#i know you MEANT for this address to signify that their relationship is unique. however it is generally considered Wrong.

[labyrynth]

trying to read a fic that is spending way too much time dwelling on forms of address considering half the time said forms of address are highly inappropriate or flat out wrong 😶

[amillioninprizes]

Some thoughts on Veronica Mars, fan service, and noir

I’ve been on winter break and at home with a nasty combo cold-ear infection-stomach virus the past couple of weeks, and as so often happens when I don’t have much going on, my thoughts have turned to ruminating over the steaming pile of excrement that was season 4 of Veronica Mars. Why yes, almost six months and one cancellation notice later and I’m still complaining about it--as I told someone on Twitter, it was so stupid that it’s going to take years to unpack.

This particular rant is brought to you by a common refrain seen in both professional critics’ and S4 supporters’ reviews of S4: the movie was schlocky fan service, while S4 is TRUE NOIR. I’m here to argue that neither of those things are true, and that in the grand scheme of things trying to definitively call Veronica Mars noir or not isn’t the best qualitative judgement of the series.

A note on “fanservice”

Something that’s been very strange to me in the critical discussion around S4 is that the fan-funded movie has been retconned as a fanservicey failure. This is weird because it did get a positive Rotten Tomatoes score, actually turned a profit despite the unorthodox distribution model, and was overall well-received by fans except for maybe the 5 Piz lovers out there (he absolutely did not deserve better you guys; he works at This American Life and lives in Brooklyn, he’ll be fine).

A lot of the things pointed to in the movie as fan service actually weren’t. In every interview about the movie and S4, RT and KB always talk about how they started with the image of Veronica punching Madison at the high school reunion and worked from there. The problem is that almost no one had been asking for that. If they had bothered to read any online discourse about the show (and we know RT definitely does), they would know that fans are actually somewhat sympathetic to Madison--after all, she was the intended recipient of the drugged drink Veronica received at Shelly Pomeroy’s party, plus growing up in a family that she wasn’t meant to be a member of must have negatively impacted her. When the preview scene of Veronica encountering Madison at the reunion welcome table was released, Veronica didn’t come off sympathetically. In a similar vein, as much as I liked Corny as a side character in the original series, I didn’t need him to come back for that random scene at the reunion. Nor was anyone asking for an out-of-nowhere James Franco cameo (which given what we know about him now is super gross in hindsight).

So why was the movie well-received by fans? Veronica was in character after an unevenly written and performed S3, and she was back in Neptune, doing what (and who; Ay-yo!) she was meant to do. So while the mystery was subpar (and what Rob Thomas mystery isn’t?), the character side of the story made sense and was satisfying. I wouldn’t call that fan service so much as good writing. Plus, what is even the point of wasting time, money, and effort on making a tv show or movie if it’s going to actively alienate the audience?

S4: more trauma porn than true noir

Admittedly, I’m not exactly the world’s foremost scholar on film noir (in my opinion, the height of cinema is teen romcoms c. 1995-2005), but I do feel I have enough pop cultural knowledge to have a working understanding of what film noir is, and as internet folk would say, S4 ain’t it chief. Sure, S4 was bleak subject matter wise, but that does not automatically equal noir. HappilyShanghaied, who does have a film studies background, wrote a pretty excellent post about why that is shortly after S4 dropped that I could not improve upon, so I will just leave it here. 

In addition to this analysis, I would also point out that S4 was lacking in a unique visual style common to noir films, especially compared to the original television series and the movie. The original series made use of green, blue, and yellow filters to fulfill a high school version of the noir aesthetic (quick shoutout to Cheshirecatstrut’s color theory posts for more on what we thought this meant before it turned out that Rob Thomas did not actually intend to imbue meaning into any of this), while the movie adopted a more mature muted blue-grey palette. S4, however, was more or less shot like a conventional drama and was brightly lit, perhaps signifying Rob Thomas’s apparent plans to turn the show into a conventional procedural.

The movie: more than fan service 

If anything, the movie was more noir than S4. Take Gia’s storyline for instance. While Veronica was off obtaining elite degrees, Gia spent 9 years in a virtual cage being forced into a sexual relationship without her total consent (because that’s the only storyline women can have on this show), and then set herself up to be murdered at the very moment she could potentially break free. That’s pretty fucking grim.

Then there is the whole police corruption storyline, which is a hallmark of noir fiction. The glimpses we get of the Neptune sheriff’s department point to a larger conspiracy at play than just crooked cops; Sachs lost his life trying to expose it and Keith was gravely injured. This was the story I was excited for future installments of Veronica Mars to address, especially given its relevance to today’s politics. Unfortunately, this thread was entirely dropped in S4, where the police department (because, as Rob Thomas revealed in interviews but not onscreen, Neptune has incorporated) is merely overwhelmed by the scope of the bombing case rather than outright corrupt. (Side note but Marcia Langdon was also a more complex and morally grey character when introduced in the second book than she was on screen in S4. Another wasted opportunity).

Noir is also marked by a sense of inevitability or doom as a result of greater forces at play. An example of this in the movie is Weevil’s storyline. After building a life and family for himself, he ultimately ends up rejoining the PCHer gang he left as a teenager due to a misunderstanding based on his race and appearance and the assumptions authority figures make about him because of those things. No matter what he does, he is still limited by an unjust and racist society. Contrast this with the final explosion in S4; it’s not inevitable, just based on Veronica’s incompetence. Rob Thomas claims that he tried to create a sense of doom to LoVe’s relationship between the OOC Leo storyline and the last minute barriers before the wedding, but those aspects just served to make the story unnecessarily convoluted.

What is noir anyway? Was Veronica Mars ever noir? Does it matter?

But this is all assuming there is a set template for noir anyway. This New Yorker essay points out that trying to definitively establish a set of rules for noir is difficult and that the classic noir films were more a product of midcentury artistic and political movements than a defined genre. The noir filmmakers working at the time would not have described their work as such. The kicker of this essay is the final sentence: “But the film noir is historically determined by particular circumstances; that’s why latter-day attempts at film noir, or so-called neo-noirs, almost all feel like exercises in nostalgia.” I found this particularly amusing because as Rob Thomas infamously proclaimed in his S4 era interviews, he wanted to completely dispense with nostalgia going forward. Rob Thomas and S4 supporters have said that Logan needed to die because noir protagonists can’t have stable relationships; but, if there isn’t a defined set of rules other than “an element of crime”, then was it strictly necessary? Hell, writing a hardboiled detective who does have a stable relationship and maybe even a family could have been an interesting subversion of genre expectations. Unfortunately, Rob Thomas isn’t that imaginative.

