#it's also only Mostly edited so if u see errors that's why

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

Natural Space and Drawn-On Suns

Summary: In a world filled with soulmates, Roman had long ago accepted that ve was never going to have one. The Universe had chosen to be a bitch to vim, and ve was stuck with that. So even though it was very in-character, Roman thought it was pretty rude of the Universe to make vim fall so hopelessly in love with two soulmates, too. Content: (Not actually) unrequited love, (mutual) pining, mention/reference to various (minor) injuries, technically one very minor reference to self-harm, panic attack, some poorly timed laughing, references to not sleeping well/bad sleeping habits, happy ending; nb!roman, nb!remy, genderfluid!logan, all characters are implied to be aromantic, soulmate au Ships: QPR rolosleep, pre-established losleep Note: For the majority of this, Logan uses the atlantis pronoun set- a/lan/atla/atlan/atlantiself. I mention this because the ‘a’ pronoun confused me many a time while writing, and I don’t want it to confuse you while reading

~

Confessions. Roman loved them…

...as tropes.

In real life? Not so much.

Maybe it would’ve been better if they weren’t soulmates. Maybe it would’ve been better if ve had a soulmate of vis own. Maybe it would’ve been better if Roman’s concept of romance existed past poorly written dime novels and cheesy romcoms.

Maybe it would’ve been just as hard if all the odds were in vis favor.

But as they stood, they weren’t great.

And yet… Roman still wanted to confess.

No, scratch that.

Needed to confess.

Ve couldn’t go on like this. They were just… so in love. Almost too in love, depending on who you asked, but Roman never saw it like that. Maybe that’s because ve’s biased. Ve found ve didn’t care that much.

They were real soulmates, unlike some of them. Some matches never clicked. Some took time.

Logan and Remy took time, but they hadn’t needed it. You could see it in their every action, their every word, their every small glance at the other. They didn’t even have a good meet-cute and they still fit better together than any couple Roman had ever seen. From two strangers forced to share the last seat on the bus to soulmates who’s every move around the other was laced with something, something more than love, something that was made from the stars themselves.

And it was etched across their skin too, the stars and constellations that decorated Logan’s skin at every spot Remy had bled and the planets on Remy that marked the spot of Logan’s every bruise. Space flowed in their veins and held them together.

Roman wasn’t as lucky. For all the beauty ve had seen in soul markings, it had only ever been on others. It had never been scales on vis burns or flowers on vis scars- better put, never markings on vis skin where vis soulmate’s had been marred. Because ve didn’t have a soulmate.

And that had hurt. Hurt worse than the tiny cuts and bruises that had near constantly lined vis arms until high school, in the hopes that vis soulmate would see them and know Roman was there. Hurt worse than going through high school watching people laugh as swirls and hearts appeared on their skin, ruminating on what their other halves could be getting up to. Hurt worse than seeing the college couples roaming campus, hand in hand, matching in injuries and patterns and bright smiles filled with adoration for the other. It hurt to know the universe, or fate, or whatever had abandoned vim, had left vim to yearn for the sort of connection it was supposed to give vim but didn’t. Left to yearn for desires that would never be fulfilled.

So, of course, in response to vis anger and betrayal and annoyance, the universe (or fate, or whatever) had sent vim Logan and Remy.

Aka, it had stabbed vim in the back and asked vim if ve had anymore complaints about vis situation.

Remy was an astronomy major who was sassy, aloof, and very vocal about the fact that they couldn’t wait to be away from earth and to the stars. Logan was a marine biology major who was withdrawn, sarcastic, and eager to sink into the depths of the ocean. Complete opposites heading in the same direction, Logan had called them once, her head on Remy’s shoulder while they did their homework and muttered about how space didn’t have homework.

Roman had watched them from where ve had been working on vis own bed, wishing that direction was towards vim.

It wasn’t going to be, of course. Multiple soulmates existed. If Roman was meant to be a part of their happiness, ve would’ve been their soulmate.

But ve wasn’t.

And that should’ve been the end of it. Ve should’ve moved on, should’ve settled with the fact ve was only ever going to maybe find love with others like vim, should’ve been happy to be Logan and Remy’s friend and nothing more.

Vis heart had other plans.

It refused to give up. It refused to move on. It refused to accept the kindness Logan and Remy showed vim as acts of friendship and instead went searching for proof of something closer.

Remy bringing Roman a coffee when they got one wasn’t Remy just being nice to and considerate of their roommate, it was a gift and sign of affection. Logan helping Roman with some of vis homework wasn’t them just trying to be helpful, it was an excuse to spend more time with Roman. Them inviting Roman so many places with them wasn’t just a gesture of friendship but instead a precursor to actual dates.

Vis heart was wrong, of course. It didn’t actually mean anything that Remy had vis coffee order memorized or that Logan always leaned so close to vim when showing vim vis mistake or that ve couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had been on a just-them date (even when Roman hadn’t been able to come to the outings they had invited vim on, they always ended up cancelling anyways, normally staying in with vim instead). Vis heart was still wrong, still seeing things that weren’t there.

So why was Roman entertaining it? Why was ve going to confess to Logan and Remy, admit that ve could see the galaxies on their skin in their eyes as well, lay vimself open before them even though ve knew ve would only be met with rejection?

Partially because ve knew it was the only way to crush that hope, once and for all. The only way to get over them was to know ve could truly never have them. Even if it stung like poison and burned like magma, Roman needed them to stare vim in the eyes and tell vim they liked vim, but only as a friend.

It was mostly because Roman was a lovesick fool.

So, here ve was. Sitting on vis bed, dressed up nice in a white dress layered in red, good looking but not uncomfortable, feeling like a complete wreck.

The three of them were supposed to be going to dinner. Some place nice, nicer than Roman was really used to, especially for something as simple as friends hanging out. But Remy had said they were also celebrating Logan’s most recent test score being absolutely stunning (and Logan just being stunning in general), so Roman had accepted it. And ve was going to tell them then, after ve had snuck around them and paid the bill vimself and when the meal was at end, so when things went horribly ve’d be able to just leave right after. It was a simple plan. It was a great plan. Ve even knew the outcome, so it was a guaranteed plan too.

Yet there was a pit in vis stomach the size of the moon and it felt like there were stars in vis throat, stealing vis breath as ve tried to breathe around them. Because for as good of a plan as it was, there was still one problem: Roman.

Ve didn’t want to know that Logan and Remy didn’t want vim. Ve didn’t want them to tell vim they only liked vim as a friend. Ve didn’t want that hope to be crushed.

But ve couldn’t keep going on like this either, couldn’t keep pretending to just be their friend, couldn’t just swallow down vis affections like a bad aftertaste. No, Roman had two choices left to vim, and the fact that they were a rock and a hard place didn’t matter- ve had to pick one.

Roman’s phone dinged, and ve didn’t need to check it to know it was Remy, letting vim know that they and Logan were there, ready to go. Roman just had to reply that ve was ready, or even that ve needed another minute, and then head out and meet them, and go to dinner, and… and…

Apparently, there was a third choice: end up destroyed, right smack dab in the middle of the other two options.

Ve wasn’t sure when ve had slipped off the bed, but ve must have, since the ground beneath vim was no longer soft and no longer allowed vim to press vis fingers into it. Ve was vaguely aware that vis phone was buzzing more, more than it should have, probably, but ve couldn’t truly bring vimself to care. Ve couldn’t bring vimself to care about anything, right then, anything that wasn’t Logan and Remy and messing everything up and dreams that would never come true and the blood roaring in vis ears and now that ve was thinking about it was ve even breathing anymore, did that even matter anymore-

Warmth, heavy and real, on vis shoulder. On instinct, Roman sucked in a breath, and though it was shaky and weak, it was something. There was something- someone- someones- in front of vim, but Roman couldn’t focus on them, the single breath ve had gotten not nearly enough to last long. Soon enough, ve was choking again, choking on stars ve had never had and never would.

More warmth, this one warm but tempered, prepared, steady, took one of Roman’s hands, pulling it away from vim until it was planted against a warm surface, one that was moving up and down in a controlled manner, slight squeezes of vis hand inviting vim to try and follow the pattern. And Roman tried to, ve really did, not knowing why ve trusted the warmth or why ve wanted to follow its suggestions, but ve did, so ve tried, and tried again and again and again even when ve couldn’t keep with the pattern just right, the warmth on vis shoulder supporting vim the whole way through.

As Roman’s breathing started to even out, so did vis focus start to come back. Vis gaze seemed to be pointed solely at the floor, but Roman could see the two figures in vis peripheral- pressed slacks and polo matched with a lovely tie, and a dazzling dress that lesser fools might’ve called garish. Ah. So it was them.

Some part of Roman was nagging that this was an issue, that there was a problem here, but ve was still occupied with the much too difficult task of breathing to worry about it much. Ve slumped over more and more with every breath, fairly certain ve was leaning against Remy, but not aware enough to care. They certainly didn’t seem to mind, their arm slipping over Roman’s shoulders and pulling vim closer to them.

“It’s alright, you’re alright, you’re okay.” They soothed quietly, their voice gentle and melodic to Roman’s ears. “Let’s get you back on the bed, yeah? Comfier up there, angel.”

A warning bell popped up in the back of Roman’s mind, something about the importance of nicknames and petnames, but ve ignored it in favor of nodding and breathing. The grip on vis shoulders tightened, and a moment later ve was vertical, only to almost instantly go back to being down. Logan was grabbing Remy’s pillows off their bed, placing them along with Roman’s, so that when Remy properly laid vim down ve was still supported mostly-upright by the pillow stack.

Remy helped settle vim, coming to sit down on the inside of vis bed, partly pressed against the wall and next to Roman’s head. Logan sat in a similar spot on the edge of the bed, frowning at Roman while Remy brushed vis hair out of vis face.

For a few minutes, they stayed like that, Roman quietly breathing while Remy and Logan sat next to vim, Remy having moved on to playing with vis hair while Logan’s hand rested on Roman’s shoulder, reassuring and constant. It almost would’ve been perfect, being so close and relaxed with them, were it not for the reason they had ended up like that in the first place.

“So,” Remy said, finally, breaking the silence gently, “are we going to talk about this?”

“About what?” Roman asked, vis eyes have fallen shut at some point, though ve was still very much awake. Ve was pretty sure ve knew what Remy wanted to talk about, but a bit of playing-dumb and buying time couldn’t hurt either way.

“Oh, just the fact that you were having a panic attack a moment ago.” Remy said, tone faux conversational but unable to completely hide the undercurrent of worry in their voice.

Roman half-shrugged. “It’s nothing.” Ve answered. Because it was nothing, really. All secrets came to light eventually, so it was for the best Roman keep vis under wraps for as long as possible, and deal with the fallout whenever it occurred naturally. A simple conclusion that ve certainly hadn’t needed to panic over. And now that it was figured out, ve was okay, so it was nothing.

Remy didn’t seem to agree. “Oh, yeah, because struggling to just breathe for five minutes is clearly the result of nothing.” They snapped. Roman flinched, and they immediately drew away from vim in response, looking away, expression abashed.

Logan reached across Roman, placing a hand on Remy’s arm in support, and Roman tried to ignore the lurch in vis stomach at the loving gesture. A looked at Remy for a moment, the two of them seeming to have a silent conversation before Remy nodded, looking reassured as Logan turned atla gaze on Roman.

“Remy’s just concerned, Roman, as am I. And with good reason.” Logan said calmly, though there was a look in atla eye that Roman knew well from late nights when Remy couldn’t sleep. “While panic attacks can be brought on by small things, we’ve never seen you have one. That suggests that whatever caused it is very important- at the very least, it’s not ‘nothing.’”

“And even if it was something ‘small,’ we’d still want to know.” Remy tacked on, voice deliberately much softer. “You’re upset, love, and we want to help you as best we can.”

With breathing no longer as serious of an issue as it had been, Roman was able to make the connection between nicknames and petnames and the alarm that had been going off in vis mind- Remy used a lot of nicknames interchangeably as petnames, but there were a few that they only used for people they cared dearly for (aka Logan).

Amongst those few? ‘Angel’ and ‘love.’

Roman forced vimself to keep breathing normally, well aware hyperventilating more would only be a cause for more concern for the other two. And they were already concerned enough, with Remy calling vim by nicknames that were meant for people closer to them then Roman was and with Logan looking at vim with a fond sort of worry reserved for Remy and Remy alone. So worried over vim they were treating vim like ve was someone close to them. Like ve was someone who truly mattered.

Like ve was someone who was their soulmate.

And all of a sudden, Roman was back to the problem of confessions. Ve couldn’t go on like this, no matter how badly ve wanted to pretend ve could. Ve needed to let them know ve was fine, that the panic had been over something silly that they couldn’t fix anyways, so they could realize how much their attempts at kindness came off as cruel. It would hurt, but it would ultimately be for the best, and Roman knew that was what mattered in the end.

Ve cleared vis throat. “It was… it’s about you guys.”

Logan and Remy both stiffened at that, casting each other a quick glance that Roman couldn’t decipher but ve didn’t miss either. Ve felt bad, well-aware that vis phrasing could’ve been better, but ve needed the build-up. Ve knew if ve tried to say it all at once, ve’d just chicken out, and that would get them all nowhere.

“Roman, if Remy or I have ever done anything to greatly distress you-”

“No, it’s not that.” Roman said, cutting Logan off.

Logan frowned, once more glancing over at Remy, who offered an equally confused-but-worried expression. Logan looked back at Roman. “Then… what’s wrong?”

Roman took a deep breath, steeling vimself. “I’m in love with you. Both of you.”

Dead silence. Roman wasn’t surprised. There wasn’t really a good way to react to that, after all.

“I’m sorry.” Roman said quietly, feeling ve had to fill the silence with something, anything. Ve needed to apologize, anyways. “I know you’re soulmates and I know you don’t- I know you just see me as a friend. And that’s- that’s fine, really, I love what we have, I just- I’m sorry.”

The silence once more stretched out as Roman finished, focusing vis attention on vis feet, trying to ignore the tears stinging at the corner of vis eyes in anticipation of all the words that were to come.

And then… laughter.

Hesitant at first, but louder soon enough, startling Roman into looking over and its source. Remy was leaning against the wall next to them, laughing, trying not to look at Roman as they did so. Ve looked over at Logan in confusion, not finding any answers in lan covering atla mouth with atla hand, hiding a smile or a frown Roman wasn’t sure. Ve supposed vis hopeless love could be seen as funny, or perhaps a joke, but… well… this wasn’t one of the outcomes ve had really expected.

“I’m- I’m so sorry, baby, this is a horrible reaction.” Remy said after a moment, once more looking at Roman and smiling for some reason or another. They looked happy, really happy, more happy than a bad joke about Roman’s love could possibly make them- right?

“And likely misleading.” Logan pointed out as well, though a sounded amused. Once more, Roman glanced between them, trying to figure out the joke ve wasn’t a part of.

“I know you guys probably think this is a joke, but I’m being serious.” Roman said, frustrated. Ve just wanted them to acknowledge what ve had said, acknowledge its ramifications, acknowledge what it meant for vim and for them all. “It’s not funny.”

Remy stifled their laughs at that, though they were still smiling, a sweet, fond thing that Roman wanted to see forever even if ve knew ve didn’t deserve it for a second. “We know, Ro. It’s just… bad timing, I think.”

Logan nodded, atla face set back into a neutral expression, save for the twitch up at the corner of atla lips and the soft look in atla eyes. “Roman, do you know why we were going to dinner tonight?”

“To celebrate your recent test score…?” Roman said, slowly, fairly certain that was the right answer but unsure why it mattered right now.

“I haven’t taken a test in at least two weeks, so no, not that.” Logan responded.

Roman frowned and looked towards Remy. “You said-”

“You kinda put me on the spot, hun.” Remy excused, chuckling a bit. “It was the first thing that came to mind as to why we’d all be going out to such a fancy place- I didn’t think you’d buy it, but I certainly wasn’t going to complain when you did.”

“Oh.” Roman said, accepting the answer before frowning harder, still confused. “But if that’s not why we were going out… what was the actual reason?”

“Good word choice there- Ro, we were going to ask if you wanted to be our partner.”

It was Roman’s turn to be silent, looking between vis two friends and squishes quicker than ve had been earlier, waiting for their expressions to break, for them to laugh, for them to mock vim for falling for it. But they didn’t, they remained looking the faintest bits amused but mostly fond, fond for vim, and Roman had the vague feeling ve was going to start crying soon.

“But… you’re soulmates.” Roman said, not wanting to crush vis hope but not wanting to only offer it false chances. “You’re not fated to be with anyone else.”

“Technically, no.” Logan agreed. “Which is why we didn’t want to tell you the true purpose of this evening. I confess, we were… worried. Roman, you’re attractive-”

“Very attractive, incredibly handsome.”

“-and talented-”

“So amazingly talented.”

“-and just generally, as they say, a ‘catch.’”

“A wonderful catch.”

