fires. We don’t want to be handling them all of the time. If at all possible, let’s make sure to make those the exception and not the rule so that we actually get these priority tasks, these important things that are going to move the needle done and we’re not constantly pushing those down for fires.

One last thing, I will say impact is something that trips up a lot of people, myself included. How do you actually determine how much of an impact something is going to have before you do it? So that can be kind of tricky, and it’s not an exact science. But there are two main ways that I kind of like to do that. Number one, look for correlations on your website.

So if you’re looking at your website through the lens of these pages are performing really well, and they have these things true about them, and they’re on your list of things to fix on these other pages, you can go into that with a certain degree of certainty, knowing that, hey, if it works for these pages, there is a chance that this will make a high impact on these other pages as well.

So look at the data on your own website and see what’s already performing and what qualities are true about those pages. Number two, I would say one of the biggest things you can do is just to start small and test. Sometimes you really don’t know what kind of an impact something is going to make until you test on a small section. Then if it does have a high impact, great. Put it here and then roll it out to the rest of your site.

But if it doesn’t have a good impact or it has minimal impact, you learn something from that. But at least now you know not to prioritize it, not to spend all of your time on it and roll it out to your entire website, because that could be potentially a waste of time. So that’s how I prioritize and I customize my SEO audits. I think a lot of us struggle with: What even is an SEO audit?

How do I do it? Where do I even look? Is this even going to make a difference? So that’s how I kind of try to make a higher impact with my SEO audits by taking a more targeted approach. If you have a way that you do SEO audits that you think is super helpful, pop it in the comments, share it with all of us. I think it’s really good to share and get on the same page about the different ways we could perform SEO audits for higher impact.

So hopefully that was helpful for you. That’s it for this week’s Whiteboard Friday. Please come back again next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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