There’s also the issue that noir and hardboiled detective fiction aren’t interchangeable genres. This article lays out that idea that they aren’t the same because noir is ultimately about doomed losers; in contrast, detective fiction, while dark, contains a moral center and has an ending where a sense of justice is achieved. An interview with author Megan Abbott makes a similar argument; she states that in hardboiled detective fiction, “At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored.” Based on the descriptions laid out here, I would argue that in its original format Veronica Mars far better fit the detective fiction model; while she wasn’t always right, she was never a loser, and she solved the mystery. S1-3 all had relatively hopeful, if not totally happy, endings, but you never see anyone complaining that they weren’t noir enough; if anything, they were more emotionally complex than the ending of S4, where Logan’s death is essentially meaningless. One could make the argument that S4 did push Veronica towards a more noir characterization by the definition of these articles by making her more incompetent and meaner than she was in previous installments, but that is a fundamental change in character, which is not coherent writing.

And that is ultimately why S4 was so poorly received by longtime fans and why there will be no more installments of Veronica Mars anytime soon (at least on Hulu). Even if S4 had been noir (or at least shot like one), the serious issues with plotting, characterization, and lack of adherence to prior canon that this season exhibited would still exist. Defending the poor writing choices made in S4 with “it’s noir!” does not mask them or automatically heighten the quality of the product. Perhaps ironically, in ineptly trying to be noir in S4, Rob Thomas likely prematurely ended Veronica Mars by failing his creation and fans with lazy storytelling.

[rukakikuchi]

LOONA # era teasers analysis and theories

Alright, so quick disclaimer. I am actually working on some analysis and theories regarding the music video for “So What” and how is affects the story of the LOONAverse, but first, I wanted to share the analysis I made for the teasers.

The reason why is because I had already written most of these points before the release of the “So What” MV; some were added on after the MV released, but for the most part, it was all speculation before the comeback.

I also wanted to correct a few details made from my original timeline analysis that I had got wrong. They don’t change my analysis too drastically, but I would still like to bring them up before talking about “So What”.

So, let’s start with addressing those corrections before analyzing the teasers.

…

Firstly, there is the scene at the end of “Love & Live”, where we see ViVi stop in the middle of the road, apparently out of breath, just after the timer on her battery runs out.

It was confirmed in an interview by ViVi herself, as well as the director of the video, that in that scene, she became human.

So, we can now say that the ending to “Love & Live” was the moment where ViVi became human again. She regained the ability to feel emotion, feel tired, to dream, and to eat food again, but her memories were still a little messed up. It’s through her interactions with Heejin, Hyunjin, and Haseul, that she eventually remembers what happened that led to her becoming an android.

Next, is regarding Chuu and Gowon’s representative emotions.

Originally, it was shown through the “one” short movie that Chuu represents love and Gowon represents hope. However, this was switched in the description for the “Butterfly” music video; Chuu is now hope and Gowon is now love.

At first, I was baffled by this change. Chuu representing love and Gowon as hope just made more sense to me. However, I decided to keep an open mind. So let’s see how these two fit into their newly designated emotions.

The description for “Butterfly” reads: “Chuu keeps her ‘hopes’ up with her yearning towards Yves. Gowon ‘loves’ her unique self.” These are both proven to be true, as we see in their respective solo MVs. 

Chuu is relentlessly stubborn in her efforts to gain Yves’ attention and affection in “Heart Attack”. 

And Gowon sings about how she learns to love herself, her “One & Only”. 

(There’s even a double meaning to that, as Gowon is referring to her “one and only” self as her “one and only” love.)

Lyrics in other LOONA songs also reaffirm this. In yyxy’s “one way”, Gowon ends the song with the spoken line, “But I still love you.” And in “Butterfly”, Chuu sings the line “Dreams, dreams may come true.”

So yeah, now that that’s cleared up, it’s time to talk about the # era teasers!

Keep in mind that most of the observations were made before the release of “So What”. I will use my analysis of what we see in “So What” to correct or alter some of these previous observations.

…

The end of the beginning

So, from watching and re-watching the teasers for “#”, I’ve begun forming a new theory of where the story of the LOONAverse could be heading.

Starting with the first teaser released last year, simply titled “#”, we see several shots that appear to parallel or reference scenes we saw in the “X X” teasers (namely XIIX, XIIIX, and XIVX) and the “Butterfly” music video.

We see Gowon in Iceland, removing her black coat just like she did in “XIIX” when she went back in time to save Haseul and initiate the butterfly effect. In my timeline analysis, I said that this was Gowon’s shadow, since the real Gowon was asleep. 

We see her awake later on, with her coat still on. She looks up at the sky, but what does she see?

Then we see Olivia, when she woke up after the world had changed due to Gowon’s butterfly effect. We see a shot of her going up the stairs, possibly hearing Gowon calling to her. 

We also see her pass by the girl with the afro we saw dancing in “Butterfly”. Olivia looks back at her as she continues looking for presumably the other yyxy girls.

We later see Chuu, looking for Yves to reunite with her after the butterfly effect. She turns around, as if something caught her attention.

There are also a couple of scenes showing some of the other girls who appeared in “Butterfly”; the other LOONAs. 

We see the girl who was standing on the rooftop look back confused, as if she doesn’t remember how she got there. 

We even briefly see the “X X” and “+ +” in the black box over her eyes.

Then we see the eye of a girl looking up at the sky, the eye belonging to the girl with the crutches. Did she see something?

Then we see the short haired “Odd Eye” girl (this one was meant to represent Choerry) standing in front of goldfish tanks while holding a plastic bag with a fish. But what is she doing here?

Knowing that the fish tanks are meant to represent alternate timelines, I’m going to propose two possibilities:

1.) Choerry was trying to travel to the past like Gowon did, either to contact herself from the past, or another member, to tell them what was going to happen.

Or…

2.) She was trying to save one of the other members from the time loop resetting by placing them in another timeline. But the question is who?

Probably the most noteworthy are the girls in the red tracksuits, who we see running up the stairs, trying to reach something, but are then seen collapsed on the ground, as if they all fell asleep.

We see imagery of things being burned, such as tags with “+ +” and “X X” on them, and a butterfly's wings, as well as a swarm of butterflies flying up from what appear to be flames. 

And throughout the video, many of these clips and images were shown with a VHS static overlay. (See images above.) 

And which member do we frequently connect this effect with? ViVi. So why are we seeing this static overlay here?