Logan gently hit Remy’s arm, atla expression one meant to be of annoyance for being interrupted but coming off only as in love. Remy just smirked back, and Logan rolled atla eyes, and turned back to Roman and looked at vim the exact same way a had been looking at Remy, just minus the poor attempts at faux exasperation.

“And yet, you never seemed to show any interest in having a partner.” Logan continued, frowning just the tiniest bit. “We assumed you held to old traditions- the idea that you couldn’t be with those who were marked for soulmates, only others who weren’t.”

“Which is why we were going to go to such a nice restaurant.” Remy explained. “We figured, hey, if we ask and you say no and everything’s awkward, at least we’ll be awkward in style.”

“That was your idea alone, Remy.”

“We’re soulmates, love, everything I do is your problem as well.”

“Unfortunately.” Logan muttered, rolling atla eyes even as a smiled. Remy matched atla smile before leaning over to kiss atla cheek, smile growing when Logan’s cheeks dusted pink at the action. “You are being a distraction.”

“The best.” Remy responded cheerfully. They leaned back to their side of the bed, moving forward a bit so they could hold the side of Roman’s face, their smile having taken on a slightly dopey look. “We could go through all the exacts of falling for you and worrying about falling for you- and we will, later, if you want- but I think you have enough of the gist for now, darling.”

Roman met Remy’s eyes, slightly addicted to looking into them, the dark brown so often hidden ve wouldn’t want to look away even if they weren’t filled with a happy, bright sort of affection. “So… what now, then?”

Logan laughed, softly, the sound immediately drawing Roman’s attention to lan, watching with adoring fascination as a smiled gently at vim. A looked away for only a moment to take one of Roman’s hands in atla own, pressing a soft kiss to the back of it, making Roman blush.

“Now, assuming you are amicable to the idea, the three of us get together queerplatonically.” Logan explained, simply and sweetly.

“As partners.” Remy added, shifting their position on the bed so that they were closer to Roman and pressing a kiss to vis forehead as they did so. Roman blushed harder, a development Remy looked delighted by.

“You guys are acting like we already are partners.” Roman pointed out.

“Well, you have admitted that you hold queerplatonic feelings for us, and we’ve confessed to having the same for you.” Logan pointed out, now holding Roman’s hand between both of atlan. “Apologies if we are making inaccurate assumptions, but there appears to be no reason for us not to be partners already.”

“Lo, love, you’re sounding a little impatient there.” Remy said, teasingly, smiling at Logan from where they were reclining beside Roman’s head.

Logan just rolled atla eyes. “It has been twenty-two near-insufferable weeks of you complaining about how pretty your roommate is and twenty-one messy weeks of falling for vim too because you wouldn’t stop talking about vim. We have confirmation that ve returns our affections. I wish to now show these affections. Any delays in me doing so are only further annoyances.”

Remy laughed. “Well, you heard my starshine.” They said, grinning at Roman. “Have anything to say in your defense?”

Roman bit vis lip. “We’re not soulmates.”

“Logan’s parents were soulmates and they divorced two years after they had lan.” Remy said. “Meanwhile, of my five parents, only one set of them were soulmates, and all of them have been cheesy and in love as long as I can remember.”

“So while your fears in that particular regard were valid… using it as a defense is not.” Logan told vim, squeezing vis hand, reminding both that a was there and that a was tired of waiting. “Anything else?”

Roman didn’t respond at first, taking a moment to think, but ve wasn’t sure why ve bothered. It was a little laughable, how quickly vis fears over being in love with them fell apart once the soulmates thing was out of the equation. Ve knew they were polyam, as Remy had mentioned it multiple times over the past few weeks- something Roman was now realizing may have been on purpose- and if they liked vim back then there was no need to worry over unrequited love.

Really, there wasn’t even a reason to think. They loved vim, and they didn’t care that ve wasn’t their soulmate. What more could Roman want?

“I guess not.” Ve said, finally, offering the two of them a smile that ve knew came off as awkward but ve hoped also came off as sweet, or fond, or nice, or any one of the dozens of things they were. And from the way Remy smiled back, brighter and happier than Roman thought ve had ever seen them before, ve had the feeling vis smile was just fine.

“Finally.” Logan said in direct contrast, moving from sitting on the edge of the bed to being stretched out across it, pressed into Roman’s side in mere seconds. A peppered kisses across the entirety of the side of Roman’s face, ignoring vis once-more rapidly rising flush. As quickly as a had started, Logan settled, pressing atla face into the crook of Roman’s neck, muttering to atlantiself about what sounded like the annoyances of pining over stupid pretty people.

“Wh-what just happened?” Roman asked, looking over at Remy, wishing ve could pretend the stutter was from exhaustion and not how flustered ve currently was. Not that it seemed Remy would’ve bought the ‘exhaustion’ excuse anyways, chuckling at Roman as they glanced over at Logan fondly.

“Logan’s officially claimed you as a partner.” Remy explained, tone soft and loving. “A’ll never admit it out loud, but a’s very cuddly with the people a loves. A’s been ranting about how warm you look for weeks now.”

“Oh.” Roman said, equally soft, looking at Logan’s messy dark hair, covering any part of atla face that Roman might’ve been able to see past where it was pushed against vis neck. “Is a asleep?”

Roman was answered by a huff from Logan atlantiself, tightening atla hold on Roman and shifting atla head. Remy chuckled again, reaching over to run a hand through Logan’s hair, Logan humming contentedly in response.

“A will be soon enough.” Logan’s hums turned annoyed. “Oh, hush. You sleep worse than me and you know it.” A more questioning hum. “Roman’s also tired and has nowhere to be, ve will not mind if you fall asleep wrapped around vim.”

“But dinner-”

“Has been cancelled since we saw you having a panic attack.” Remy cut vim off smoothly, still playing with Logan’s hair as they kissed Roman’s forehead. “Your only evening plans are to lay here and let Logan cuddle you and probably take a nap while you’re at it.”

“I think I can get behind those plans.” Roman replied, loath to move or disrupt  Logan in any way. “And afterwards? When a wakes back up?”

Remy shrugged. “A’ll still want to hold you, so probably watch a movie. Or take turns talking about how much we love you. Or find all your scars- I know you have a lot, sweetheart, you were a trouble child- so me and Lo can map them out properly.”

“Map them out…?”

“I was thinking suns.” Remy answered, their hand moving from Logan’s head down atla arm, tracing over one of the constellation patterns there. “Bright and energetic and beautiful.”

Roman realized what Remy meant as ve looked at Logan’s soulmarks, and at the black sketch of saturn on the back of Remy’s hand from where Logan had accidentally trapped atla hand in a door. “That would be… nice.” Ve decided quietly, looking at the planets and stars and thinking suns would look nice amongst them. “Could you also…”

“I think you’ll wear the universe very well.” Remy said by way of response, their hand slipping all the way down Logan’s arm so that they could hold atlan. They moved back, pulling their joined hands over Roman’s chest, Remy using their free hand to rest their head on. “But for now, you should probably try to get some sleep, angel.”

Though ve wanted to argue, wanted to say ve wasn’t tired and would much rather talk to Remy about just how long the whole mutual-pining thing had been going on, vis earlier exhaustion from the panic attack was creeping back in, and with Logan pressed against vis side and Remy just as close resisting its call had become nigh impossible. So instead, Roman wrapped an arm around Logan, holding lan even closer. Ve curled up a bit, getting comfortable, before glancing back at Remy. They were still resting on their hand, eyes open but half-lidded, watching Roman and Logan with a tired smile.

“Don’t you need sleep too?” Roman asked as ve settled vis head over Logan’s, reveling in how close and warm and soft a was.

“I’ll go to bed soon enough, don’t worry.” Remy assured, softly kissing the top of Roman’s head. “Sleep well, love.”

And Roman did, feeling melty from the fondness in Remy’s voice, feeling warm from Logan against vim, and feeling only pure joy at the thought of being a part of Logan and Remy’s universe.

[wizzycore]

I wanna hear more about kadjal, she sounds like best friend material

ok buckle in this is goin be a long explanation teehee

ill add a read below as well its very long `>`

so before i explain who kadjal is besides her intro post i need to explain what champions are.

(edit: NVM i cant find the button. praying tumblr doesn't show this entire post in longform in the tag)

ok anyway so

in my wiz canon, a big big piece of ravenwood tradition/folklore is the concept that every half a century (50 years) a wizard who's destined to be a ravenwood student is born with more raw power / potential than others. sometimes they're on earth sometimes they're born in wizard city / the spiral.

but it's more than folklore, a), and b), it's more like clockwork. after long enough and many, many iterations, that 50 years number has proven exact. exactly 50 years after the death of one champion, another champion is born. this is like one of the primary ways of identifying one. the error on birthdates is at most a month.

there is one champion per school of magic! they're never all alive at the same time due to the birth/death lag.

nobody knows exactly why this happens (note: i had this headcanon VERY early in replaying the game - maybe level 30 onward, so i had the first proposed 'theory' by characters be that it was like a bloodline sorcerer thing, but as the idea started to fit more with canon lore, i changed it) but one of the more significant theories is that it's some sort of reincarnation loop for certain ravenwood druids' spirits, anchored to the world itself.

before my main character's time, (and he did not know this for a long time) champions took the role of bartleby's interns, basically. instead of doing errands for ambrose they sometimes also did them for bartleby. this was ravenwood's curriculum of guidance for champions -- because they needed so much guiding, and who better to do it? but after a couple of disappearances, maiming, etc. (the school being not entirely blameless), they retired this system and champions were taught mainstream with others, and the stain of the guidance system was forgotten.

the replacement system was, in fact, worse! and my main was one of the last guinea pigs for this new system, though he didn't know it.

anyway, another part of the legend is that champions all have some sort of magical title, and it changes depending on the school.

for fire (and my main character), it's lightbringer. (fun fact: i was also only like level 30 when i decided this. khrysalis was a TRIP AND A HALF for me.)

there are some other titles i have written out but i cant find them all on hand lol.

SO. now that u know all that, it doesn't sound so weird when i say, 'kadjal is a champion!'.

Kadjal (life champion) and her best friend Daniel (death champion - title 'Cryptkeeper' and later simply 'Keeper') thrived under the bartleby system. ...Mostly.

see, what all champions realize after long enough is that all the policies that ambrose puts in place about them, (no matter how veiled with special guidance from bartleby) only correspond to finding god or greatness in already marked children. i.e, in a sort of monkey typewriter way, surely one day ambrose will produce an epic hero or fulfiller of prophecy.

(im not super kept up on morganthe lore! but from what i recall, morganthe certainly could've been considered one of the earliest champions of ravenwood. but for what school?)

anywho, because of these policies, both daniel and kadjal (and the other two champions who happened to be alive at the same time) ended up attempting the scion trials at some point. and, too, they realized that they were being somewhat screwed by ambrose. being sent to 'destinies' that involved death or doom for reasons unknown.

during this time, something (that kadjal hasn't yet revealed to my main) disastrous happened at ravenwood, something so shameful (hint: a Huge Failure) that kadjal sheds her champion title and disassociates from championhood for a while until it forces itself back on her. she ends up taking a school neutral version of daniel's title after that.

anyway, so both the ambrose typewriter fuckery and kadjal's accident are why the two (daniel and kadjal) were most grateful when their revealed destiny involved finding some sort of "shrine to mortality" and helping to safeguard it -- some massive artefact of life and death.

they started in mooshu, which is where many to this day believe they stayed. but in mooshu they found legends of the wheel of mandalla and realized That is where they were supposed to be going. how did they get inside? idk. grace of raven or whatever. but then they chilled in there for like 80 years learning the customs of samsara and just becoming total monks.

and the two always had a deep bond! but in samsara they really kinda Fused as people. they spoke as one, they became deeply connected down to the level or thought, etc. and its super comfortable for them, almost an ideal existence. but it does in fact look kinda creepy from an outside perspective.

in samsara they examined the champion system wholly through the lens of mandalla, and finally found some peace. (that, AND their only exposures to ravenwood were now reduced to newspaper clippings... bound to ease a poor soul).

but yeah, she's best friend material! you've just gotta be best friends with daniel too.

she's the more neat and neurotic of the two, where daniel is more free spirited, but the two balance each other out so well you'd barely tell. so besides that, she's warm, observant, and somebody who goes through an entire box of teabags in a week and a half.

these days shes more like a mentor. after a brief introduction with my main character (carlos... permhamps you've seen him...) during the empyrea questline, she didn't see him for a while....

until the end of lemuria! how and why carlos came back ill leave unsaid for now because i know some of the mutuals are still working on finishing up lemuria, but basically, carlos came back for a chat, ended up staying to try and learn/secondary in life magic....

which was mostly kadjal's recommendation and solution! its a slightly selfish one for a couple of reasons ( 1. teaching the scion life magic... in a horrible way, it kinda fulfills that feeling of service she used to get at ravenwood helping bartleby. 2. the scion has access to tree magic!!!!! its a no brainer to teach him life magic!!! she'd love to see how the two interact 3. ....her old girl best friend was the fire champion. a kid named sheila lightbringer. just snuffed out like a candle before she even graduated. kadjal mentoring her 'reincarnation', a person that possibly held part of her soul, feels like a way of apologizing for her fate.)

but its something that will end up really good for all parties involved. 😌......

[gukptune]

Blood Rank || One [m]

Pairing: jimin x reader

Genre: angst, vampire!au, highschool!au, eventual smut

Warnings: vampire!reader, human!jimin, mean!hoseok, asshole!taehyung, bloodbag!jungkook

Words: 2.3k

Plot Summary: Jimin is afraid for his best friend makes a deal with the devil he’s been in love with since he was 14.

a/n: not edited, sorry for any mistakes or errors in spelling and grammar!

B L O O D  R A N K - Part 1 / Part 2

This was no normal high school. Van Emrick’s Academy is a school in the supernatural world in which humans and vampires strive to live alongside each other. In it’s situated location with a higher ratio of vampires to humans, it’s high school was the same.

Location of the most wealthy of vampires and humans who worked together in business and relations. It’s high school was the exact same. With a student made hierarchy of blood rankings. Let’s just say the more vampire you are the more power you have within the system.

The supernatural world held all types of creatures of the night, including werewolves, witches, vampires and hybrids. Each species being restricted to it’s labeled school, humans had the upper hand here in being able to attend any of the three reigning schools.

Van Emrick’s Academy for Vampyres, Adolphus’ College for Lycans and lastly Necromancer Institute for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Hyrids, which were rare, get to choose their schools too but with limitations where they need to be somewhat related to the corresponding species.

The most prestigious and most powerful school of them all is of course Van Emrick’s due to their generous stream of funds towards the government by parents.

Park Jimin, was lucky enough to attend Van Emrick’s Academy― mostly due to his loaded parents and intelligence which he never really boasted about.

He boarded at the Academy, which was normal and all students do as the dorms were specular. He boarded mostly due to the fact that his parents believed that he’d have his mind strictly on education, which was something he believed in too but with those blood thirsty vampires, high rates of hormones and highly attractive people he was distracted nearly all the time.

He boarded in the Azrael dormitory alongside his housemates. Students were separated into seven different houses according to their corresponding Archangel. Extremely for the novelty and not practicality as students merely stayed within their houses in the dorms and common room only and mixed around otherwise.

There he was just laying on his bed in his dorm suite. He shared the large room with 3 other students. A text from his best friend woke him.

Sooyoung: U up? [6:42 am]

Sooyoung: Im in the cafeteria if ur wondering :D [6:42 am]

Sooyoung: Meet me here [6:43 am]

Jimin immediately stood up off his bed, he was already dressed and merely slipped his shoes on before taking off. His dorm mates were all still sleeping, probably due to how early he was up. Moving quietly outside the room and closing the door as quietly as he could to not wake anyone up.

He was out of the room in his clad uniform, sporting the academy’s signature dark navy uniform and his house crest on his blazer’s breast pocket. His tie done neatly and his blonde hair styled to perfection.

Jimin: Alright

Jimin: I’ll be there in 5

Which was a lie, he wasn’t going to be there in 5 minutes because it would be impossible. Her dorm was literally across the school and he wasn’t exactly going to run because he’d look extremely stupid.

Sooyoung: Okii take ur time

Sooyoung: im going to do some homework as I wait okay

Jimin knew that she wouldn’t eat without him as they always waited for each other. As he was texting a reply to her he was rammed into by something, well someone.

He fell to the floor with his phone a distance away from him. Uttering a low mumble. He looked up to see the person that ran into him.

Well shit. He thought.

In front of him was a practically shivering student. Jimin could see the collar on the poor guy’s neck. He was a blood bag. Jimin breathed slowly not really knowing what to do.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s okay. I’m fine,” Jimin quickly cut him off, giving him a reassuring smile before getting up slowly. The other boy trying to help him up but was too afraid to touch Jimin.