Well, something I have gone back and forth about including in the LOONA timeline is 1/3’s “Rain 51db”. But it might actually have more significance than I originally thought. 

Alongside the VHS tape recording aesthetic, similar to ViVi’s “Everyday I Love You”, this video feels like it came straight from the 90’s. There’s also something quite peculiar about the beginning of the video, but that’s something we’ll discuss later.

The main reason I didn’t include “Rain 51db” in my timeline was because I had no idea where to place it. I didn’t know if this was some alternate timeline, or another dream or warped memory from ViVi. I even thought it could’ve been a sort of message 1/3 was trying to send to someone. (Odd Eye Circle maybe?) 

But the more I think about it, it makes sense for this to be a memory or dream from ViVi.

Or rather… It’s both. It’s a memory of a dream.

If we consider the cassette tapes in ViVi’s possession as a way to access memories through dreaming, then that means we can link the VHS static effect with someone dreaming, whether that be ViVi herself, or another member.

So, this means what we see in the # teaser are memories, and maybe even memories of dreams.

And the dreamlike vision of the butterflies flying is abruptly cut by static, before immediately taking us back to a bird’s eye view of the black sand beach in Iceland.

(And just a quick aside, I won’t be trying to decode what the blurred message we see in the static could be. Because, I don’t think that’s a detail we should be focused on; rather, the fact that the cut to static is present at all to begin with.)

This exact same shot is where we open “#1″ with, before another flash of static, some quick black and white images of the 1/3 girls, cutting to Heejin waking up floating above the clouds.

I think what we are seeing in the “#” teaser is another instance similar to the first “X X” teaser, when we saw everything in “Hi High” being rewound; the time loop is being reset again. 

The previous timelines of “+ +” and “X X” are being erased, and so are the girls’ memories. They become like memories of dreams. Memories that start to fade after you wake up, and eventually disappear.

And the tracksuit wearing girls we see collapsed on the ground could represent the other members of LOONA. Only one of them managed to break out of the Moebius time loop, and the others tried to catch up to her, but failed as the time loop began to catch up to them. 

And who was the one girl who made it out? Heejin.

In “#1”, Heejin awakens alone in the sky above the Moebius. She was the only one who managed to fly high enough to break out of the Moebius loop. Only she managed to reach the moon, where the Goddess was waiting for her. We see she reached the moon in “#2”.

[[**Flash warning for gif**]]

But her friends are still stuck in the time loop, and now that she’s out of the Moebius loop, the world is rewriting itself completely. The eclipse we see in “#2” signifies this; it is the sign of the end and beginning of the world.

“+ +” was about three worlds (Earth, middle Earth/the Cosmos, Eden) becoming one; “X X” was about the girls uniting with their shadow selves on the mirror side of the LOONAverse. And as we’ll talk about later, “#” in my opinion is about the destruction and rebirth of the LOONAverse.

So what does Heejin do seeing that her friends are still trapped by the Moebius loop? She willingly falls back to Earth to save her friends. 

Similar to the “fall of Icarus”, whose wings burned due to hubris, Heejin made the conscious choice to go back so she and her friends could break out of the loop together; because they were meant to be together, as twelve.

So how has the world and the other girls changed?

The back of the moon

The “#3” teaser shows us the “back of the moon”, meaning we are in an alternate, darker timeline than what we’ve previously been following. Certain things about the girls, their relationships, and other aspects from LOONA’s story have been reversed, or slightly altered.

Firstly, we see ViVi, now a graffiti artist, most likely using graffiti as an act of self expression and maybe even rebellion against something. 

In the teaser for “So What”, she tosses a can of spray paint while looking down towards the camera.

I think in this new timeline, ViVi is a human. But perhaps she is having a different sort of identity crisis, using graffiti as a way to express herself.

Then we see Kim Lip in what appears to be a museum or palace. Kim Lip is one of the few members who does not turn around in the whole video.

We see a similar looking setting later in “To all LOONAs around the world”, but Gowon is there, in a different place in possibly the same location.

We then see Hyunjin and Choerry are together, facing a line of tuk tuks. Some of them have different colored headlights, but the most notable are the orange and green headlights seen side by side, most likely meant to represent Haseul and Yeojin.

Next, we see Jinsoul walking on a train with a group of unknown girls (Update: it’s been revealed these are members of LOONA, but we’ll talk about that later on). 

She looks behind her, but turns her head back to facing forward as she continues on. Perhaps in this new timeline, Jinsoul is indulging more in her inner darkness, acting more aloof and rebellious.

Then, we see three of the yyxy girls, Chuu, Gowon, and Yves. 

Chuu and Gowon are together, holding their hands behind each other’s backs as they turn their heads backwards, while Yves is by herself, in a dance practice room, looking at the sky from a window. Do Chuu and Gowon know something that Yves doesn’t? Are the three of them even in the same place?

Also, an interesting thing we can point out here are the colors of the dresses Chuu and Gowon are wearing. Chuu is in a red dress, and Gowon is in a yellow dress.

What’s so noteworthy about this? Because of the meanings both colors have. Red is a color that often represents love, and yellow, alongside cheerfulness and joy, can also represent hope.

But we just said that Chuu is now representing hope and Gowon is love, so why has it switched back? Could it be that in “+ +”, the two of them didn’t realize what their true representative emotions were until “X X”?

Either way, it’s an interesting point to note. So moving on...

What’s notable is that Yves is wearing all black, a direct contrast from when we first saw her in “new” wearing all white. 

We see this dance room again in “To all LOONAs around the world”, and the latest teaser for “So What”, with several other ballerina girls. 

At one point, we see them circling someone. Maybe Yves? Perhaps in this timeline, Yves is an outcast because she’s different from everyone; a “black swan”.

Next, from a distance, we see Yeojin standing in the middle of a schoolground as a group of students run in her direction. Why this could be the case, there are several possibilities. Are these students meant to represent the members of LOONA finding Yeojin, or is Yeojin about to start a school uprising?

(My money is on the latter. lol)

However, here is where I would like to propose another theory; Yeojin and Haseul have switched places. In the previous timelines, Yeojin was lost in the forest before being found by Haseul and the other girls. 

But now, I think the roles have reversed in this timeline, and now Haseul is the one who is missing. (This could serve as a good in-universe reason as to explain how she won’t be present in this comeback. The 11 members of LOONA need to unite to find her.)

Lastly, we see Heejin and Olivia Hye, on two different sides of the same billboard. Heejin is there in the day, likely her arrival after she fell back into the loop, and Olivia is there at night, the screen turning red as she turns her head back.

Heejin and Olivia have always been mirror opposites of one another; they are literally shown to be “day and night” here. So what will happen when they confront each other in this new timeline?

...

Thus concludes the observations I made for the teasers! Again, since I am still working on my analysis for the “So What” MV, some of these previous observations may be revised when I actually do the analysis proper.

Nonetheless, I hope you look forward to my theories! Until then, keep streaming “So What” and support LOONA however you can! 🙌🏻🙌🏻

[neocab]

Translating the Cyberpunk Future

I'm a video game translator, and I love my job. It's odd work, sometimes stressful, sometimes bewildering, but it always provides interesting and inspiring challenges. Every project brings new words, slang, and cultural trends to discover, but translating also forces me to reflect on language itself. Each job also comes with its own unique set of problems to solve. Some have an exact solution that can be found in grammar or dictionaries, but others require a more... creative approach.

Sometimes, the language we’re translating from uses forms and expressions that simply have no equivalent in the language we’re translating to. To bridge such gaps, a translator must sometimes invent (or circumvent), but most importantly they must understand. Language is ever in flux. It’s an eternal cultural battleground that evolves with the lightning speed of society itself. A single word can hurt a minority, give shape to a new concept, or even win an election. It is humanity’s most powerful weapon, especially in the Internet Age, and I always feel the full weight of responsibility to use it in an informed manner.

One of my go-to ways for explaining the deep complexity of translation is the relationship between gender (masculine and feminine) and grammar. For example, in English this is a simple sentence:

"You are fantastic!"

Pretty basic, right? Easy to translate, no? NOT AT ALL!

Once you render it into a gendered language like Italian, all its facets, its potential meanings, break down like shards.

Sei fantastico! (Singular and masculine)

Sei fantastica! (Singular and feminine)

Siete fantastici! (Plural and masculine)

Siete fantastiche! (Plural and feminine)

If we were translating a movie, selecting the correct translation wouldn't be a big deal. Just like in real life, one look at the speakers would clear out the ambiguity in the English text. Video game translation, however, is a different beast where visual cues or even context is a luxury, especially if a game is still in development. Not only that, but the very nature of many games makes it simply impossible to define clearly who is being addressed in a specific line, even when development has ended. Take an open world title, for example, where characters have whole sets of lines that may be addressed indifferently to single males or females or groups (mixed or not) within a context we don't know and can't control.

In the course of my career as a translator, time and time again this has led into one of the most heated linguistic debates of the past few years: the usage of the they/them pronoun. When I was in grade school, I was taught that they/them acted as the third person plural pronoun, the equivalent of the Italian pronoun "essi." Recently, though, it has established itself as the third person singular neutral, both in written and spoken English. Basically, when we don't know whether we're talking about a he/him or a she/her, we use they/them. In this way, despite the criticism of purists, the English language has brilliantly solved all cases of uncertainty and ambiguity. For instance:

“Somebody forgot their backpack at the party.”

Thanks to the use of the pronoun "their," this sentence does not attribute a specific gender to the person who has forgotten the backpack at the party. It covers all the bases. Smooth, right? Within the LGBT circles, those who don’t recognize themselves in gender binarism have also adopted the use of they/them. Practically speaking, the neutral they/them pronoun is a powerful tool, serving both linguistic accuracy and language inclusiveness. There's just one minor issue: We have no "neutral pronouns" in Italian.

It's quite the opposite, if anything! In our language, gender informs practically everything, from adjectives to verbs. On top of that, masculine is the default gender in case of ambiguity or uncertainty. For instance:

Two male kids > Due bambini

Two female kids > Due bambine

One male kid and one female kid > Due bambini

In the field of translation, this is a major problem that often requires us to find elaborate turns of phrase or different word choices to avoid gender connotations when English maintains ambiguity. As a professional, it’s not only a matter of accuracy but also an aesthetic issue. In a video game, when a character refers to someone using the wrong gender connotation, the illusion of realism is broken. My colleagues and I have been navigating these pitfalls for years as best we can. Have you ever wondered why one of the most common Italian insults in video games is "pezzo di merda"? That's right. "Stronzo" and "bastardo" give a gender connotation, while "pezzo di merda" does not.

A few months ago, together with the Gloc team, I had the pleasure of working on the translation of Neo Cab, a video game set in a not too distant future with a cyberpunk and dystopian backdrop (and, sadly, a very plausible one). The main character is Lina, a cabbie of the "gig economy," who drives for a hypothetical future Uber in a big city during a time of deep social unrest. The story is told mainly through her conversation with the many clients she picks up in her taxi. When the game’s developers gave us the reference materials for our localization, they specified that one of the client characters was "non-binary" and that Lina respectfully uses the neutral "they/them" pronoun when she converses with them.

"Use neutral pronouns or whatever their equivalent is in your language," we were told.

I remember my Skype chat with the rest of the team. What a naive request on the client's part! Neutral pronouns? It would be lovely, but we don't have those in Italian! So what do we do now? The go-to solution in these cases is to use masculine pronouns, but such a workaround would sacrifice part of Lina’s character and the nuance of one of the interactions the game relies on to tell the story. Sad, no? It was the only reasonable choice grammatically-speaking, but also a lazy and ill-inspired one. So what were we to do? Perhaps there was another option...

Faced with losing such an important aspect of Lina’s personality, we decided to forge ahead with a new approach. We had the opportunity to do something different, and we felt like we had to do the character justice. In a game that's completely based on dialogue, such details are crucial. What's more, the game's cyberpunk setting gave us the perfect excuse to experiment and innovate. Language evolves, so why not try to imagine a future where Italian has expanded to include a neutral pronoun in everyday conversations? It might sound a bit weird, sure, but cyberpunk literature has always employed such gimmicks. And rather than take away from a character, we could actually enrich the narrative universe with an act of "world building" instead.

After contacting the developers, who enthusiastically approved of our proposal, we started working on creating a neutral pronoun for our language. But how to go about that was a question in itself. We began by studying essays on the subject, like Alma Sabatini's Raccomandazioni per un uso non sessista della lingua italiana (Recommendations for a non-sexist usage of the Italian language). We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, "x," and "u."

Siamo tutt* bellissim*.

Siamo tuttx bellissimx.

Siamo tuttu bellissimu.