The hierarchy in this school was ridiculous, up in the top tier were the student council members usually students of the most pure blood line and had the most influence, of course they are leading all the students. In the second tier, were pure blood vampires, then third were half bloods, fourth were those turned, whilst confusing humans held the tier between third and fourth since their influence mattered more. Including their wealth and connections. Lastly were the blood bags, also called “tractare”, mostly these were anyone who made deals with the council and couldn’t pay it back.

You might believe that this school’s currency was blood but it wasn’t it was favours and real money. People wanted things done, scores raised, reputation raised or rumours dead would make offerings. If unpaid the council turns them into blood bags, meaning that their lives were now in the president’s hands.

Only the most desperate go to them, being their offers were hard to pay for, that’s why most students turn into blood bags so easily.

Jimin knew this boy, he was in his Chemistry class. His name was Jungkook, rumours risen about him watching girl’s in the changing room and jacking off to them. He wanted all of that to disappear so he asked the council, Jimin didn’t know what the payment was but he failed to pay, now he lives as feed.

Jungkook was shaking. This boy was pale and frail. Jimin couldn’t help but feel so bad for him.

But a voice boomed over the crowding audience. “Now, now, tractare-shi, learn your manners.”

The voice was head secretary, Jung Hoseok. He shoved Jungkook’s head onto the ground. The younger boy immediately began bowing to Jimin, over and over.

Jimin’s eyes practically bulging out of his head. Hoseok merely smirked. Tension rises as Jimin feels extremely worried.

“Sorry about the livestock, he’s fresh, still learning... hope you understand,” He chuckled as he dragged Jungkook by the collar away.

Jimin stood frozen as the students around him disappeared. Running into a student council member was rare, speaking to one was even more rare, well he was being spoken to but still. 

He could finally breathe and made his way to his destination.

“That’s literally so horrible,” Sooyoung sighed as she bit into her croissant, “Why does this system even exist!”

Jimin looked up from his cereal to see his best friend frowning, “I don’t know.”

“We should change it, isn’t it like centuries old. So medieval of the Council to keep an old system,” She suggests, nodding to her own thought.

Jimin couldn’t help but chuckle, “It’s not centuries old, Soo, each time a new President is elected he/she changes the system, since our latest president was elected only a few years ago the system isn’t even half a decade old.”

“So she’s into the whole medieval, humans are lower than vampires thing?” Sooyoung huffs. With the mention of you, the president Jimin blinks briskly.

“Uhm, not defending her but... anyone could be a blood bag. Jungkook is a half blood,” He didn’t want Sooyoung to think he actually cared about anyone apart of the council because she hated them.

Sooyoung sighed, “I guess.”

“Though, I heard that those deals that she makes with everyone are like extreme, because people tend to ask for a lot. Sometimes murder, though I’m sure she doesn’t let that pass but she tends to make sure people don’t get what they want,” She said.

“I’m sure it’s because they want blood bags,” She ended. Concluding by herself.

It was true, they needed the circulation of blood to keep everyone in check. 

“People get paid for blood though, blood donations. Because every vamp pays for them. People get paid for blood and others pay for it,” Jimin said.

Sooyoung nods in agreement, “That’s true, but I heard it’s way better from the vein, that’s why students sometimes offer their body for certain agreeable deals.”

Jimin thought about this deeply. Of course blood was better from the vein, it’s fresh and warm. He felt gross thinking about this but then again it was fascinating just because he wasn’t one of them.

“Anyways enough of this, you know how I was doing that homework well-” Sooyoung’s voice drowned into the background as Jimin’s eyes met with a figure coming into the distance. They came closer, closer to his table.

A hand slammed onto their table as their drinks fell, Sooyoung lets out a shriek at the surprise and Jimin placed his hands on his lap.

“Well, well, Park Jimin,” Vice President, Kim Taehyung nods at Jimin, who gave a little nod back, Taehyung’s eyes met with Sooyoung, “And pretty Miss Park Sooyoung.”

Taehyung slid into the chair next to her and placed his arm over her shoulder, she flinches at this. Kim Taehyung, notorious playboy and your local asshole. His mean attitude and rudeness passed due to his seemingly great connection to the president which is why Jimin secretly hated him. All due to jealousy. 

“You look great, you could eat in the dining hall you know, instead of eating whatever this is,” Taehyung nods at their food tray, “I’d let you bring your lapdog too.”

Which Jimin knew was directed towards him.

Sooyoung pushed Taehyung’s arm off of her, “Gosh, like I’d ever eat in their with you people and Jimin is my best friend- uh all you people do is look down on others-”

“I don’t look down on you, though I wouldn’t mind going down on you,” Taehyung whispered lustfully and groaned at his own imagination. 

Disgusting was all Jimin could think, not the action but merely how Taehyung was saying this to someone who didn’t like him and didn’t want him.

“God! You’re disgusting just go away,” She tried to shove him before he gripped her arm tightly.

He pulled her face closely to his, “Look here, I get what I want, and don’t be rude to me- you’ll find that opposing me will only get you into a very very bad place in this school.”

He literally growled at her. Taehyung was a pureblood vampire, which meant he was extremely powerful in every single way. Jimin wanted to stick up for his friend but he can’t.

“I-” Sooyoung whimpered trying to say something back. Though her lack of words and tone was all that was needed for someone else to step in.

“Tae, get off her, we don’t have time for this,” the sultry voice that lived in Jimin’s wildest dreams broke the tension in the air.

It was you, you stood in your perfectly tailored uniform, that looked different to everyone else’s. Student council members had their own style. Your blazer stuck onto your upper half so tightly with double buttons. Your flat cross tie framing the top of your quite large breasts.

Jimin couldn’t help but stare at your perfectly braided hair and sharp features.

Taehyung coughed and quickly got up and stood next to her. He was whispering things in your ear. Taehyung’s eyes met Jimin’s very lustful eyes. 

As you heard the things Taehyung wanted you to hear you merely nodded. You did see what happened and Tae was going to get it. He can’t make your school look like trash.

Before you could take Tae away he spoke again, “Look at little blondey, got a crush on our President?” He teased, laughing mockingly.

You looked straight at Jimin to see him flush a bright red and his hand picking at eachother. A sign of nerves. You kept a smile in as you let out a soft huff.

“Whatever, Tae-”

“Come on, Jimin-ah. Our gorgeous President is right here in front of you. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to get some, though would she―”

“Kim Taehyung, do not cut me off, now get back to our office before I remove you,” You said, calmingly. As fearfully calm as anyone else could hear.

Taehyung immediately shuts up and with wide eyes walked away, a few members of the council following him as they always do. Taehyung knew not to test your limits as using his full name meant this was the last draw.

“Park Jimin, was it. I’m sorry about him-he’s just you know him,” You straighten your back.

Jimin stuttered looking at you blankly as if he wasn’t believing what was happening, “Uhm- it’s okay―”

“No, it wasn’t, thank you,” Sooyoung cuts him off and thanks you. You felt a little annoyed that she cuts Jimin off but here you get to see that you were definitely not the dominate one in this friendship.

You merely nod and take your leave, as the rest of the council follow you back to deal with Taehyung.

Computer Science was not Jimin’s thing but he took it because he was required to. The only thing he could focus on was your interaction with him which never left his mind. Your face, your body and scent. Better than he ever imagined, he didn’t want to come off as a stalker or creep but you were just... incredible to him. Trying to calm himself off by thinking of light fairy thoughts instead of you.

A beep breaks his trail of thought.

Sooyoung: u okay? u ran off

Jimin recalled what happened, right after you left he felt as if he was going to throw up.

Jimin: yea just felt sick

Sooyoung: oh thats okay

Sooyoung: was it the president

Sooyoung: was it what tae said u know about her

Jimin didn’t know what to reply with, his fingers were shaking and he could feel himself getting red. Sooyoung was in a different class right now and he sat alongside some hardworking students, he’s glad no one could see his face right now.

Sooyoung: so its true?

Sooyoung: jimin

Sooyoung: just tell me 

Sooyoung: do you actually like her???

Jimin had many thoughts running through his head as he ran through some possible scenarios depending on his response. Though he felt adventurous and very rebellious now. He did what he thought he could never do.

Jimin: I’m sorry.

c. 2018

[chelleztjs18]

Hello you 😌

You writers are something else. It's amazing how ideas and words just flow in your head. I wish I had that. I have the imagination and all but I can't put it into words 😅

How many times do you reread your stuff and know when to post it? Like how do you know that it's a good piece and it's ready for the world to see?

Hahaha I only do it to break the ice. Cause I never know how to approach someone just normally, I'm awkward in person so when I meet someone I just try to say something corny or funny.

I am right handed. Fun fact, apparently when I was younger I was left handed but my mom "forced" me to write with my right hand. How about you?

Do you think love at first sight is a thing?

- CuriousGeorge

Hi hi! The healthy eyebag. lol.

aw thank you so much! I appreciate it so much! Oh sometimes the idea can flows well sometimes they dont.

Someday I can have the will to write but then no idea. Sometimes I have the idea but not in the mood to write. lol.

Mostly I got my ideas or imaginations from music and I usually got it when I was taking a shower because I always plays my music when I do so. Sometimes I got new plot of stories or just simple additional ideas for the request that I got and grows the plot. Sometimes I got the idea from my writer friends that helps me brainstorming.

I alwyas lost count how many I re-read my work until I post it. Even though i re-read it many times, there's still some errors i find after I post it. lol.

I always make sure no typo, n tried my best to write gramatically correct. that's why it takes extra time for me until i post it. Plus, I always try to find gif or picture that match with story. If i cant find it, sometimes I make my own picture edit or something like a cover or header (espcially if it's a multichapters or mini series)

plus deciding the title, it can be easy to find it can be hard to find. lol. even though i have fun when it's time to pick the title.

haha i think we r kinda similar but u hv more confidence in u. lol. well, not all eyebags are the same with the other, right? hahahahaha.

OMG! I swear i said OMG out loud when I read the part about ur funfact on left handed or right handed. because it HAPPENED to me!!! hahaha. I was born left handed, i remember when i was a kid, I always do stuff with my left hand, eating, playing, holding things or taking things, even writing but since in indonesia culture is considered impolite to do things with left handed (because it's the hand most people do to clean up their body after potty) so my mom "forced" me to write n do things with right handed. Now i'm right handed but not really. it's so funny that it happened to us. Was ur mom's reason teach u right handed because of that culture things?

I can say that I'm ambidextrous now. I used both hands daily but my natural dominant hand is left. but also right handed because i was taught right handed. so some daily things like cutting with knife or scissors, i use right hand. some daily things are right handed. but mostly I use left hand.

when I eat sometimes I swtch between two hands. I write with both hands but my left doesnt do as good or as fast as my right.

That's why my bow is left handed. I shoot guns left handed, i hit baseball with left hand. I can throw with both hands. its fun but i love it if i end up become a lefty. lol

fun fact, i noticed that my daughter is ambidextrous. hahahahaha. i guess she copies me but her left hand is more dominant.

yes, i believed in love at first sight. because it happened to me twice. to my ex gf and my husband. lol. what about u?

Cheerio!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 20/02/2021 (Lil Tjay & 6LACK, Taylor Swift, slowthai)

Okay, so we’ve got a busy week ahead of us, actually a pretty massive one to deep-dive through – and it’s immediately obvious from the second song on the chart, but for now, “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo hangs on for what I believe is its sixth week at #1, and we’ve got a lot to cover.

Rundown

First of all, why’s this a big week? Well, there is an album bomb – or at least all that the UK Singles Chart allows for album bombs – and everything that could have debuted... debuted high. So in the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, we’ve got an awful lot to discuss. First of all, our drop-outs, other than debuts from last week, include “Baby Shark” by Pinkfong, “Train Wreck” by James Arthur, “Golden” by Harry Styles, “SO DONE” by The Kid LAROI, “Therefore I Am” by Billie Eilish, “All Girls are the Same” by the late Juice WRLD, “All I Want” by Olivia Rodrigo and fittingly, “Skin” by Sabrina Carpenter. We also have  a fair few losers, like “Bringing it Back” by Digga D and AJ Tracey down to #16 off of the top 5 debut and all of Fredo’s tracks skidding down off of the album bomb two weeks ago, like “Money Talks” with Dave at #19, “Ready” featuring Summer Walker at #37 and “Burner on Deck” with Young Adz and the late Pop Smoke at #51. We also have “34+35” by Ariana Grande not getting a remix boost at #30 (though it can get the album boost next week), “Love Not War (The Tampa Beat)” by Jason Derulo and Nuka collapsing at #39, “Regardless” by RAYE and Rudimental at #48, “willow” by Taylor Swift at #49, “Lemonade” by Internet Money and Gunna featuring Don Toliver and NAV at #50, “positions” by Ariana Grande at #52, “i miss u” by Jax Jones and Au/Ra at #55, “Midnight Sky” by Miley Cyrus at #56, “Be the One” by Rudimental featuring MORGAN, Digga D and TIKE at #58, “Martin & Gina” by Polo G at #59 (I’m surprised we didn’t get “GNF (OKOKOK)” debut, by the way), “What You Know Bout Love” by the late Pop Smoke at #61, “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles at #62, “Loading” by Central Cee collapsing at #63, “No Time for Tears” by Nathan Dawe and Little Mix doing the same at #65 (probably both victims of streaming cuts), “Apricots” by Bicep at #68, “Really Love” by KSI featuring Craig David and Digital Farm Animals at #69, “Looking for Me” by Paul Woodford, Diplo and Kareen Lomax at #70 and “See Nobody” by Wes Nelson and Hardy Caprio at #73. What may be more interesting than our notable fallers are our notable gains and returning entries, however, as whilst only “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper returned to #64, we also have some inexplicable or just plain bad gains. “Roses” by SAINt JHN and remixed by Imanbek seemingly has a second wind at #67, along with “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran at #57 and “Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi at #42, but our other gains are mostly recent debuts, like “Little Bit of Love” by Tom Grennan at #45, “Astronaut in the Ocean” by Maxed Wolf at #44, “Believe Me” by Navos at #43, “Arcade” by Duncan Laurence at #33 and finally, “Friday”, Riton’s ugly Nightcrawlers remix featuring Musafa & Hypeman dopamine re-editing itself into the top 10 at #10, becoming everyone’s first in that category, except the Nightcrawlers themselves getting their first top 10 since 1995, even if it’s just “Push the Feeling On” getting into the top 10 a second, separate time 26 years later... and it’s scary to think 1995 is indeed 26 years ago. Anyway, let’s start to make sense of these new arrivals.

NEW ARRIVALS

#72 – “MAZZA” – slowthai featuring A$AP Rocky

Produced by SAMO, slowthai and Kwes Darko

Now, the charts may be chaotic because of the general weakness of it all but it also allows for artists you wouldn’t really expect to do that well get #1 albums, and slowthai’s riding the waves of controversy, his well-received debut album and, you know, a genuinely very good quality of work, as his sophomore effort, TYRON, debuts at #1 on the UK Albums Chart, and we’ve got three songs from Ty on this singles chart, which is the highest amount the chart actually allows, meaning this is an album bomb. Yeah, an album bomb from slowthai – that’s the one thing you can guarantee ONLY ever happens on the UK charts... well, okay, there are many things, but we’ll get to those later. I’m surprised “MAZZA” didn’t debut higher given the music video, big-name feature, being one of the catchiest on the record and the fact that it’s getting radio play, but it’s still here, so who’s to complain? This track, from the emptier A-side of “bangers” in the first half of the album, relies on a quirky synth loop and a bouncy trap beat for slowthai and Rocky to individually prove themselves on and, yeah, the song is pretty great, with a really infectious hook and mostly really smooth flows, propelled by the charisma that just so easily spreads out of every word Ty raps. The title itself is slang that basically something is “mad” – that in, crazy and fun – and that is fitting for the song, which seems to be at a disconnect between the content, beat and feature. Ty flip-flops between flexing, depression and drug addiction, whilst A$AP Rocky just delivers some flexing... but when it’s one of Rocky’s best verses in years, I’m just glad to have him spitting here finally. This is far from the most interesting track on the record but it’s definitely an empty banger cruising on energy more than anything, which is good because it has that in spades. I’d like to point out though that much like the rest of the first half of this album, it is derivative: this is a beat you could see either Rocky or Playboi Carti on, and Ty seems to be doing mostly Rocky-esque flows with a definite attempt at doing the same ad-lib-focal song structure as Carti would. This is unfortunate by now but I can see him growing out of his influence as time comes, although it is a concern when it’s clearer on your bangers than it is your retrospective tunes, which are also pretty clearly Kanye- and BROCKHAMPTON-inspired. Speaking of...