I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that's deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa (ə), the mid central vowel sound. What does it sound like? Quite familiar to an English speaker, it's the most common vowel sound. Standard Italian doesn’t have it, but having been separated into smaller countries for most of its history, Italy has an extraordinary variety of regional languages (“dialetti”) and many of them use this sound. We find it in the final "a" of "mammeta" in Neapolitan, for instance (and also in the dialects of Piedmont and Ciociaria, and in several other Romance languages). To pronounce it, with an approximation often seen in other romance languages, an Italian only needs to pretend not to pronounce a word's last vowel.

Schwa was also a perfect choice as a signifier in every possible way. Its central location in phonetics makes it as neutral as possible, and the rolled-over "e" sign "ə" is reminiscent of both a lowercase "a" (the most common feminine ending vowel in Italian) and of an unfinished "o" (the masculine equivalent). The result is:

Siamo tuttə bellissimə.

Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting. The player/reader need only look at the context and interactions to figure it out. The fact that we have no "ə" on our keyboards is easily solved with a smartphone system upgrade, and though the pronunciation may be difficult, gender-neutrals wouldn't come up often in spoken language. Indeed, neutral alternatives are most needed in writing, especially in public communication, announcements, and statements. To be extra sure our idea worked as intended and didn't overlook any critical issues, we submitted it to a few LGBT friends, and with their blessing, then sent our translation to the developers.

Fast forward to now, and the game is out. It has some schwas in it, and nobody complained about our proposal for a more inclusive future language. It took us a week to go through half a day's worth of work, but we're happy with the result. Localization is not just translation, it's a creative endeavour, and sometimes it can afford to be somewhat subversive. To sum up the whole affair, I'll let the words of Alma Sabatini wrap things up:

"Language does not simply reflect the society that speaks it, it conditions and limits its thoughts, its imagination, and its social and cultural advancement." — Alma Sabatini

Amen.

[teafortiff]

Call Me By My Name

In 1948, professors at Harvard studied whether names had any bearing on academic performance and found that men with uncommon names were more likely to have symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with common names. Thus, leading to the beginning of our fascination with names.  

Almost 60 years later in 2004, the National Bureau of Economic Research sent out 5000 resumes in Boston, where half were given a "white-sounding" name and others were given a "black-sounding" name. As all BIPOC already know, the CVs with white-sounding names received more callbacks, but not just by a small margin - by 50%. This is further supported by later research which found that people with easier-to-pronounce names (by Western standards) were more positively evaluated than those with harder to pronounce names.

Names are undeniably a part of a person's identity. When asking someone to introduce themselves, most will begin with their name - no matter what the context is. However, names are more than just a jumble of sounds used to identify ourselves and other people - our names give away information about our ethnicity, our religion, even our socio-economic background.

More personally, names carry family history, culture and traditions with them.

In Chinese tradition, names are picked with great care and are imbued with a parent’s blessings for their child’s life. Days, nights, weeks, months are spent thinking about the meaning of each character, how they sound when combined, their interpretations, even the number of strokes are counted to bring the best fortune. Unlike English names, it is rare to find individuals who share exactly the same name, as parents aim for uniqueness. 

Which is why it is essential to pronounce names accurately and correctly - all names carry months of deliberation.  

My full name consists of my dialect name, and as a Singaporean-Chinese, this is my Chinese name. When I first migrated to Australia, I wrote my Chinese name phonetically alongside my English name, only to have several classmates butcher the pronunciation of my name and laugh at it. Within a singular moment, there was a dismissal of not only my identity but also the significance and meaning of my Chinese name. Feeling ashamed and ridiculed, I halted the practice of writing my Chinese name and kept to my English name, grateful to my parents for choosing one.

It was not until several years later that I re-examined my feelings towards my Chinese name. For many with non-English names, adopting an English one is a means of assimilating into a new country. For others it is a matter of convenience - it is easier to choose to go by an English name than to deal with people making little effort to pronounce their names accurately or, even worse, arbitrarily assigning them a nickname without permission. Much better to maintain agency through choosing their English name; than to have their name that contains history, culture and tradition be dismissed without a second thought.

Despite having an English name, Singapore's arrangement of names also posed a challenge when I moved here. My official documentation in Singapore places my English name first, family name second and finally my Chinese name - following the conventional structure of Chinese names where the family name precedes the given name. The issue in Australia is that my Chinese name effectively becomes my “middle” name. 

 Yet, rearranging my name to conform to Western naming standards presented its own set of problems.  Once, while opening a new bank account I had produced my Singaporean passport as proof of identity, and when I filled in my last name as "Fong" - my family name - the banker stated it was wrong, insisting on placing my Chinese name as my last name. I explained Singapore’s naming conventions but the bankers' insistence on my 'error' was annoying, if only due to the implication that a stranger knows the structure of my name better than me.

But names are not only important to people; they are important to locations too.

 During NAIDOC Week in 2020, Australia Post supported Rachael McPhail's campaign to include Traditional Place names as part of mailing addresses to recognise and celebrate Indigenous people, challenging the prevailing narrative of terra nullius within Australia. By including Traditional Place names in addresses, it is a step in recognising the rich culture and history of Indigenous people in Australia prior to colonisation.

 Furthermore, to rename a place is to erase its history and its cultural significance. Uluru contains sacred sites that are culturally important to the Anangu people. When renamed Ayers Rock, it perpetuated the narrative of Australia being "discovered", effectively robbing the Anangu people of their historical connection with the land. In 1995, the national park's name was changed to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National park to acknowledge and respect the Anangu people and honour their relationship with the land.

Names are important because they identify. They make something significant.

In a world where the rich are naming their children increasingly obscure names - *cough* Elon Musk *cough* - the notion of names being uncommon because they are ethnic should be challenged. Names should not be assessed based on how hard they are to pronounce (once again, by Western standards) or by how unfamiliar they sound - instead, a name is a signifier of a person's identity and the history that they carry with them. In high school, I had a conversation with a (white) friend who politely asked if I had a Chinese name and if I would be willing to share what it meant. She repeated it carefully after me, unsure of the tones but treating it with care.

Address people the way they have introduced themselves. Ask them for clarification on the pronunciation if you are unsure. It is better to try and be wrong than to not try at all.

[blogsureshus]

Language Translation Service

Our ancestors were very good at wandering places and searching for new things. Since man found how to make pictures with color or ink on any surface, he has conveyed himself with unique patterns and pictures, etc. As our ancestors who drew with different things like charcoal on stone or cut in wood. Later when languages were made, we started communicating with short messages printed by hand or by an instrument. But still, there are so many languages now that you can’t count on your fingers. Therefore the invention of the language translation service comes in our rescue. Language Translator is a job for people who are comfortable speaking up in a foreign environment, who can understand people very easily and correctly. Because of the main responsibility of the

Back then they had many sign languages but not many verbal languages which made it easier for them to work and live all around. but now is the time when people do not stop themselves from going out from their native places just because they don’t know foreign languages.