#72 – “terms” – slowthai featuring Dominic Fike and Denzel Curry

Produced by Mount Kimbie, JD. Reid and Kenny Beats

It’s crazy to see production credits from Mount Kimbie and Kenny Beats on the UK Singles Chart... but with that said, you’d expect that to end up as one of the best songs on the chart, especially with this trio of artists. Sadly, the tracks that debuted this week are not close to my favourites off of the project, but if songs like “45 SMOKE”, “push”, “nhs”, “focus”, “PLAY WITH FIRE” and my personal favourite, “i tried”, aren’t going to chart, then I guess we can deal with this to show the more introspective side of the record and slowthai as a whole... except this song is exceptionally shallow in that lane, discussing the downsides of fame in a way that feels tired and done before, even on the same album – and we’ll get to that in a bit. Dominic Fike discusses his words being “jumbled” when in reality I don’t think anything Ty has said has been confused or taken out of context. It doesn’t help that this beat has a drowned-out guitar sample that just sounds ugly below a dark, menacing 808 and trap percussion that take Dominic Fike out of his element so much that he just sounds awful on the hook. Slowthai may have a faster flow here but he’s remarkably unfocused content-wise, and Denzel Curry doesn’t deliver more than a badly-mixed Memphis rap interlude that you can barely tell is him. This is far from bad, I do like the subtle vocal samples in the chorus and slowthai’s second verse about his daily schedule is genuinely really great, but it feels like wasted potential. Fun fact: This is actually Denzel’s first ever song to chart in the UK... if you can even call it his song. We’ll see Ty more later as we get higher on the chart.

#60 – “Cover Me in Sunshine” – P!nk and Willow Sage Heart

Produced by the Struts

Okay, so this is a song by P!nk with her young child daughter... Hmm, okay, so this is a ballad relying on acoustic guitar picking and some really ugly echoed percussion as well as two voices that go from meshing not at all to meshing too well together for voices 30 years apart. I’d like to end it here because this song really isn’t interesting past the novelty factor and some strange mixing in the first verse especially but as a bland uplifting “Fight Song”-type song, I guess it works though I don’t know about you but if I were going through a global pandemic right now with no real source of income, no end in sight and constant governmental error that’s killing thousands of people nationwide, I wouldn’t want a child who was born into millionaires telling me that it’s all going to be okay... oh, yeah, we are in that situation and I don’t want to hear this at any point, especially because this is generic and frankly, not worth anyone’s time.

#54 – “Mixed Emotions” – Abra Cadabra

Produced by TR the Producer

Okay, so when I said this would be a big week I did not mean or expect that it would be a good week, as we can tell already, but Abra Cadabra is here with a “thugs-need-love-too” track to drive that point home. Apparently a snippet of this went viral before its official release in a Valentine’s Day EP I didn’t know existed, which I honestly don’t get because there’s nothing stand-out about this song, like, at all. It’s got a guitar-based trap beat as Abra Cadabra croons in his admittedly pretty interesting, rich voice but he’s not saying anything interesting and this beat is just incompetent, with those badly-mixed swooshing sound effects that come in way too many times, and the fact that half the song is lacking percussion for no reason other than to make the beat sound busier than it is, even when it already has that ugly acoustic guitar lick playing through the whole thing in the front of the mix and... yeah, what’s the point in really critiquing this? Abra can’t even really hold much of a flow, especially in the meandering second verse, so not much of value is lost when this inevitably drops out next week.

#53 – “Big” – Rita Ora, Imanbek and David Guetta featuring Gunna

Produced by Mike Hawkins, Toby Green, Spenser, Sam Martin, David Guetta and Imanbek

This is the lead single – if you can call it that – from a trainwreck of a collaborative EP by COVID-19 super-spreader Rita Ora and everyone’s favourite Kazakh DJ, Imanbek, who seems to be chasing hits here with no real gain. You can already tell this is going to be hilariously bad, right? There are four primary artists seemingly picked out of a hat who had never collaborated prior to this EP, with two vocalists that would not mesh at all, and two producers... as well as four others to engineer this mix out so that the actual DJs and producers here become pretty much in name only. So, this is an already pointless song in all capacities, but then we find out that Ed Sheeran had a hand in writing this... this is just prepped for disaster. Fittingly, the song’s bad in a hilariously boring way. It starts with a bassy synth lead and some generic house production before Rita Ora comes in with a really unconvincing delivery that does not help to propel some genuinely bad singing in the pre-chorus and awkward songwriting. “Blame it on the city how I’m ballin’”? “Big tanks looking like Transformers”? It’s even funnier when you note that that line is where the beat cuts out (kind of) and it doesn’t rhyme with the rest of the verse at all. There’s some really bad vocal processing that makes Rita Ora sound overly digitised, much like a lot of Imanbek’s production, but also emphasises her in the mix along with the vocal mixing being generally overly loud compared to the rest of the production, which doesn’t really have a proper drop so it just goes nowhere other than a brief drum fill that comes out of nowhere and serves no real purpose. Rita Ora delivers rap clichés or at least lines I’ve heard before in the most generic possible way in the second verse, with as much charisma as Gunna’s literally phoned-in verse, mixed awfully, where the beat doesn’t even dignify his existence by just staying on the build-up and not even properly giving him the trap breakdown that it’s clearly going for. There’s this one stray kick or 808 note in that verse that goes nowhere. It’s honestly hilarious how dreadful this song is, lacking any groove or punch that it would need to become even a guilty pleasure... if you still use that term, anyway. Just fascinating. Anyway, let’s get to the top 40.

#39 – “CANCELLED” – slowthai featuring Skepta

Produced by SAMO, Kelvin Krash and Kwes Darko

Yeah, okay, so this song isn’t great either. Although I’m glad slowthai is in the top 40, it won’t be for long and it’s not because of Ty. It’s because this is a Skepta song through and through. He does the hook, has a verse and a presence on the intro and post-chorus. It’s probably good that it is as well because Skepta does the best he can with his menacing delivery over a pretty weak flute-trap beat that sounds as sleepy as Skepta’s flow on the chorus, which is even more awkward when it takes a left turn for an unnecessary post-chorus. Ty brings energy here and some pretty funny lines but is overall a non-presence on his own song, being over-shadowed by the bass knock and interrupted by Skepta’s hook at the end of his verse. Skepta brings a better verse, with some genuinely really fun flow switches but nothing content wise to make this song that’s already barely two minutes feel like it adds anything to... well, anything. The song itself is trying to prove a heavy-handed yet misguided point about cancel culture, which I don’t think even exists, and how it “kills art” when in reality anything further than stans or trolls on Twitter is probably deserved. When a book shop stops selling J.K. Rowling books, it’s not because they’re silencing or censoring art as much as they are not giving profits to a terrible person with too much time and money on their hands. Thankfully, neither of these guys are terrible people but what backlash they have had has been either from a deserved place or not from the left. There was an incident at an awards show with Katherine Ryan that didn’t get him cancelled but got Ty some brief backlash. Everybody swiftly moved on, and nothing changed except I think he delivered some kind of apology, not that I would remember because this song retcons whatever regret he has for it. He also got some backlash from the British news media – see: the right-wing – from displaying a severed head of Boris Johnson on stage, but again, if backlash “killed art”, you wouldn’t have a #1 album. As much as it wants to be a middle-finger to cancel culture, it ends up as a worthless flex track from rappers who’ve done much better. It’s not bad at all – and I’m glad the guy’s having success (I mean, after all, the album is overall good and he’s a fellow Northamptonshire resident). I just don’t think this song really works at all for what it’s trying to do.

#35 – “Siberia” – Headie One featuring Burna Boy

Produced by TheElements and AoD

This is an awfully rap-centric episode, huh? Well, this is from the deluxe edition of Headie’s album Edna, because that trend’s not going away any time soon... and I think Abra Cadabra could learn from this because this is how you do a low-key guitar trap single, with those watery, almost Blink-182-esque acoustic loops under a somewhat off-kilter trap beat as Headie mumbles in his smoother voice and faster, fun flows that do remind me too much of Gunna but overall sound pretty great. The cadences, especially in the chorus, are pretty infectious, and honestly the song could just use with some refinement in the mixing category and with Burna Boy’s verse, as whilst the singer definitely delivers the energy here, his voice is particularly muddy in this mix and his flow is more janky. With some multi-tracking or backing ad-libs, this could have definitely sounded better. The strings and electric guitar that come in at the final chorus were a welcome surprise though, and Burna Boy’s soulful delivery on the final outro verse sounds better than his actual verse, so I don’t really know what went wrong here. The content isn’t all too interesting, but I’m a sucker for geography references so the hook would have always made me chuckle and that’s before the shallow but deserved political commentary in Headie’s verse as well as Burna Boy making... perhaps insensitive references to infections in his more Young Thug-like inflections that do sound fun and more out-there as a contrast to Headie keeping it a bit tighter. Yeah, this isn’t perfect but it’s a pretty good trap banger so check it out.

#27 – “UK Hun?” – United Kingdolls

Produced by Freddy Scott and Leland

And now in stark contrast, drag queens. I don’t follow RuPaul’s Drag Race at all but I very much understand its appeal, especially now that it’s come to the UK on BBC Three, with I believe Graham Norton at the helm. This is a song from its second season that apparently takes homage from Eurovision for a song which has a title that is literally a pun. “You okay, hun?” but because it’s Britain, it’s UK. Very, very clever. At least it’s up-front right out of the gate so you can expect what will end up as pretty dumb fun... and this is immediately obvious from the intro which introduces you to the chorus: “bing, bang, bong, sing, sang, song, ding, dang, dong, UK, hun”. Okay, so this wasn’t ever going to be a prowess in songwriting, although you’d think there’d be something more here given MNEK’s involvement. Each contestant in the race gets a rap verse here over a pretty rote late 2000s dance-pop beat, with varying levels of charisma but ultimately a lot of energy from people who pretty clearly can’t sing, not that it matters when there’s the Auto-Tune slathered on top of the pre-chorus and chorus. I do feel like I’m separated from the show enough to be completely mystified by this, but really, the song’s not bad, and I can dig the upbeat synths in the chorus, even if the childlike novelty of it makes it a lot less enjoyable to me, personally. At the end of the day, it’s a sugary pop song about confidence with a pretty great fourth verse about loving yourself for who you are, so I can’t hate that. Also “gender-bender, cis-tem offender” is kind of a bar.

#25 – “We’re Good” – Dua Lipa

Produced by Scott Harris, Emily Warren and SLY

Future Nostalgia is a great album, and like all great albums, it needs a mediocre deluxe edition with snippets of leftover, unfinished tracks and remixes... no, wait, no album ever needs that. Sadly, life doesn’t go my way all of the time, so Dua released a “Moonlight Edition”, the fifth version of the album to be released as far as I know, and other than a hilarious JID collaboration in the form of “Not My Problem”, it’s not worth listening to past the first 11 tracks that were already on the standard edition. This track is the worst of them all, stripping away any of the disco groove and grandiose strings that defined the vibe of the album for a really bland, vaguely tropical trap-pop tune. The only remnant of the disco theme is the chorus referencing cocaine, which seems bizarrely out of character if anything, although it doesn’t help that Dua sounds checked-out, especially on the verses but also on the chorus which definitely takes some inspiration from emo-pop in those guitar tones but not in those awkward, first-take vocal deliveries that make the chorus flow pretty awfully. This songwriting is consistently janky too, with the overly short bridge serving no real purpose and the song itself feeling like an under-written, over-produced waste of everyone’s time. I’m surprised Dua couldn’t debut higher than #25, but at the same time I understand why people aren’t enjoying this as much as the prior singles, because this is bad.

#23 – “Commitment Issues” – Central Cee

Produced by mokuba

This guy is just releasing a bunch of singles and squandering any potential I saw in him, huh? Well, okay, this is from an upcoming album but that doesn’t make its acoustic guitar loops any more interesting or the content any more dissonant from its hard-hitting UK drill beat and his aggressive delivery. Like, there’s nothing about his flow or the instrumental that makes sense for a song where he’s apologising to his ex and trying to convince her to come back to him... at all. I’d get annoyed by a song that’s not cohesive in its content, but this one is annoyingly so, with the content never giving a reason for the dark, menacing 808 slides other than the... arguments with the woman he describes in the hook? It does kind of work with the flow there, but, like... why? Why does this exist? This isn’t convincing, it can’t be a banger because of its overly-specific break-up themes and it’s just a mess of a song, not helped by the fact he goes off trailing in the second verse about how many “hoes” he has, which is honestly kind of funny given in the first verse, he acknowledges that his ex hates those types of lyrics. Man, Central Cee was onto something with the jazz-drill on “Loading”, where did any of that go?

#12 – “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” – Taylor Swift

Produced by Taylor Swift and Christopher Rowe

The original “Love Story” is one of my favourite Taylor Swift songs. There’s something so sweet and Mew Mew Power about it. I don’t know if that’ll work as an adjective for anyone else but what I’m saying is it really emphasises the inner “white teenage girl in the 2000s” that many have hidden in them, with its cute banjo intro and honestly kind of funny misinterpretation of the original Romeo & Juliet text, none of which has been fixed in this new version. Out of the stuff I’ve heard from the country-pop era of Taylor’s work, it’s definitely one of the catchiest, most melodramatic choruses, probably second to my favourite from this era, “Mine”. Well, this new version has to be made so that Taylor Swift can own the rights again to her music that Scooter Braun sold after she left the Big Machine label. Honestly, I think I prefer a younger Taylor Swift in the context of such a cutesy, pretty song with all its childlike novelties – I mean, a 30-year-old Taylor Swift won’t misremember details from Shakespearean texts. Not to say that she sounds bad here because she sounds great, especially over the more refined, modern production and the incredible strings in the chorus that are emphasised in this mix. I can’t say that much of a cover that takes the original and does exactly the same thing with it, just with a more modern instrumental that honestly has a pretty epic instrumental bridge. Ultimately, this is taking a great song and making it sound better and more accessible for an audience a decade or so detached from the original “Love Story” and it sounds pretty great doing it.

#2 – “Calling My Phone” – Lil Tjay and 6LACK

Produced by Non Native, Bordeaux and G. Ry

This chart week ended up being less of a beast to tackle than I thought it was, mostly because there are a couple good fun songs sprinkled in the range of mediocrity here. Now this is the final song to discuss and... this is just as inexplicable as “drivers license”. If it weren’t for the streaming numbers, I’d be convinced this is an error and this should have been switched with the second-highest debut, as it makes no sense for Lil Tjay and 6LACK to debut at the #2 spot in the UK. For context, Lil Tjay is an Auto-Tune crooner from the Bronx, in a similar vein to a Lil Tecca or A Boogie wit da Hoodie, who I thought would completely disappear post-“Pop Out” given he seemed to be on the Lil Tecca route as most of his other singles just couldn’t stick the landing other than I guess “F.N.”. Admittedly, that might be because they were pretty bad, and I think he actually kind of ruined “Pop Out” by killing its momentum with his non-existent presence and gross Auto-Tune whine, but he seems to have gotten a lot of traction since then from a posthumous Pop Smoke record as he wastes time on “Mood Swings”, which became a pretty massive hit for Tjay and the late Pop Smoke, with a lot more longevity than I expected, even though it was my personal least favourite on that posthumous album. 6LACK is more for the alternative and hip-hop head crowd, known less for his street bangers than he is for his smooth alternative R&B collaborations with guys like J. Cole. He has mainstream attention and has tried to cross over before, but ultimately he’s probably better guest-starring on robotic Gorillaz singles with Elton John of all people... or at least that’s what I thought, because they seem to have just released a single with no real promo other than TikTok previews and a music video, and it blew up immensely almost immediately. Maybe it’s good timing given Valentine’s Day but this seems like a combination of weak charts and a genuinely organic sudden hit, pushed by a label of course but not without word of mouth and... I don’t know, I’m kind of clueless on why this is so big here, and seemingly everywhere, but I’m not complaining. Wait, no, I am complaining because I’m not a fan at all. I can go for smoother, more soulful R&B but something about this is way too jagged for it to work for me, with Tjay delivering some pretty bored, mumbled crooning over melancholy pianos and an infectious but off-beat chipmunk vocal sample that acts a refrain because nothing Lil Tjay does is catchy enough. His verse is really sloppy, as is the piano, and the percussion is kind of just gross in how it’s mixed. Thankfully, 6LACK is here for some brief relief on the second verse, as he actually has a presence with his cruising, subtle multi-tracked delivery that sounds genuinely pretty great and would be at better use with bass that isn’t mastered like this and maybe an actual chorus. In fact, I think this would work as a UK garage song with that vocal sample if you speed up the whole track and add some actual groove to it, so someone please get on that because otherwise I don’t see any reason why this is so high. It’s just lethargic R&B, really just basic and tired.

Conclusion

Yeah, this was a big week but sadly I think it is shrouded in a lot of mediocrity that I think will be gone by next week, so whilst the UK chart chaos can be fun, especially when I’ve got nothing else to do, I’m not sure if any of these songs really stick. Best of the Week goes to Taylor Swift’s re-recorded “Love Story” with a really close Honourable Mention in slowthai’s “MAZZA” featuring A$AP Rocky, just hedging out Headie One. With the worst, we have a lot to choose from but because of its high debut and hence the expected hype, I’ll give Worst of the Week to “Calling My Phone” by Lil Tjay and 6LACK, with tied Dishonourable Mentions to “Big” by Rita Ora, Imanbek and David Guetta featuring Gunna, and honestly Central Cee’s “Commitment Issues” for not working on any level, though it really easily could have gone to Dua Lipa, P!nk or Abra Cadabra. Here’s this week’s top 10:

Honestly, I have no idea what’s coming for next week other than Ariana Grande’s deluxe edition. Maybe Trippie Redd’s pop-punk album can make somewhat of a splash? I don’t know, I don’t think anything too big is coming but I’m probably wrong. I just know that a lot of this’ll be gone by next week. Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank if you feel the need to do so and I’ll see you next week.