Numerous individuals new to interpretation and limitation are in some cases confounded by the language. This blog entry will assist clear with increasing the perplexity with the frequently tradable terms “interpretation” and “limitation” just as other phrasing related to the interpretation business.

Language Translation Service is also a part of marketing. It can be looked at as an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, delivering and communicating value to customers, and managing customer relationships in ways that also benefit the organization and its shareholders. Marketing is the science of choosing target markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding consumer buying behavior and providing superior customer value.

I will not talk much about marketing as I already have a fully focused article on it if you wish to read it Click Here.

We are talking so much about Language Translation Service you must be wondering…..

What is Language Translation Service?

Interpretation is a type of limitation. It includes the interpretation of names, manuals, preparing recordings, advertisements, and sites into nearby dialects. To spare costs, a few organizations build up their manuals and preparing materials in different dialects, including English, Mandarin, Hindi, French, Spanish and Arabic. Corporate sites must be interpreted, particularly the oftentimes utilized web-based business and help areas. Moving administrators ought to figure out how to impart in the neighborhood language or possibly see a portion of the subtleties of nonverbal correspondence. Senior administration ought to think about the utilization of synchronous interpreters in gatherings with their worldwide accomplices, particularly if some of them are not open to convey in English.

“Language Service Providers” or “LSP’s” have been around for quite a long time. All the more normally in the US, LSP’s are known as Translation Agencies. The term LSP is increasingly regular in Europe yet is presently being heard here in the US all the more frequently.

Types of Language Translation Services:-

Language Service Providers (LSP) are organizations that offer to change degrees of interpretation, elucidation, limitation, language and social training arrangements. LSP’s commonly offer the accompanying administrations:

Interpretation “spoken”-

Language translation is the helping of verbal or communication through signing collaboration, either simultaneously or over and again, between individuals talking in various ‘dialects’. There are a few different ways of translation including back to back and concurrent. Back to back Interpretation – This is the point at which the speaker (for instance an educator, teacher or a court judge) represents a couple of moments and afterward breaks, enabling the translator to interpret the information exchanged into the other language. At the point when the mediator is done translating the speaker proceeds with where he/she left off.

Localization-

Localization is the adjustment of item configuration, bundling and showcasing capacities to suit nearby markets. Item changes might be important to represent social contrasts and neighborhood guidelines. For instance, a café franchiser may need to change its menu for a nation that limits the clearance of particular sorts of meat. Notwithstanding interpretation from English to the neighborhood language on item names, organizations may need to change the substance or the size of their items to agree to nearby guidelines. Advertising efforts may require changes to regard social contrasts. For instance, specific sorts of outfits or open presentations of love may not be proper in certain nations, albeit a business highlighting polar bears skiing down mountain slants with refreshments in their grasp would work anyplace.

Telephonic Translation-

Telephone translation is the communication between individuals through a telephone who don’t communicate in a similar language. The translator encourages the two gatherings to speak with one another.

Simultaneous Translation-

Understanding is the point at which the speaker/moderator doesn’t stop, however, he continues talking at a characteristic speed. Regularly this kind of deciphering happens during gatherings or enormous gatherings. During gatherings, the translators (of different dialects) as a rule are altogether situated in a deciphering stall. The mediator hears what the speaker is stating through a headset and afterward deciphers into an amplifier. The target group of the understanding hears what the translator is stating through their earphones.

It is most basic when your home office needs to prop the discussion up with branch workplaces in different nations. TrueLanguage can combine you with local speakers in whatever target markets you have to reach over the worldwide commercial center. We can deal with interpreters for occasions went to by gatherings of any size or multi-day meetings for many members.

Localization and interpretation administrations ought to appreciate solid interest outside of their borders. Organizations may confront rivalry for qualified interpreters who are capable of different dialects. Agency should begin with a website design that can deal with various languages and character sets from day one.

3 Ways Translation Service can Benefit your Business?

Helps your Business to connect Emotionally- Clients who are sincerely associated with an item are progressively gainful. What’s more, if you need to associate with your clients on a passionate level, you should know their first language.

It helps you to rank on SEO- Website optimization, which is great to work together on the web. Ensuring that your site arrives at the highest point of web search. Powerful correspondence is improved when clients can peruse your site in their language; helpful data is accessible to a more extensive crowd; having a bigger site (another page for every language).

Makes your Business accessible with Transcription- Numerous online advertising efforts incorporate the utilization of online recordings. Sound digital broadcasts ought to have a translation accessible for the hard of hearing. However, it additionally enlarges your group of spectator’s reach, improves brand dependability, and lifts SEO. There are products motivation to remember interpretation for any sound or video content your business produces.

6 Methods to accelerate your Business through Language Translation Service

So your business is doing incredible and you wish to grow it further internationally? Worldwide presentation is conceivable just on the off chance that you prepare it for it. Business correspondence with numerous nations requests skill and accuracy. Regardless of whether you have a place with open or private division, you need proficient language interpretation administrations for reasons multiple. Peruse on.

Better correspondence with clients:

If your business calls for discussing straightforwardly with your clients then you must’ve confronted many individuals who don’t communicate in English. You can showcase your items to a lot more extensive range of a group of spectators if you could address them in their language.

Upgrade brand permeability: An organization’s image potential is tried based on a ton of capacities. Connecting with an ever-increasing number of individuals is one of them. You have to cross the boundary of language to fabricate a picture in the worldwide market and that is conceivable just with proficient interpretation administrations.

Maintain a strategic distance from terrible notoriety:

You will be stunned to gain proficiency with a portion of the significant showcasing slip-offs of enormous undertakings. KFC got their celebrated slogan “Finger-Lickin’ Good” interpreted in China and it signified “We’ll eat your finger off”. Pepsi got its slogan “Wake up with Pepsi” meant “Pepsi can bring progenitors resurrected!” in China. The American Dairy Association’s unique slogan “Got milk?” was mocked in Mexico as the interpretation signified “Are you lactating?” Numerous such comparative cases welcomed a great deal of fire from individuals over the globe. You can avoid the projectile and upkeep your image notoriety by getting your promoting procedures checked or composed by the experts before it’s past the point of no return.

The social insurance industry is tremendously profited:

Healthcare units need to manage plenty of patients originating from different nations. Likewise, there are a ton of specialists over the globe occupied with inquiring about. Language ought to never be a hindrance to medicinal research or a patient’s treatment. Proficient restorative mediators and interpreters play their aces in deciphering the medicinal reports that will help the specialists who are progressively agreeable in contemplating in the language they pick.

More opportunities for work:

many individuals are enthusiastic about learning various dialects. Nothing can be better if they can learn and gain simultaneously. Any industry, little or large, procures interpreters and mediators to not just facilitate their business correspondence with different nations yet in addition to advertising and venture coordination.

Drafting authoritative documents:

Understanding authoritative reports itself is a tough assignment and on the off chance that it’s in an alternate language, at that point it gets even more convoluted. One sneak off and the importance of the sentence changes totally. Proficient interpreters guarantee precise and simple translation of authoritative records adjusted to the expert needs of legal counselors, court stenographers, lawyers, judges, and other legitimate experts.

Why Language Translation Service is important to your Business?

Interpretation is fundamentally critical to any association needing to catch universal markets.

Proficient interpreters with experience and training will help you with speaking with individuals from different nations. They will work in their first language to create writings that will precisely repeat your image’s message and style of the first content, while simultaneously perusing fluidly in the goal language.

With the best possible instruments, interpretation can surrender you a leg against your rivals, help make purchasers progressively OK with your image, and eventually construct solid notoriety in another market, all of which will guarantee long haul achievement.

Is Language Translation Service is for you?

If you are familiar with more than one language and can productively make an interpretation of starting with one language then onto the next, a speaker giving interpretation administrations could be the ideal independent company for you. Here is the thing that you have to know before you choose if this business thought is an ideal choice for you.

The Pros of Starting a Translation Services BusinessA portion of the advantages you may be understanding on the off chance that you start an interpretation administration include:

Startup costs are low.

It’s an extraordinary locally established business, particularly because you can work utilizing the Internet.

Overhead expenses are low, and you can make critical benefits.

You have an extremely wide target advertise, including legitimate, business, restorative, specialized altering, translation and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

There is a developing interest in interpreters in our worldwide network.

You can work solo, or deal with a gathering of interpreters, regardless of whether you are not an interpreter yourself.

The Cons of Starting a Translation Services BusinessA portion of the potential difficulties of beginning an interpretation business include:

You should have total and exhaustive order of whatever dialects you intend to offer interpretation administrations for.

Among your opposition might be modernized interpretation projects and voice acknowledgment innovation.

It can require some investment to build up the business, contingent upon your area.

You might need to get guaranteed before offering your administrations.

You need standard office hardware, incorporating a PC with an Internet association and conceivably interpretation gear if you will do sound interpretation from tapes.

Step-by-Step Guide to Become a Language Translator?1. Concentrate your source language widely.

To begin with, you should choose a language and study it widely.

There’s interpretation work accessible for almost any living language, and there’s a contention to be made for adapting essentially any language you can name. Normally, there are additionally interpreting work accessible for the most widely recognized dialects. In any case, since more individuals know these dialects, there’s additionally more challenge for work. While there might be fewer occupations for less regular dialects, realizing one could make you stand apart from the group and give you access to employments that fewer individuals can perform.

To pick a language, you should think about exploring what occupations are out there.

2. Get particular preparing.

The truth of the matter is that regardless of whether you’re familiar with a language, it doesn’t mean you have what it takes to decipher.

Having the option to give clear, effective interpretation frequently requires specific preparing notwithstanding language study. Here are a few alternatives to consider:

3. Get ensured.

the most effective method to turn into an interpreter

An affirmation in interpretation is a simple method to show you have what it takes important to take the necessary steps.

Something else to consider is getting non-language-related accreditations in a field in which you’re keen on interpreting. For example, turning into a guaranteed paralegal could assist you with getting deciphering work in the legitimate field by indicating that you comprehend the business. Thus, being an affirmed attendant may assist you with getting restorative interpretation work.

4. Focus on a particular industry and learn industry-explicit terms.

When you’re familiar with a language, you’ll additionally need to target industry-explicit terms for anything that field you’re keen on working in.

Only being familiar doesn’t generally give the pertinent wording you’ll have to interpret, so you’ll have to place some extra concentration into industry-explicit phrasing.

For example, you should think about considering words that are especially vital in medication, business, government or training. There are a few different ways to do this.

5. Sharpen your Computer aptitudes.

A great deal of deciphering requires utilizing explicit computer programs. This is intended to make the interpretation procedure faster and increasingly productive. Normal projects utilized by proficient interpreters that you should acquaint yourself with include:

6. Get some understanding.

One of the unfeeling incongruities of deciphering and most other professional fields is that to land most positions, you as of now need work involvement with the field, leaving you with a problem—how would you get that involvement with the primary spot?

the most effective method to turn into an interpreter

The appropriate response is more straightforward than you may suspect. Agreement or independent work is a simple method to get some understanding to add to your resume. Your initial barely any gigs probably won’t pay just as you’d like, however, once you get more understanding added to your repertoire, you can typically get increasingly more pay for your administrations.

7. To additionally develop your profession, adapt more dialects.

If you need to make yourself significantly progressively attractive, you should procure more dialects that you can interpret between to grow your scope of contributions.

For example, suppose you’re completely conversant in Chinese and can interpret among Chinese and English. Nonetheless, consider the possibility that you likewise figured out how to add Spanish to your scope of contributions. Presently, you could interpret from Spanish to English or Chinese to English. In the end, it’s conceivable that you may even have the option to convert into Chinese or potentially Spanish, in this way increasing your potential interpretation choices and making yourself progressively employable. How’s that for vocation development?

Following is all that you have to think about a vocation as a mediator and interpreter with heaps of subtleties. As an initial step, investigate a portion of the accompanying occupations, which are genuine occupations with genuine bosses. You will have the option to see the genuine activity vocation necessities for bosses who are effectively enlisting.

Go live your dream of connecting people by giving them the words

Do tell us in the comment section below what’s the surprising part about the Language Translation Service in this blog?

More than 19 Years of experience in Designing, Printing and Advertising sector. I own an Enterprises named “Shivani Enterprises”. It’s a commercial Designing, Printing and Advertising Company. Deals in complete designing, printing, advertising, corporate gifting, business collateral material services solutions (designing, offset, digital, screen printing, signage printing, corporate gifting material, event material printing, etc.). We are an exporter of printing and publishing materials. Write a blog on printing tech, tricks and strategy is my passion. We are suited at 249/2, opposite Vasant Vihar Bus Depot, Munirka New Delhi -110067, near Indira Gandhi International Airport, India. We provide our services in Pan India and all major countries in the World.