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

A - Z (Fandom ‘Come At Me, Friend’ Meme)

WELL THEN *cracks knuckles* HERE WE GO 

(all 26 letters behind a cut bc this is very long)

A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)

As of this hour, my top OTPs are Penelope/Schneider from ODAAT and Joyce/Hopper from Stranger Things. But I have endless numbers of them, even within each fandom.

B - A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind

Jean/Alice from TDBM. 

C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will (be nice)

Um…hmm. I’m such a multishipper, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my NOTPs. I’ve never been onboard the Keens from The Blacklist, though. Not even a little. I only enjoyed Tom in his original villainous state.

D - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t (again: be nice)

A couple of my spouse’s faves, I really wish I liked too, especially Sam/Josh and Mal/Simon. I don’t like one of the characters in each very much, so I’ve never been able to get into them–even though I understand them, and have had fun writing them…I just don’t love them too.

E - Have you added anything cracky/hilarious to your fandom, if so, what

Yeah, mostly graphics, though. I don’t think I’ve ever written crackfic. I did New York Times Minus Content edits for TDBM, a ton of those. Also Sext Message Error sets for Lizzington and for Josh/Donna. And Welcome To Nightvale sets for iZombie and Lizzington. And OTP Bot sets for Lizzington.

And this isn’t EXACTLY crack, but my original tumblr claim to fame was this Hamilton/TWW crossover that got reblogged by Lin himself.

F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom

Mm, the first time I actively joined a fandom was Buffy, and I was about 14 when that started for me…so as of this year I’ll have been in that fandom for 20 years! But I’ve been a fangirl literally my whole life, I just didn’t really join fandoms before the internet, and I started using the internet more in junior high and HS.

G - Do you remember your first OTP, if so who was in it

Lou/Joey from Brotherly Love, or Claire/Trevor from Cupid (original run), or Dharma and Greg, or Allison/Wade from CryBaby, or Idgie/Ruth from Fried Green Tomatoes. I was a shipping prodigy, and the couples I was obsessed with as a literal child blur together a bit in the timeline, so I’m not completely sure which came first.

H - What is your favorite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., tv shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.) 

TV shows.

I - Has tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why

The Aaron Tveit fandom made me uncomfortable watching BrainDead before I even had the chance to decide if I liked it or not. Most fandoms I love, though. I prefer to ignore the drama and focus on the people I actually like. 

J - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr

SO MANY. Parks and Rec, TDBM, Stranger Things…a significant portion of my watchlist comes from this hellsite by now–I have friends with good taste.

K -Say something nice about someone in any of your fandoms

@mossdonnatella is in a lot of my fandoms. She is a much better fic writer than she thinks she is!!

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves (chars you’re neutral on are fair game, as are chars you dislike)

I really ended up disliking Jacob a lot, on Grace and Frankie. But I will say that in the beginning he is very respectful of Frankie’s boundaries and tries to be patient with her, and I did like that.

M - Say something genuinely nice about a ship that you don’t ship (or its shippers, or anything related to you)

I don’t actively ship Jancy on Stranger Things after seeing S1 (I don’t really ship Steve/Nancy either, though…I think I mostly just ship Nancy x happiness) but the moment when her mom knocks on her bedroom door and they reach for each others’ hands instinctively? That is a damn fine understated sweet connection moment and I really enjoyed and believed it.

N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice)

Okay since a lot of my top fandoms are for shows that ended a long time ago, I’m going with One Day At A Time. In fic or in canon, I want to see a lot more of Schneider being Penelope’s BFF and her confidant. I want more serious!Schneider moments bc it turns out the actor rocks at them, and I want to see Pen really get to move on from Victor as her kids get older, I want real confirmation that she’s finally past any possibility of reconciliation with him bc she deserves SO MUCH BETTER.

O - Choose a song at random, which ship or character does it remind you of

Randomizing my music gave me “Quiet” by MiLCK feat. GW Sirens and Capital Blend. 

Sample lyrics:

Cuz no one knows me, no one ever willIf I don’t say something, take that dry blue pillThey may see a monster, they may run awayBut I have to do thisI can’t keep quiet, no A one woman riot

Despite the mature meaning behind the lyrics, and probably because I’m watching Stranger Things right now, it reminds me of Eleven, the tiny badass fighting her way to freedom.

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)

Alright, I’m gonna invent one right off the top of my head right here and now since you asked. Um… a One Day At A Time AU in which Penelope meets Schneider not as her landlord but as a patient, once she becomes an NP. Doctor/patient “okay if you won’t stop asking me out then get a new doctor so I can say yes” fluff ensues.

Q - A ship you’ve abandoned and why

Lizzington. I’m technically still writing fic for it bc I have a chapter fic to finish, but I haven’t watched the show in years, I avoid content for it, and have no interest in it anymore besides the phantom limb feeling of having been so invested in a ship for that long and making friends around it.

R - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships

Well, since I mentioned it earlier, I think I’m the only person ever to watch the scenes Bud and Brianna have together in Grace and Frankie and think “that should really be a thing.” 

Also…Kate/Donna from The West Wing. Based entirely on one scene.

S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)

I genuinely don’t understand this question, sorry. What’s an ‘example’ of my headcanon, and how does that relate to prompts? If somebody wants to explain this to me, I’ll answer it. 

T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending, about anything at all (gender identity, sexual or romantic orientation, extended family, sexual preferences like top/bottom/switch, relationship with poetry, seriously anything)

Yep yep yep. Andy was the leak, not Toby, and that is the hill I will die on always. I’m sure I have others, but that’s the big one.

U - 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms

Toby Ziegler (TWW), Alice Harvey (TDBM), Lorelai Gilmore (Gilmore Girls), Jim Hopper (Stranger Things), and Spencer Hastings (from what I just saw of PLL with @actuallylukedanes). 

V - 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms

Luke/Lorelai, Gilmore Girls. Parker/Hardison/Eliot, Leverage. Joyce/Hopper, Stranger Things.

W - 5 favorite ships and 5 kinks you like best for said ships

Josh/Donna (TWW), Donna in control. Matthew/Alice (TDBM), hurt/comfort sex. Alvareider (ODAAT), “whoops are we kissing wait do we like each other?”Jared/Miss Parker (The Pretender), conflicted kisses up against wallsI’m having trouble thinking of a 5th one but I used to really like Lizzington angry!sex bc damn that ship was angsty

X - top 5-10 characters who are yoUR PRECIOUS BABIES AND YOU WILL DIE DEFENDING THEM

Eleven, Toby Ziegler, Schneider, Lena Luthor, Logan Echolls, literally every main character on The Good Place.

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)

Game of Thrones, Agents of Shield, Doctor Who (though I finally have started this one!), Jane the Virgin, The Worst Witch, and lots more…I like learning about fandoms secondhand. 

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go (prompts optional but encouraged)

Every single one of these tiny Stranger Things children in S1 is the epitome of epic friendship and I love it. Mike jumps off a cliff to protect Dustin and Dustin’s willing to get his teeth cut out to protect Mike and Lucas offers a sincere apology when he’s wrong, something most adults still suck at, and Will tells Mike the truth even when he would benefit from lying and Eleven chooses death to save them all and they are beautiful and perfect and I love them.

[earthling-liya-blog]

little things we can do for the environment

a/n ok before anything GURL there are a lot of links tagged bc i didn’t rly expect this to be a long post and some will be further explained in a separate post ! maglilink naman aq pag nagawa na may edit button naman HAHAHAHA but ya this is a bit taglish but mostly english kase conyo tayo chz but yaaaaa

i would say disregard any grammatical errors or flaws but i like comments and criticisms. this isnt formal writing at all kase this was rushed kase naexcite ako,,,,, ayun ok i shld stop talking leTS GET DIS BREAD

nowadays, a lot of people have been inventing machines that help in saving the planet but the easiest and most simple thing that have a huge impact on our environment is following the 3R’s.

 REDUCE

here is a list of things on what you should reduce

1.      single-use plastic consumption

this is the most obvious material we should refrain from buying. i know it’s tempting but don’t buy that candy, or that water bottle. as they say:

 if you don’t buy crap from companies they’ll stop making crap.

 think about it, that candy you’ll buy comes with a plastic food packaging. that plastic’s purpose is to cover the candy from anything that can contaminate it, but once the candy is opened he plastic no longer has purpose and will be thrown away on the trash can. that piece of plastic was used once but will LAST FOR DECADES, and in those decades the plastic will go through a lot of.. things. y’know like…

other than plastic interrupting the food chain, we can literally kill all animals with the plastic bags choking them or filling up their stomachs with plastic. we’ve all seen the turtle with a straw stuck inside its nose.

truly heartbreaking. this video started a petition to ban straws, but please STRAWS ARE NOT THE ONLY PLASTIC PRODUCT HARMING MARINE LIFE.

 here are videos that prove so:

Plastic Ocean | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju_2NuK5O-E

Plastic is killing marine wildlife | #OceanRescue | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhksqkC6WV0

See How It Feels to Be an Ocean Animal Stuck in a Plastic Bag | National Geographic |  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaDx-WJAsaE

 now you can say “I don’t litter so how am I harming these animals? I throw my trash properly.” but no, buying from companies that produce plastic makes YOU part of the problem. 

the plastic you throw away “properly” adds into the landfill. as i’ve mentioned before, plastic lasts for decades. if we don’t reduce our plastic consumption, we will soon have a mountain of plastics. less plastic u buy, less plastic is produced.

 next time you buy from the mall, don’t tempt yourself from buying beverages and/or foods that come with plastic food packaging. if possible, bring your own food containers and a reusable tote bag or don’t buy at all. quit saying “it’s just one time” a lot of people say that everyday and see what problem we’re facing now? overproduction and overconsumption of plastic asshole. say no to single-use plastic !

2.      printing

this one’s new to me and im sure most of you are as shocked as i am. i always thought it was only because we were wasting so much paper by printing documents and other things that don’t really mean anything (tama na pagprint ng pix ng kras niyo mga burnok), but we keep buying cartridges.

here’s a tip: use recycled paper and reuse toner cartridges. I got that here https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/zero-waste/reduce/paper-and-printer-waste. it says here that it costs wayyy less money cause duh reusing and reducing??? lam mo na yan mag-isip ka chz

 3.      electronics/appliances anything that consumes electricity

this one. this is something that’s hard for many of us to reduce and i admit im one of those who have a hard time letting go of their phone and uses the light the whole night.

 PHONE: for iphone users like me (weird flex but ok), apple produces a new model every now and then and it makes a lot of apple users buy the newest model. don’t be like them no matter how much money u have that u want to flex (money cant help you survive when earth is dying sis) also, iphones don’t really last a looong time for many users since it’s kinda breakable and well it slows down after a while lmao

my tip is buy what you think will last for a long time (coming from me eh) for you and if you want, try buying secondhand phones. for phones you broke that you piled up in a box (yep i do that), you can replace some parts of it that broke it or give it to recycling centers. According to the University of Colorado Boulder, phones have metals that can still be “reused and salvaged such as aluminum, gold, silver, copper and iron.” NEVER THROW AWAY PHONES OR ANYTHING ALIKE ! “The circuit boards contain arsenic, lead, mercury, and other toxins. The batteries contain heavy metals that are lethal to the land. Many of the chemicals in cell phones have the potential to be released into the air when burned and can create air pollution.” (Second Wave Recycling, 2013) This means that the phone you’ll throw away will intoxicate the landfill. just think about insects flying around and possibly animals eating garbage 

4.      water

do i even have to explain myself? hm maybe.

shower with a partner shower together

jk but seriously, save water. take shorter showers and please refrain from using the heater. here’s an article to further elaborate https://slate.com/technology/2009/10/exactly-how-bad-should-i-feel-about-taking-hot-showers.html

5.      fast fashion

oh you have no idea how much shopping can affect the environment. i didn’t know before either. but not only is the environment affected but also who work for companies that sell fast fashion.

a.      people have been treating clothes as disposables. clothes that don’t fit the trend nowadays either get thrown away or just stay in the corner of a cabinet.

b.      theyre cheap. and by cheap, i mean CHEAP. most of fast fashion clothing don’t last long that they end up in the landfill. even if you donate/sell it, chances are they’ll be rejected due to poor quality.

c.      “. . most garments (especially fast fashion ones) are made with inexpensive, petroleum-based fibers that don’t easily decompose (such as polyester, nylon, and acrylic), they’re going to be taking up landfill space for decades to come.” (Wood, K.) As Cline points out;

“people generally recycle plastic bottles or avoid buying them in the first place, but people are pretty okay with buying lots of plastic clothing”

next time you think of buying from forever 21 or zara, think about it. they are simply made NOT to last. think about the exploited workers, the products you could’ve gotten for a cheaper price if they were made locally, and the effect on the environment. do you really want to support companies that only gives a fuck about their sales?

read more in these articles: 8 Reasons to Rethink Fast Fashion| https://www.lifehack.org/articles/money/8-reasons-rethink-fast-fashion.html

Fast Fashion Is the Second Dirtiest Industry in the World, Next to Big Oil | https://www.ecowatch.com/fast-fashion-is-the-second-dirtiest-industry-in-the-world-next-to-big--1882083445.html

6.      meat and dairy

as a meat-lover myself, this was the hardest thing to do. im basically a carnivore since i hate veggies but i do eat a lotta ass fruits so no need to judge sis. but yeah this is so important yet so hard.

if you can, only buy products that are vegan. it doesn’t necessarily have to be food if it’s too difficult for you to let go. you can also have a #meatlessmonday or not eat meat 1-2 days a week.

this post is long enough so here’s an article to help u: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth

7.      waste

all in all, reduce waste. avoid throwing away literally anything. aim for a zero waste lifestyle and i can give tips in my next post on how you can reduce waste.

 REUSE

this is soooo hard to do. trust me, i would know BUT it is doable by an average person so shut the f*ck up and use that ugly reusable water bottle your aunt gave you. i don’t care how rich you are and how you can afford a lot more, but what does it matter if they wont be used much and be thrown away when it gets old?

avoid throwing things away and think about how it can still be useful to you or someone else. not everything useless to you is useless to everyone. let someone else find purpose for it or repurpose it yourself.

donate, not discard. choose reusable, not disposable.

  RECYLE

1.      plastic

this is the most important thing we have to do now especially with plastic. now note that not all plastic can be recycled. it’s important to know what type of plastic can be recycled and what shouldn’t

 so as it states, 1&2 are recyclable which is what you would see on a water bottle. it means you should throw your plastic bottles in the recycling bin. here are things you should avoid and things you should recycle

BUT OK BEFORE YOU DO THROW THAT BOTTLE IN THE RECYCLING BIN JUST A QUICK NOTE

PLEASE REMOVE THE PLASTIC LABEL AND DO A QUICK RINSE ON THE BOTTLE! IT LITERALLY TAKES A FEW SECONDS OF YOUR TIME.

bottles that still have the label on are considered trash and are thrown away instead of being recycled. if u ask “why don’t they just take off the label? it takes a few seconds as u said” well dipshit they have more bottles to worry about so if i were you i wouldn’t be lazy piece of shit and take off the label.

bottles that contained sugar drinks should have a quick rinse & make sure there is no left over ! not rinsed = trash. do i have to go scientific and geeky as to why they should be rinsed? i think not lmao

for the plastic i find that can no longer be recycled (ex. shopping bags, food packaging, small pieces of plastic i see lying on the ground), i put them in an ecobrick which i will explain in my next post.

2.      paper

paper can also be recycled. collect all those newspapers, cardboard, cereal boxes, failed quiz papers, rejected thesis papers and notes from your ex-boyfriend. all of them. don’t throw them away, or worse burn them. papers can still be given another chance at life by being remade. all of the papers should not be mixed with any plastic or wax coating.

TRIVIA: Recycling one ton of old paper saves 17 trees; 2 barrels of oil (enough to run an average car for 1,260 miles); 4,100 kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average home for 6 months); 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space; 7,000 gallons of wate; and 60 pounds of air pollution. 

 3.      glass materials

products that are packed in glass glass jars and bottles like RC or your local nata de coco jar are recyclable as well although i’d prefer to reuse them.  

TRIVIA: Recycling one glass bottle saves enough electricity to light a 60-watt bulb for four hours. 

4. books

no. i don’t mean sell it to the junkshop but if u want to, go for it. although there are a lot of people who’d rather secondhand books than new ones so sell/donate your old books to those in need !