[seo1code-blog]

Do you need an SEO?

SEO is associate signifier for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to rent associate SEO could be a huge call that may probably improve your website and save time, however you'll be able to conjointly risk injury to your website and name. confirm to analysis the potential blessings in addition because the injury that associate harum-scarum SEO will do to your website. several SEOs and different agencies and consultants offer helpful services for web site house owners, including:

Review of your website content or structure

Technical recommendation on web site development: for instance, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript

Content development

Management of on-line business development campaigns

Keyword analysis

SEO coaching

Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and sometimes paid packaging (denoted as "Ads" or "Sponsored") in addition. Advertising with Google will not have any result on your site's presence in our search results. Google ne'er accepts cash to incorporate or rank sites in our search results, and it prices nothing to look in our organic search results. Free resources like Search Console, the official Webmaster Central journal, and our discussion forum will offer you with an excellent deal of data concerning the way to optimize your website for organic search.

Before starting your rummage around for associate SEO, it is a nice plan to become an informed shopper and acquire aware of however search engines work. we have a tendency to suggest beginning here:

Google Webmaster tips

Google 101: however Google crawls, indexes and serves the online.

If you are puzzling over hiring associate SEO, the sooner the higher. an excellent time to rent is once you are considering a website design, or aiming to launch a brand new website. That way, you and your SEO will make sure that your website is meant to be search engine-friendly from rock bottom up. However, an honest SEO may also facilitate improve associate existing website.

Some helpful inquiries to raise associate SEO include:

Can you show American state samples of your previous work and share some success stories?

Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Do you provide any on-line selling services or recommendation to enrich your organic search business?

What reasonably results does one expect to visualize, and in what timeframe? however does one live your success?

What's your expertise in my industry?

What's your expertise in my country/city?

What's your expertise developing international sites?

What square measure your most vital SEO techniques?

How long have you ever been in business?

How am i able to expect to speak with you? can you share with American state all the changes you create to my website, and supply careful data concerning your recommendations and therefore the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs will offer shoppers with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the business a black eye through their excessively aggressive selling efforts and their tries to control computer program ends up in unfair ways in which. Practices that violate our tips could end in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or maybe the removal of your website from our index. Here square measure some things to consider:

One common scam is that the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a website by victimisation deceptive redirects. These shadow domains typically are closely-held by the SEO World Health Organization claims to be functioning on a client's behalf. However, if the link sours, the SEO could purpose the domain to a unique website, or maybe to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the consumer has paid to develop a competitory website closely-held entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit follow is to put "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's website somewhere. The SEO guarantees this may create the page additional relevant for additional queries. this is often inherently false since individual pages square measure seldom relevant for a large vary of keywords. additional insidious, however, is that these entranceway pages typically contain hidden links to the SEO's different shoppers in addition. Such entranceway pages drain away the link quality of a website and route it to the SEO and its different shoppers, which can embrace sites with unsavory or felonious content.

If you're feeling that you just were deceived by associate SEO in a way, you'll wish to report it.

In the u.  s., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints concerning deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a grievance, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on on "File a grievance on-line," decision 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission

CRC-240

Washington, D.C. 20580

If your grievance is against a corporation in a very country aside from the u.  s., please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.

Be cautious of SEO corporations and internet consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.

Amazingly, we have a tendency to get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,

I visited your web site and detected that you just don't seem to be listed in most of the foremost search engines and directories..."

Reserve an equivalent skepticism for unsought email concerning search engines as you are doing for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to assist transfer funds from boot out dictators.

No one will guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to ensure rankings, maintain a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. there's no priority submit for Google. In fact, the sole thanks to submit a website to Google directly is thru our Add uniform resource locator page or by submitting a Sitemap and you'll be able to do that yourself at no value whatever.

Be careful if a corporation is uncommunicative  or will not clearly make a case for what they will do.

Ask for explanations if one thing is unclear. If associate SEO creates deceptive or dishonorable content on your behalf, like entranceway pages or "throwaway" domains, your website may well be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you're answerable for the actions of any corporations you rent, therefore it is best to take care you recognize specifically however they will "help" you. If associate SEO has FTP access to your server, they must be willing to clarify all the changes they're creating to your website.

You should ne'er need to link to associate SEO.

Avoid SEOs that bring up the ability of "free-for-all" links, link quality schemes, or submitting your website to thousands of search engines. These square measure generally useless exercises that do not have an effect on your ranking within the results of the foremost search engines -- a minimum of, not in a very approach you'd probably fancy to be positive.

Choose sagely.

While you concentrate on whether or not to travel with associate SEO, you'll wish to try and do some analysis on the business. Google is a method to try and do that, of course. you would possibly conjointly search out a number of of the cautionary tales that have appeared within the press, as well as this text on one significantly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. whereas Google does not discuss specific corporations, we've encountered corporations line of work themselves SEOs World Health Organization follow practices that square measure clearly on the far side the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

Be sure to know wherever the money goes.

While Google ne'er sells higher ranking in our search results, many different search engines mix pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular internet search results. Some SEOs can promise to rank you extremely in search engines, however place you within the advertising section instead of within the search results. a number of SEOs can even modification their bid costs in real time to form the illusion that they "control" different search engines and may place themselves within the slot of their selection. This scam does not work with Google as a result of our advertising is clearly labelled and separated from our search results, however take care to raise any SEO you are considering that fees go toward permanent inclusion and that apply toward temporary advertising.

What square measure the foremost common abuses an internet site owner is probably going to encounter?

What square measure another things to appear out for?

There square measure a number of warning signs that you just is also managing a scalawag SEO. it is from a comprehensive list, therefore if you've got any doubts, you must trust your instincts. By all suggests that, be happy to run away if the SEO:

owns shadow domains

puts links to their different shoppers on entranceway pages

offers to sell keywords within the address bar

doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that seem on search results pages

guarantees ranking, however solely on obscure, long keyword phrases you'd get anyway

operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS information

gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware

has had domains off from Google's index or isn't itself listed in Google

[wickedbananas]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2kDtVRN via IFTTT

[cesarhcastrojr]

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[identityshine]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build posted first on http://ift.tt/2maTWEr

[ubizheroes]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[swunlimitednj]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2lBWYER via SW Unlimited

[lawrenceseitz22]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2kYRLnf via IFTTT

[tracisimpson]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[holmescorya]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[neilmberry]

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors’ size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build published first on http://elitelimobog.blogspot.com