5. clothes

i’ve mentioned this before already but i’ll say it again. buy secondhand clothes. theyre not gross and you wont look like those typical katip pipol that all wear the same shoes and/or polo shirts charet. you’ll even help save the planet.

  *note: it is still better to reduce than recycle so still avoid buying plastic and lessen use of paper. but, you do gain money from selling paper and plastic so start collecting your friends’ and family’s junk.

by doing the 3R’s, you can save energy and natural resources and help prevent environmental issues coming from the landfill and pollution. not only are you helping save the environment but you’re also saving money by reducing your purchase, reusing what you already have and promoting recycling.

a/n ulet this is my first post and i’ll be sure to post more tips and help raise awareness. my writing may have flaws and i accept any criticisms to improve ! help me be better and to save the environment:)

 check out another article related to this one:

http://www.irondequoit.org/community/green-initatives/16-community/125-why-should-i-reduce-reuse-or-recycle

[zacfaq]

PLEASE DON’T SEND ME “PASS IT ON” MESSAGES !! as sweet as some of they are they can be really annoying. i don’t check my PMs here! if you need to get ahold of me either send me an ask, or email me.

apparently necessary reminder: google exists! i’m not a know-it-all source, honestly i shouldn’t even be your second plan after google unless it’s a question specifically based on me or something relating to me

i try to avoid fandom drama as much as possible and keep a generally positive space, so please don’t come and ask me about stuff like that. thanks. 

if you want to commission me please send an email to zacharyjackbaron@gmail.com. do not email me through this address if your intentions are purely social and not work related

-what do you use to record and edit your speedpaints?

i use OBS to record, and edit in sony vegas

-what do you use to draw?

huion gt-191 and clip studio paint

-what are your pen settings?

just the default settings. all my custom stuff/things i’ve downloaded from CSP assets are just things i think look neat but probably never end up using. 

-a blog called papersans is claiming to be you! are they a thief?

that’s literally me, i use it to archive my art so i can find stuff easier without having to hunt through my tag. also available for people who just want to see my art n not my other posts

-when is your birthday?

february 6th!

-what is your sexuality?

gay. i like men.

-how long does it take you to draw?

idk like. awhile? sometimes 45 minutes sometimes four hours sometimes a week. 

-can i draw you/your ocs?

of course! pls show me after it would make me very happy !!!!! 

-favourite band/singer/musician?

i don’t know a damn thing about myself here’s a spotify playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Zk5o5g7nMnGt0vrJVEcDq?si=7cd248a0b64046ee

-will you do art for cheap/free?

nah. art is currently the only job/income i have, if ur interested in commissioning me you can either find my prices on like, any of my pages, but if not ur more than welcome to email me @ zacharyjackbaron@gmail.com and i can give you prices there !! -(venting or something involving abuse, suicidal thoughts, self harm, bullying, eating disorders, or other similar things in real life situations. even in fiction i’m iffy.)

i hate to sound rude or not be of help, but please don’t send these messages to me. they send me into horrible anxiety  for several personal reasons. if you’re having such negative thoughts i implore you to speak to someone you trust without an anonymous mask, or do your best to seek help from a professional. i have my own things to worry about and as much as i’d like to help, i simply can’t.

-(asking for advice that isn’t related to art)

i would love to help but i’m not an ~all knowing source~. i can’t give you tips for school. i can’t give you tips for life. not only will i probably not know a solution for you but there’s likely a chance i’m in just as bad a situation as you/going through the same problem, as silent as i am about my personal life. also don’t use ‘asking for advice’ as an excuse to vent about things or to send me a paragraph describing in depth something listed above/that’s potentially triggering. thank you.

even if you’re looking fr art tips i’m not a great source i’m still learning, ur best bet is looking for already existing sources and reading through those bc i don’t preach the word of Art God. i’m also awful at explaining things

-why didn’t you answer my ask?

Main reason is i’m just really really bad at socializing, so it’s not anything on u. i’m almost always low on energy and when i do talk to people it wears me out really quick. i’m also just. not gr8 at talking in general so if i can’t think of a reply i tend to just leave things n then end up forgetting about them

-how do you draw [blank]?

honestly my art style is such a fucked up thing that’s so personalized to my own use i can’t do or make tutorials. the best i can do is direct you to my youtube.

-can we do an art trade?

sorry, i’ll have to say no. i’m not necessarily busy but i get stressed very easily, so i try to keep my art to either personal stuff or work ! if you would like art from me, please considering commissioning me! mutuals and friends may be the exceptions here if they catch me at a good time or we make plans well ahead to do smth when we’re both free to work on stuff

-can we be friends?

please don’t ask this. i’m awful enough at socialization as is and i just don’t fit well with most personality types. not to mention this is just overall a bad question. it backs the person being asked into a corner where they either have to say “yes” and end up in a friendship that actually isn’t working out and is maybe only good for one side bc they’re getting any and all of the benefits, and if they say “no” they look like a total dick bag and come across as an ass. don’t ask this question. it’s not how socializing works. it’s not how friendships work. thanks. -can you tag [blank]? unfortunately i’ve been a real bad place in terms of memory so i can’t tag tons and tons of things. i try and tag more general/basic things but i’m sorry i’ll have to pass on specifics. if i post or reblog things that trigger u or harm you it might be best to unfollow for ur own safety!! very sorry

if it’s specific words you’d like tagged please consider blacklisting the word itself. 

-how tall are you?

i’m 5'11".

-can you promo me?

i’d rather not, doesn’t sit well with me. if you have a commission post you want me to reblog i’m happy to! but i won’t just do text based handouts, y’know? not a fan of being used for visibility for no reason, and chances are if i do it for one person it’ll happen with hundreds of others and i don’t want my blog to turn into a free advertisement zone that just floods peoples’ feeds with promotions.

-you reblogged something from someone extremely problematic/unsafe

thank you for letting me know! tell me what it is they did, even better offer proof on it. i’ll likely delete the post and blacklist their url to hopefully prevent their name popping up on my blog in the future. i won’t publish these asks mostly to avoid discourse or in the event false information is provided. sorta just safety precaution i guess

-you’ve done something bad

again, thank you for letting me know! if i post or say something questionable please feel free to message me and i’ll try my best to address the issue and adjust accordingly. i’m aiming to grow as a person so critique is welcome, both on me and my artwork. don’t just come up and call me an asshole or a prick or something, actually point out the errors and explain why they’re wrong so i can better understand and it doesn’t just turn into a defensive round of who’s worse, because i tend to be a very defensive person.

-i think someone is stealing/reposting your art!

thank you very much for telling me! don’t message them right off the bat, come to me first and i will deal with it. i’ve dealt with this shit tons of times and it’s tiring as fuck but i’d rather repeat the same stupid civil message over and over again than start a giant calamity over something and end up with someone getting hurt. if you do get involved please stay polite about it don’t throw insults just a simple “hey this art was done by princeofmints/tv-headache/zachary jack/dirtypip/(etc my other account names) and he doesn’t want his art reposted, please take this down or add proper credit.”

-can i use your art as an icon?

sure man. only on places like instagram, tumblr, or twitter though, and proper credit in an easy to see place must be given. if a piece of art is of my ocs or especially vent art though never use it for icons. thank you.

-can i repost your art?

the answer is “no” but i know you’re going to do it anyways. easy to see credit is mandatory. if you see somebody reposting my art please let me know and i’ll talk to them. if you want to use my art in things like image edits, i don’t allow that. want to use my art in a video? if it’s something like an AMV sure fine just credit me and inform me beforehand, if it’s something like a cringe/comparison video. no. i don’t want any association with work like that whatsoever. you may not use my artwork for fanfic covers.

-can i colour/finish one of your sketches?

no. even if you don’t intend on posting it. 

-what is [insert some form of media/fandom]

https://www.google.ca/

-why do you have an entirely separate blog for your FAQ? you know you can make blog pages, right?

i’m well aware of that and originally my faq WAS set up on a blog page, but unfortunately many folks proved to be either lazy or just couldn’t figure out how to get to a blog page on mobile so i had to set it up this way for accessibility purposes.

-tons of your videos are gone, what happened to them? will they come back? can you repost them?

i set old videos on private for my own sake, i don’t like having my old content available bc it just looks old and stale and i don’t like it. there’s nothing deep about it, i just don’t want people interacting with my old stuff. as deep is it gets is i just deleted videos related to fandoms i’m sick of bc the association is fuckin annoying. these videos will not come back into public. i do keep them posted for my own reflection sake, but that’s it. don’t ask me to bring them back. don’t whine about me not putting shit back out just bc ur a little sad n gonna cry. guilting people is gross, reevaluate yourself.

if you want a song from an old video, just ask me! I’ll happily let you know what the music is in case u liked ‘em and can’t remember the titles or artists. i’ve also got a playlist full of the music i listen to so u can comb through there n see if the songs u want are there

[krisggordon]

21 Easy to Implement SEO Actions That Can Improve Your Rankings Big Time

To many people SEO seems like something really hard to do, which also takes a lot of time. While mostly that’s true, it’s also true that there are some small SEO actions you can perform that can have a big impact on your rankings.

  In this post, we’ve gathered 21 things you can do to improve your SEO. Most of them are easy to implement, but we’re trying to focus more on the ratio between the effort and the results. So, if something seems harder to do, it will also have a greater impact.

    I know this is a long post, but I want to challenge you to read through all of it and leave a comment at the bottom stating which recommendation you think has the best effort/results ratio. I’m really curious. Additionally, if you have other ideas, please share them with us.

  Fixing Crawlability & Indexability Issues

Set Up Traffic Monitoring Tools & Analyze Your Data

Optimize Your Titles, Headings, Content & Meta (Add Relevant Keywords)

Claim Google My Business

Target Less Competitive Keywords

Write More Content

Compress Images

Take Advantage of Caching & Minification

Claim Social Media Profiles

Ask Customers for Reviews (Use Incentives)

Optimize Internal Links & Adopt Internal Linking Practices

Remove Unnecessary Plugins/Features

Create Linkable Resources

Understand User Intent & Optimize for It

Perform A/B Testing

Get an SSL Certificate & Move to HTTPS

Look At What Your Competitors Are Doing & Do It Better!

Get Mobile Friendly

Use PPC & Advertise

Avoid Over Optimizing

Focus on Singular Call to Actions

    1. Fixing Crawlability & Indexability Issues

  Making sure that your website can be discovered and indexed by search engines is your main concern when it comes to SEO.

  They say that “The best place to hide a dead body is on the 2nd page of Google”. That implies that something has been killed. Well, in this case, a website not being on Google at all basically implies that it never even existed. At least from and SEO point of view.

  Fixing crawlability and indexation issues might be either really easy or really hard.

  For the easy part, all you have to do is make sure you don’t block any important pages from being indexed through your robots.txt file or through any meta tags.

  You can access your robots.txt file by visiting yoursite.com/robotxs.txt. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, you should have one. In the following example you can see that the file blocks access for WordPress’s admin URLs, but gives access to admin-ajax.php.

    If you don’t want to block any URLs from being indexed, your file should contain the following:

  User-agent: * Allow: /

  You also want to make sure your pages can be found by search engines. The easiest way to do it is to submit a Sitemap. However, there’s a natural way through which pages get indexed: through links.

  To discover websites and pages on the internet, search engines use software called crawlers. These crawlers access sites from one link to another to discover new pages. So make sure that when you post a new page, it’s somehow accessible from your homepage, either through the top menu, footer or through another article, at least.

  For the hard part, your site might have different issues that prevent indexability, from server and PHP errors to duplicate content, bad hreflang implementation or automatic page generation. These can lead to big expenses in your crawl budget risking leaving important pages uncrawled (the search engine sometimes limits the number of pages it crawls on a site, so if unimportant pages get crawled first, there’s no room left for important ones).

  Also, you might block individual pages using meta tags. These can be set from Plugins such as Yoast SEO. To find these, you have to visit a page and hit CTRL + U to see the source, then search for “noindex” without the brackets.

  If you find something like this, it means your page won’t be cralwed and indexed:

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

  It’s hard to check manually, because you have to go through each page, so a tool like CognitiveSEO’s Site Audit will be helpful. It will also help you with any other crawlability and indexability issues, such as duplicate content and bad hreflang implementation.

    To put it more simply, you need to make sure that all your important pages get indexed by search engines. You can also do a search for “site:yoursite.com” in Google to see how many pages were indexed by the search engine.

    If you see a big discrepancy between the number of indexed results and the number of pages you think your site has, you probably have some sort of issue which is worth digging into.

  2. Set Up Traffic Monitoring Tools & Analyze Your Data

  Monitoring your site’s traffic and performance is one of the most important things when it comes to SEO.

  By looking at this data you can figure what type of content works in your niche and what type of content doesn’t. You can find out things such as what articles provide the most traffic, which pages convert better and what visitors actually do when browsing your site.

    Although fancier tools, like Hotjar, are helpful for understanding how users interact with your site in terms of UX, much simpler tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console will do.

  If you don’t have monitoring tools installed, install some ASAP. If you already have them installed but never visit them or analyze the data, start doing it.

  The findings might surprise you!

  3. Optimize Your Titles, Headings, Content & Meta (Add Relevant Keywords)

  This is one of the mistakes I see very many people do! I’ve had SEO clients telling me they’ve worked with other specialists before only to see they’ve built hundreds of links without even optimizing the titles… and by that I literally mean not having the keywords in the titles tags!

  The basics are very important! Do your keyword research and optimize your titles, headings, content and metas!

  While creating a keyword rich title which is optimized for multiple phrases and also catchy to the eye might not be easy, make sure that you at least have the most important keywords in there!

  If you’ve done Adwords before, you know that having the Keyword in the title towards the beginning is recommended. Why? Because that way people click more on them.

  If you want to attack multiple keywords with a single page, you’ll have to optimize the title for multiple keywords and also take advantage of headings, bold text and content.

  An easy way of increasing your chances is using the CognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to optimize your content for multiple keywords. Start with the most important and then add keywords in the order of importance.

    The meta description is also very important because it affects you CTR in the search engines. Make sure you also have important keywords there, because Google shows them in bold text and it makes your result stand out. Add a call to action as well, something like “Visit our website for details!”.

  4. Claim Google My Business

  If you’re a local business, having your listing secured is a must!

  Not to say that creating a Google MyBusiness page is really easy. All you have to do is go to https://www.google.com/business/ and create an account. Then, follow the steps they show you.

    It’s a great way of ranking your business multiple times on Google.

  5. Target Less Competitive Keywords

  Targeting the most competitive keywords is a good idea. Or at least that’s what market leaders such as Brian Dean suggest. Brian tried many things during his career as an SEO and learned through failure. Now he truly is an expert and an innovator in the field. He usually talks about long content and premium design. Which, if you reverse engineer him, he does. Quite well.

  What Brian doesn’t state, however, is that he spends a lot of money to get things right and create that amazing content that he does.

  He’s not a designer. He’s not very good with videos. He probably doesn’t edit his own HTML and CSS to make his web pages look so good. He also probably doesn’t promote his content all by his own (not sure about this one though).

  On average, I’d say that his Ultimate Guides cost at least $1000 each to set up, with writing, editing, design and promotion. And if you add the videos, it’s probably more.

  That’s not what most people (or clients) want to spend. Sure, you can do it all by yourself, but you might not know design or you might not be a good writer or you might have no idea on how to do outreach.

  Also, Brian already posts once per month or so, so it will probably take you more than that to get it done all by yourself. And if you have no idea how to draw, edit or write, it will take you even longer to learn it.

  The solution here is to start with less competitive keywords and build your way up. As your business grows, you’ll get more and more experience and you’ll have more capital to outsource different tasks that are out of your area of expertise (such as design) to professionals.

  You can use the CognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to find out how competitive a keyword is. Usually, what’s over 60 is considered a pretty difficult keyword to rank for. However, you have a list of other keywords below. Look for ones with lower search volume (although keep the relevancy score high).

    But if you have the money (or client budget) already, hell, go for it. Take the top keyword and make the best possible content using the best possible team. Just make sure it’s a profitable niche and that there will be ROI.

  6. Write More Content

  One simple way of improving your content is writing more content.

  You’ll hear different opinions on this topic. Some say that people don’t have the patience to read through 2,000 words. While that might be true for click-bait posts on Social Media, it’s definitely not the case when someone’s trying to cure hemorrhoids.

  The fact that longer content ranks better in search engines is pretty much accepted as true by most of the SEOs. New research backs this up.

  So, if you have a content that doesn’t yet make it to the top, add more words to it and you might see an improvement.

  However, just adding random content won’t help much. Make sure you cover adjacent topics to make your content as relevant as possible. You can always use the CognitiveSEO Content Assistant to help you cover the most relevant points regarding your topic.

  You’ll also score bonus points for content freshness if you update your old content.

  Another great way of increasing your SEO visibility is publishing more often. If you write 2 articles per month, you’ll cover two topics. If you write 4 you’ll cover 4 topics. It’s simple math. 

  7. Compress Images

  Slow websites impact conversions and they also impact SEO. Google doesn’t want their users to wait very much for websites to load.

  One of the leading causes of slow loading websites are images. It’s also a problem with a very simple solution.

  Don’t upload big images. Generally, they should not exceed 100-200kb in size. You should also try to find the right size in pixels. There’s no point in loading a 2000×2000 pixels image if you’ll only display it 200×200 pixels on screen.

  You can also use image compression plugins. You can find plenty on Google for different content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla. If you can’t find one, you can try using 3rd party tools such as TinyPNG (manual) or ShortPixel (can be automated with API).

  If you’re a photographer, you’ll probably want your images to be HD. If this is the case, then one trick would be to create a separate link for your HD versions. If you still aren’t satisfied with the quality, then you’ll need a faster server, but also take into account that the user’s internet speed matters as well.

  8. Take Advantage of Caching & Minification

  Again, another simple fix that can make a big difference is taking advantage of caching.

  Cache files are stored into your users’ browsers. When users access your site a second time, instead of downloading those files (such as images, css files and javascript files) the browser uses the stored ones to load the site faster.

  Most of the time, it’s really easy to minify and compress files and to enable caching. You can do it with a plugin such as W3 Total Cache if you run on WordPress, but there are plugins for all kinds of CMS.

  Sometimes, however, minifying and compressing css/javascript files might affect your site’s design and functionality, so make sure you test thoroughly if everything works fine.

  9. Claim Social Media Profiles

  Social Media profiles can also rank in Google, if they’re public pages. You can optimize them for slightly different keywords, but still keep your brand and main keywords somewhere in the title.

  Different platforms are fit for different types of audience so choose wisely where you decide to invest most of your time and money.

      Either way, it’s a good idea to secure accounts on all of the popular platforms, just in case. You never know when you become an industry leader and someone else owns your page name on Facebook.

  10. Ask Customers for Reviews (Use Incentives)

  If you want your Google MyBusiness page to be at the top, you’ll need good reviews.

  But how can you get them?

  Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking them to. However, it’s a good idea to ask them on the spot and see them leave the review on their mobile device. If Google tracks their location, it will see that the review is genuine and that the person actually visited the business.

    Other times it’s not that easy and you might have to incentivize them. You can ask them for a review through an e-mail after a week or so of purchasing an item. You can offer a discount for their next purchase if they offer the review.

  Note that there’s a higher change of users leaving negative reviews than positive ones, so you always have to try to get happy users to write about you.

  11. Optimize Internal Links & Adopt Internal Linking Practices

  Internal linking is very important for both crawling and indexing as well as keyword optimization.

  First you have to take care of your navigation. Do you use the proper anchor texts when linking to important pages from your navigation?

  For example, on our site we use the most searched for keywords to link to our most important pages (because we want to rank for those keywords).

    We also link to other very important resources on our site, such as the case studies we’ve worked on and published over the years. This shows search engines that those pages are highly important, since we’ve made them accessible directly from our top menu.

  Then make sure you link between articles and pages when relevant. I’ve done this plenty of times throughout this article. It’s a good idea to also make a habit and edit old articles and link from them to the newly published ones (hopefully, Cornelia does this from time to time as I don’t have access to modify already published articles #theydonttrustme).

  You can always use the cognitiveSEO Site Audit to better understand your site’s internal linking structure.

    Another interesting practice is to link internally to random pages from your 404 pages. This works very well for big sites which often have 404 issues.

  Don’t overdo this. Although Gary Illiyes said you can overoptimize this without a direct hit/penalty on SEO, it might affect the user experience which eventually leads to problems.

  12. Remove Unnecessary Plugins/Features

  Don’t add things that you don’t really need on your website.

  A good example of a feature many webmasters think they need are sliders. Sliders kill conversions and they also make your site a lot slower, because most of them load the necessary JS files on all the pages of the site, while the slider probably runs only on the homepage.

  Also, if you’ve decided you don’t longer need a feature, make sure you also uninstall that plugin/extension. Don’t just deactivate it. You should also check and clean your database from time to time of unnecessary tables and entries, but make sure you backup everything before you make any modifications.

  13. Create Linkable Resources

  When you create content, your first thought is probably to rank for that keyword. So you try to optimize the content for keywords and probably write more content, as I’ve already told you before in this article.

  However, it’s known that you can’t really rank high without links. It’s also known that trying to hack your way into links is a risky thing and can get you into trouble.

  So what’s a really good way to get natural backlinks? The secret is to rank for link worthy topics. A good example are studies.

  Actually, I have an example right in this article:

    If you use the CognitiveSEO Site Explorer, you can see that websites in industries where people are interested in studies and statistics take advantage of this.

  For example, I’ve searched for Alcohol Statistics and added the domains that ranked first into the site explorer. To no surprise, those very studies that ranked there were the top linked pages on that domain:

      It’s not a foolproof method so you’ll have to get creative. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to find out what’s actually popular at this point in your field/niche. You need to find the gap or outrank the other sites in order for this to work (but hey, we’re SEOs, aren’t we?)

  We’ve used this technique for CognitiveSEO as well. We knew that people kept searching whether “social signals influence SEO”. We also knew most people needed a resource to link to. We also know they wanted it to be credible and that they like numbers. Big numbers. Like 23 million shares. So we analyzed 23 million shares and created this study about social signals and how they affect SEO.

  And guess what? It’s in the top 10 most shared resources on our site, among with the homepage, Site Explorer and Blog page. The difference is that this page is rather new compared to the other most linked to pages on our domain.

  14. Understand User Intent & Optimize for It

  One thing that many webmasters seem to ignore is user intent. Although this might sound like some advanced technique that only the pros do well, the truth is it’s something rather basic.

  How many times have you heard that you must “know your audience”? Probably plenty of times. Well, you also have to know what your user is looking for.

  For example, if you’re trying to book hotel rooms, you might have your Book Now button pretty high. However, do you think that your users will try to book the room as soon as they land on the page? Probably not.

  They will first want to see some pictures, probably the price and then other customer reviews before they decide on booking.

  You have to take these things into account when creating the flow of your page. If on a mobile device the first thing they see is a big Book Now button and then a bunch of keyword rich content, they might leave the page because they were actually looking to see some photos of the room first.

  Note that what I’ve said above was an example and it shouldn’t be taken for granted (although I’m pretty sure that’s the case 99% of the times). You should always test these things constantly to figure out what’s best for your website.

  15. Perform A/B Testing

  A/B Testing is a really good way of finding out what works and what doesn’t.

  It’s something you should be constantly doing, but not as often as to jeopardize your profits too much.

    This is usually the best test for conversions rates. For example, a small change, as minor as switching the button color from green to red might account for a significant increase in click through rates.

  However, you can also test with SEO, but it’s harder to isolate, because so many things can affect SEO at the same time, from Google updates to server issues.

  However, it works very well with CTRs, which means it works well with titles and meta descriptions. You can test two variants, each for one week and see which one did best. For this though, you’ll have to rank in the top 3 positions, at least.

  16. Get an SSL Certificate & Move to HTTPS

  Warning: Merging from HTTP to HTTPS is risky. It’s a good idea to consult an expert before proceeding or at least check a good migration guide.

  SSL certificates don’t have a big impact on your SEO but they can have an impact on trust. As the internet evolves, internet security becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

  Important data circulate on the internet, from names, e-mails and phone numbers to much more sensitive information, such as health or credit card information.

  If your site sends information from the server to the client or vice versa, be it only through a simple contact form, the connection should be secured.

  When browsing your site, people want to see a green lock, not a red one or any warnings.

  via netregistry.com.au

  17. Look at What Your Competitors Are Doing & Do It Better!

  One fail-proof way of ranking to the top is trying to do what your competitors are doing (the ones ranking at the top, of course).

  In the InBound Link Analysis section of the CognitiveSEO Toolset, under the Compare tab, you can find a section called Common Domains.

  If you select “at least 3 sites” you can get a list of domains that are linking to at least 3 sites in your analysis. The goal here is to identify domains that are linking to at least 2-3 of your competitors but not to your site.

    The theory here is that if those sites are already linking to your competitors, there’s a higher chance that they’ll also link to you as well, since they’re already interested in the subject.

  However, you have to be careful not to build spammy links. Make sure you analyze your competitor’s link profile before you build the links. Anyway, it’s an opportunity that your competitors are already taking advantage of, which seems to work.

  Also, this doesn’t only apply to links. Look at where they’re advertising, look at what they’re posting on social media and look at what their content looks like. Ideally, try to do everything better than them!

  18. Get Mobile Friendly

  Now this can be a big modification but I promise you, if your site isn’t displaying well on mobile platforms, you’re losing A LOT!

  Sometimes, the modification might be as simple as installing a responsive website design. Changing themes on content management systems isn’t very difficult.

  However, if your site was running on a separate mobile version before, you also have to take all the redirects into account in order to avoid losing traffic. Make sure you do this by the book and ask for a professional’s advice if this is the case.

  19. Use PPC & Advertise

  We all know that SEO takes time. It might take somewhere between 6 months to one full year to see any real results, especially when it comes to services and sales.

  However, if by that time your business goes bankrupt, it won’t help much.

    People always try to compare SEO to PPC but the truth is that they go well together. It helps you grow your business as you’re growing your organic search visibility and even when you’re at the top you can still use PPC to take up an extra spot in the search engine. Combine it with a top maps listing and you’re set!

  20. Avoid Over Optimizing

  Most of the things I’ve said in this article are pretty basic. So if you’re not doing any of that at all, start doing them. But don’t over-do it! If you try to overoptimize, you risk messing up things.

  Don’t try to figure out the next big thing. If a couple of things work and show results, don’t try to abuse them. It might harm you on the long run.

  This doesn’t mean you have to ignore any optimization tip or trick you hear. However, try to take a more ‘back to the basics’ approach and think long term.

  You should still test new things, but one at a time.

  21. Focus on Singular Call to Actions

  Many people make the mistake of having too many offers on their site. You have to think very well what you want your user to do.

  Do you want the user to enroll in an e-mail list? Then don’t show them ads. Do you want them to click on a button? Then don’t put an e-mail sign-up form in the sidebar.

  If you have multiple offers in the same place, users might get confused or distracted and probably skip both.

    Ending note

  Hopefully these tips will help you improve your SEO results quickly with minimal effort. Which technique from above do you think will be the most effective?

  Also, what other techniques have you used that were easy to implement but had visible or even significant results? Share them with us in the comments section!

  The post 21 Easy to Implement SEO Actions That Can Improve Your Rankings Big Time appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/21573/small-seo-actions-big-results/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[philipfloyd]

21 Easy to Implement SEO Actions That Can Improve Your Rankings Big Time

To many people SEO seems like something really hard to do, which also takes a lot of time. While mostly that’s true, it’s also true that there are some small SEO actions you can perform that can have a big impact on your rankings.

  In this post, we’ve gathered 21 things you can do to improve your SEO. Most of them are easy to implement, but we’re trying to focus more on the ratio between the effort and the results. So, if something seems harder to do, it will also have a greater impact.

    I know this is a long post, but I want to challenge you to read through all of it and leave a comment at the bottom stating which recommendation you think has the best effort/results ratio. I’m really curious. Additionally, if you have other ideas, please share them with us.

  Fixing Crawlability & Indexability Issues

Set Up Traffic Monitoring Tools & Analyze Your Data

Optimize Your Titles, Headings, Content & Meta (Add Relevant Keywords)

Claim Google My Business

Target Less Competitive Keywords

Write More Content

Compress Images

Take Advantage of Caching & Minification

Claim Social Media Profiles

Ask Customers for Reviews (Use Incentives)

Optimize Internal Links & Adopt Internal Linking Practices

Remove Unnecessary Plugins/Features

Create Linkable Resources

Understand User Intent & Optimize for It

Perform A/B Testing

Get an SSL Certificate & Move to HTTPS

Look At What Your Competitors Are Doing & Do It Better!

Get Mobile Friendly

Use PPC & Advertise

Avoid Over Optimizing

Focus on Singular Call to Actions

    1. Fixing Crawlability & Indexability Issues

  Making sure that your website can be discovered and indexed by search engines is your main concern when it comes to SEO.

  They say that “The best place to hide a dead body is on the 2nd page of Google”. That implies that something has been killed. Well, in this case, a website not being on Google at all basically implies that it never even existed. At least from and SEO point of view.

  Fixing crawlability and indexation issues might be either really easy or really hard.

  For the easy part, all you have to do is make sure you don’t block any important pages from being indexed through your robots.txt file or through any meta tags.

  You can access your robots.txt file by visiting yoursite.com/robotxs.txt. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, you should have one. In the following example you can see that the file blocks access for WordPress’s admin URLs, but gives access to admin-ajax.php.

    If you don’t want to block any URLs from being indexed, your file should contain the following:

  User-agent: * Allow: /

  You also want to make sure your pages can be found by search engines. The easiest way to do it is to submit a Sitemap. However, there’s a natural way through which pages get indexed: through links.

  To discover websites and pages on the internet, search engines use software called crawlers. These crawlers access sites from one link to another to discover new pages. So make sure that when you post a new page, it’s somehow accessible from your homepage, either through the top menu, footer or through another article, at least.

  For the hard part, your site might have different issues that prevent indexability, from server and PHP errors to duplicate content, bad hreflang implementation or automatic page generation. These can lead to big expenses in your crawl budget risking leaving important pages uncrawled (the search engine sometimes limits the number of pages it crawls on a site, so if unimportant pages get crawled first, there’s no room left for important ones).

  Also, you might block individual pages using meta tags. These can be set from Plugins such as Yoast SEO. To find these, you have to visit a page and hit CTRL + U to see the source, then search for “noindex” without the brackets.

  If you find something like this, it means your page won’t be cralwed and indexed:

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

  It’s hard to check manually, because you have to go through each page, so a tool like CognitiveSEO’s Site Audit will be helpful. It will also help you with any other crawlability and indexability issues, such as duplicate content and bad hreflang implementation.

    To put it more simply, you need to make sure that all your important pages get indexed by search engines. You can also do a search for “site:yoursite.com” in Google to see how many pages were indexed by the search engine.

    If you see a big discrepancy between the number of indexed results and the number of pages you think your site has, you probably have some sort of issue which is worth digging into.

  2. Set Up Traffic Monitoring Tools & Analyze Your Data

  Monitoring your site’s traffic and performance is one of the most important things when it comes to SEO.

  By looking at this data you can figure what type of content works in your niche and what type of content doesn’t. You can find out things such as what articles provide the most traffic, which pages convert better and what visitors actually do when browsing your site.

    Although fancier tools, like Hotjar, are helpful for understanding how users interact with your site in terms of UX, much simpler tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console will do.

  If you don’t have monitoring tools installed, install some ASAP. If you already have them installed but never visit them or analyze the data, start doing it.

  The findings might surprise you!

  3. Optimize Your Titles, Headings, Content & Meta (Add Relevant Keywords)

  This is one of the mistakes I see very many people do! I’ve had SEO clients telling me they’ve worked with other specialists before only to see they’ve built hundreds of links without even optimizing the titles… and by that I literally mean not having the keywords in the titles tags!

  The basics are very important! Do your keyword research and optimize your titles, headings, content and metas!

  While creating a keyword rich title which is optimized for multiple phrases and also catchy to the eye might not be easy, make sure that you at least have the most important keywords in there!

  If you’ve done Adwords before, you know that having the Keyword in the title towards the beginning is recommended. Why? Because that way people click more on them.

  If you want to attack multiple keywords with a single page, you’ll have to optimize the title for multiple keywords and also take advantage of headings, bold text and content.

  An easy way of increasing your chances is using the CognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to optimize your content for multiple keywords. Start with the most important and then add keywords in the order of importance.

    The meta description is also very important because it affects you CTR in the search engines. Make sure you also have important keywords there, because Google shows them in bold text and it makes your result stand out. Add a call to action as well, something like “Visit our website for details!”.

  4. Claim Google My Business

  If you’re a local business, having your listing secured is a must!

  Not to say that creating a Google MyBusiness page is really easy. All you have to do is go to https://www.google.com/business/ and create an account. Then, follow the steps they show you.

    It’s a great way of ranking your business multiple times on Google.

  5. Target Less Competitive Keywords

  Targeting the most competitive keywords is a good idea. Or at least that’s what market leaders such as Brian Dean suggest. Brian tried many things during his career as an SEO and learned through failure. Now he truly is an expert and an innovator in the field. He usually talks about long content and premium design. Which, if you reverse engineer him, he does. Quite well.

  What Brian doesn’t state, however, is that he spends a lot of money to get things right and create that amazing content that he does.

  He’s not a designer. He’s not very good with videos. He probably doesn’t edit his own HTML and CSS to make his web pages look so good. He also probably doesn’t promote his content all by his own (not sure about this one though).

  On average, I’d say that his Ultimate Guides cost at least $1000 each to set up, with writing, editing, design and promotion. And if you add the videos, it’s probably more.

  That’s not what most people (or clients) want to spend. Sure, you can do it all by yourself, but you might not know design or you might not be a good writer or you might have no idea on how to do outreach.

  Also, Brian already posts once per month or so, so it will probably take you more than that to get it done all by yourself. And if you have no idea how to draw, edit or write, it will take you even longer to learn it.

  The solution here is to start with less competitive keywords and build your way up. As your business grows, you’ll get more and more experience and you’ll have more capital to outsource different tasks that are out of your area of expertise (such as design) to professionals.

  You can use the CognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to find out how competitive a keyword is. Usually, what’s over 60 is considered a pretty difficult keyword to rank for. However, you have a list of other keywords below. Look for ones with lower search volume (although keep the relevancy score high).

    But if you have the money (or client budget) already, hell, go for it. Take the top keyword and make the best possible content using the best possible team. Just make sure it’s a profitable niche and that there will be ROI.

  6. Write More Content

  One simple way of improving your content is writing more content.

  You’ll hear different opinions on this topic. Some say that people don’t have the patience to read through 2,000 words. While that might be true for click-bait posts on Social Media, it’s definitely not the case when someone’s trying to cure hemorrhoids.

  The fact that longer content ranks better in search engines is pretty much accepted as true by most of the SEOs. New research backs this up.

  So, if you have a content that doesn’t yet make it to the top, add more words to it and you might see an improvement.

  However, just adding random content won’t help much. Make sure you cover adjacent topics to make your content as relevant as possible. You can always use the CognitiveSEO Content Assistant to help you cover the most relevant points regarding your topic.

  You’ll also score bonus points for content freshness if you update your old content.

  Another great way of increasing your SEO visibility is publishing more often. If you write 2 articles per month, you’ll cover two topics. If you write 4 you’ll cover 4 topics. It’s simple math. 

  7. Compress Images

  Slow websites impact conversions and they also impact SEO. Google doesn’t want their users to wait very much for websites to load.

  One of the leading causes of slow loading websites are images. It’s also a problem with a very simple solution.

  Don’t upload big images. Generally, they should not exceed 100-200kb in size. You should also try to find the right size in pixels. There’s no point in loading a 2000×2000 pixels image if you’ll only display it 200×200 pixels on screen.

  You can also use image compression plugins. You can find plenty on Google for different content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla. If you can’t find one, you can try using 3rd party tools such as TinyPNG (manual) or ShortPixel (can be automated with API).

  If you’re a photographer, you’ll probably want your images to be HD. If this is the case, then one trick would be to create a separate link for your HD versions. If you still aren’t satisfied with the quality, then you’ll need a faster server, but also take into account that the user’s internet speed matters as well.

  8. Take Advantage of Caching & Minification

  Again, another simple fix that can make a big difference is taking advantage of caching.

  Cache files are stored into your users’ browsers. When users access your site a second time, instead of downloading those files (such as images, css files and javascript files) the browser uses the stored ones to load the site faster.

  Most of the time, it’s really easy to minify and compress files and to enable caching. You can do it with a plugin such as W3 Total Cache if you run on WordPress, but there are plugins for all kinds of CMS.

  Sometimes, however, minifying and compressing css/javascript files might affect your site’s design and functionality, so make sure you test thoroughly if everything works fine.

  9. Claim Social Media Profiles

  Social Media profiles can also rank in Google, if they’re public pages. You can optimize them for slightly different keywords, but still keep your brand and main keywords somewhere in the title.

  Different platforms are fit for different types of audience so choose wisely where you decide to invest most of your time and money.

      Either way, it’s a good idea to secure accounts on all of the popular platforms, just in case. You never know when you become an industry leader and someone else owns your page name on Facebook.

  10. Ask Customers for Reviews (Use Incentives)

  If you want your Google MyBusiness page to be at the top, you’ll need good reviews.

  But how can you get them?

  Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking them to. However, it’s a good idea to ask them on the spot and see them leave the review on their mobile device. If Google tracks their location, it will see that the review is genuine and that the person actually visited the business.

    Other times it’s not that easy and you might have to incentivize them. You can ask them for a review through an e-mail after a week or so of purchasing an item. You can offer a discount for their next purchase if they offer the review.

  Note that there’s a higher change of users leaving negative reviews than positive ones, so you always have to try to get happy users to write about you.

  11. Optimize Internal Links & Adopt Internal Linking Practices

  Internal linking is very important for both crawling and indexing as well as keyword optimization.

  First you have to take care of your navigation. Do you use the proper anchor texts when linking to important pages from your navigation?

  For example, on our site we use the most searched for keywords to link to our most important pages (because we want to rank for those keywords).

    We also link to other very important resources on our site, such as the case studies we’ve worked on and published over the years. This shows search engines that those pages are highly important, since we’ve made them accessible directly from our top menu.

  Then make sure you link between articles and pages when relevant. I’ve done this plenty of times throughout this article. It’s a good idea to also make a habit and edit old articles and link from them to the newly published ones (hopefully, Cornelia does this from time to time as I don’t have access to modify already published articles #theydonttrustme).

  You can always use the cognitiveSEO Site Audit to better understand your site’s internal linking structure.

    Another interesting practice is to link internally to random pages from your 404 pages. This works very well for big sites which often have 404 issues.

  Don’t overdo this. Although Gary Illiyes said you can overoptimize this without a direct hit/penalty on SEO, it might affect the user experience which eventually leads to problems.

  12. Remove Unnecessary Plugins/Features

  Don’t add things that you don’t really need on your website.

  A good example of a feature many webmasters think they need are sliders. Sliders kill conversions and they also make your site a lot slower, because most of them load the necessary JS files on all the pages of the site, while the slider probably runs only on the homepage.

  Also, if you’ve decided you don’t longer need a feature, make sure you also uninstall that plugin/extension. Don’t just deactivate it. You should also check and clean your database from time to time of unnecessary tables and entries, but make sure you backup everything before you make any modifications.

  13. Create Linkable Resources

  When you create content, your first thought is probably to rank for that keyword. So you try to optimize the content for keywords and probably write more content, as I’ve already told you before in this article.

  However, it’s known that you can’t really rank high without links. It’s also known that trying to hack your way into links is a risky thing and can get you into trouble.

  So what’s a really good way to get natural backlinks? The secret is to rank for link worthy topics. A good example are studies.

  Actually, I have an example right in this article:

    If you use the CognitiveSEO Site Explorer, you can see that websites in industries where people are interested in studies and statistics take advantage of this.

  For example, I’ve searched for Alcohol Statistics and added the domains that ranked first into the site explorer. To no surprise, those very studies that ranked there were the top linked pages on that domain:

      It’s not a foolproof method so you’ll have to get creative. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to find out what’s actually popular at this point in your field/niche. You need to find the gap or outrank the other sites in order for this to work (but hey, we’re SEOs, aren’t we?)

  We’ve used this technique for CognitiveSEO as well. We knew that people kept searching whether “social signals influence SEO”. We also knew most people needed a resource to link to. We also know they wanted it to be credible and that they like numbers. Big numbers. Like 23 million shares. So we analyzed 23 million shares and created this study about social signals and how they affect SEO.

  And guess what? It’s in the top 10 most shared resources on our site, among with the homepage, Site Explorer and Blog page. The difference is that this page is rather new compared to the other most linked to pages on our domain.

  14. Understand User Intent & Optimize for It

  One thing that many webmasters seem to ignore is user intent. Although this might sound like some advanced technique that only the pros do well, the truth is it’s something rather basic.

  How many times have you heard that you must “know your audience”? Probably plenty of times. Well, you also have to know what your user is looking for.

  For example, if you’re trying to book hotel rooms, you might have your Book Now button pretty high. However, do you think that your users will try to book the room as soon as they land on the page? Probably not.

  They will first want to see some pictures, probably the price and then other customer reviews before they decide on booking.

  You have to take these things into account when creating the flow of your page. If on a mobile device the first thing they see is a big Book Now button and then a bunch of keyword rich content, they might leave the page because they were actually looking to see some photos of the room first.

  Note that what I’ve said above was an example and it shouldn’t be taken for granted (although I’m pretty sure that’s the case 99% of the times). You should always test these things constantly to figure out what’s best for your website.

  15. Perform A/B Testing

  A/B Testing is a really good way of finding out what works and what doesn’t.

  It’s something you should be constantly doing, but not as often as to jeopardize your profits too much.

    This is usually the best test for conversions rates. For example, a small change, as minor as switching the button color from green to red might account for a significant increase in click through rates.

  However, you can also test with SEO, but it’s harder to isolate, because so many things can affect SEO at the same time, from Google updates to server issues.

  However, it works very well with CTRs, which means it works well with titles and meta descriptions. You can test two variants, each for one week and see which one did best. For this though, you’ll have to rank in the top 3 positions, at least.

  16. Get an SSL Certificate & Move to HTTPS

  Warning: Merging from HTTP to HTTPS is risky. It’s a good idea to consult an expert before proceeding or at least check a good migration guide.

  SSL certificates don’t have a big impact on your SEO but they can have an impact on trust. As the internet evolves, internet security becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

  Important data circulate on the internet, from names, e-mails and phone numbers to much more sensitive information, such as health or credit card information.

  If your site sends information from the server to the client or vice versa, be it only through a simple contact form, the connection should be secured.

  When browsing your site, people want to see a green lock, not a red one or any warnings.

  via netregistry.com.au

  17. Look at What Your Competitors Are Doing & Do It Better!

  One fail-proof way of ranking to the top is trying to do what your competitors are doing (the ones ranking at the top, of course).

  In the InBound Link Analysis section of the CognitiveSEO Toolset, under the Compare tab, you can find a section called Common Domains.

  If you select “at least 3 sites” you can get a list of domains that are linking to at least 3 sites in your analysis. The goal here is to identify domains that are linking to at least 2-3 of your competitors but not to your site.

    The theory here is that if those sites are already linking to your competitors, there’s a higher chance that they’ll also link to you as well, since they’re already interested in the subject.

  However, you have to be careful not to build spammy links. Make sure you analyze your competitor’s link profile before you build the links. Anyway, it’s an opportunity that your competitors are already taking advantage of, which seems to work.

  Also, this doesn’t only apply to links. Look at where they’re advertising, look at what they’re posting on social media and look at what their content looks like. Ideally, try to do everything better than them!

  18. Get Mobile Friendly

  Now this can be a big modification but I promise you, if your site isn’t displaying well on mobile platforms, you’re losing A LOT!

  Sometimes, the modification might be as simple as installing a responsive website design. Changing themes on content management systems isn’t very difficult.

  However, if your site was running on a separate mobile version before, you also have to take all the redirects into account in order to avoid losing traffic. Make sure you do this by the book and ask for a professional’s advice if this is the case.

  19. Use PPC & Advertise

  We all know that SEO takes time. It might take somewhere between 6 months to one full year to see any real results, especially when it comes to services and sales.

  However, if by that time your business goes bankrupt, it won’t help much.

    People always try to compare SEO to PPC but the truth is that they go well together. It helps you grow your business as you’re growing your organic search visibility and even when you’re at the top you can still use PPC to take up an extra spot in the search engine. Combine it with a top maps listing and you’re set!

  20. Avoid Over Optimizing

  Most of the things I’ve said in this article are pretty basic. So if you’re not doing any of that at all, start doing them. But don’t over-do it! If you try to overoptimize, you risk messing up things.

  Don’t try to figure out the next big thing. If a couple of things work and show results, don’t try to abuse them. It might harm you on the long run.

  This doesn’t mean you have to ignore any optimization tip or trick you hear. However, try to take a more ‘back to the basics’ approach and think long term.

  You should still test new things, but one at a time.

  21. Focus on Singular Call to Actions

  Many people make the mistake of having too many offers on their site. You have to think very well what you want your user to do.

  Do you want the user to enroll in an e-mail list? Then don’t show them ads. Do you want them to click on a button? Then don’t put an e-mail sign-up form in the sidebar.

  If you have multiple offers in the same place, users might get confused or distracted and probably skip both.

    Ending note

  Hopefully these tips will help you improve your SEO results quickly with minimal effort. Which technique from above do you think will be the most effective?

  Also, what other techniques have you used that were easy to implement but had visible or even significant results? Share them with us in the comments section!

  The post 21 Easy to Implement SEO Actions That Can Improve Your Rankings Big Time appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/21573/small-seo-actions-big-results/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[wjwilliams29]

21 Easy to Implement SEO Actions That Can Improve Your Rankings Big Time

To many people SEO seems like something really hard to do, which also takes a lot of time. While mostly that’s true, it’s also true that there are some small SEO actions you can perform that can have a big impact on your rankings.

  In this post, we’ve gathered 21 things you can do to improve your SEO. Most of them are easy to implement, but we’re trying to focus more on the ratio between the effort and the results. So, if something seems harder to do, it will also have a greater impact.

    I know this is a long post, but I want to challenge you to read through all of it and leave a comment at the bottom stating which recommendation you think has the best effort/results ratio. I’m really curious. Additionally, if you have other ideas, please share them with us.

  Fixing Crawlability & Indexability Issues

Set Up Traffic Monitoring Tools & Analyze Your Data

Optimize Your Titles, Headings, Content & Meta (Add Relevant Keywords)

Claim Google My Business

Target Less Competitive Keywords

Write More Content

Compress Images

Take Advantage of Caching & Minification

Claim Social Media Profiles

Ask Customers for Reviews (Use Incentives)

Optimize Internal Links & Adopt Internal Linking Practices

Remove Unnecessary Plugins/Features

Create Linkable Resources

Understand User Intent & Optimize for It

Perform A/B Testing

Get an SSL Certificate & Move to HTTPS

Look At What Your Competitors Are Doing & Do It Better!

Get Mobile Friendly

Use PPC & Advertise

Avoid Over Optimizing

Focus on Singular Call to Actions

    1. Fixing Crawlability & Indexability Issues

  Making sure that your website can be discovered and indexed by search engines is your main concern when it comes to SEO.

  They say that “The best place to hide a dead body is on the 2nd page of Google”. That implies that something has been killed. Well, in this case, a website not being on Google at all basically implies that it never even existed. At least from and SEO point of view.

  Fixing crawlability and indexation issues might be either really easy or really hard.

  For the easy part, all you have to do is make sure you don’t block any important pages from being indexed through your robots.txt file or through any meta tags.

  You can access your robots.txt file by visiting yoursite.com/robotxs.txt. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, you should have one. In the following example you can see that the file blocks access for WordPress’s admin URLs, but gives access to admin-ajax.php.

    If you don’t want to block any URLs from being indexed, your file should contain the following:

  User-agent: * Allow: /

  You also want to make sure your pages can be found by search engines. The easiest way to do it is to submit a Sitemap. However, there’s a natural way through which pages get indexed: through links.

  To discover websites and pages on the internet, search engines use software called crawlers. These crawlers access sites from one link to another to discover new pages. So make sure that when you post a new page, it’s somehow accessible from your homepage, either through the top menu, footer or through another article, at least.

  For the hard part, your site might have different issues that prevent indexability, from server and PHP errors to duplicate content, bad hreflang implementation or automatic page generation. These can lead to big expenses in your crawl budget risking leaving important pages uncrawled (the search engine sometimes limits the number of pages it crawls on a site, so if unimportant pages get crawled first, there’s no room left for important ones).

  Also, you might block individual pages using meta tags. These can be set from Plugins such as Yoast SEO. To find these, you have to visit a page and hit CTRL + U to see the source, then search for “noindex” without the brackets.

  If you find something like this, it means your page won’t be cralwed and indexed:

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

  It’s hard to check manually, because you have to go through each page, so a tool like CognitiveSEO’s Site Audit will be helpful. It will also help you with any other crawlability and indexability issues, such as duplicate content and bad hreflang implementation.

    To put it more simply, you need to make sure that all your important pages get indexed by search engines. You can also do a search for “site:yoursite.com” in Google to see how many pages were indexed by the search engine.

    If you see a big discrepancy between the number of indexed results and the number of pages you think your site has, you probably have some sort of issue which is worth digging into.

  2. Set Up Traffic Monitoring Tools & Analyze Your Data

  Monitoring your site’s traffic and performance is one of the most important things when it comes to SEO.

  By looking at this data you can figure what type of content works in your niche and what type of content doesn’t. You can find out things such as what articles provide the most traffic, which pages convert better and what visitors actually do when browsing your site.

    Although fancier tools, like Hotjar, are helpful for understanding how users interact with your site in terms of UX, much simpler tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console will do.

  If you don’t have monitoring tools installed, install some ASAP. If you already have them installed but never visit them or analyze the data, start doing it.

  The findings might surprise you!

  3. Optimize Your Titles, Headings, Content & Meta (Add Relevant Keywords)

  This is one of the mistakes I see very many people do! I’ve had SEO clients telling me they’ve worked with other specialists before only to see they’ve built hundreds of links without even optimizing the titles… and by that I literally mean not having the keywords in the titles tags!

  The basics are very important! Do your keyword research and optimize your titles, headings, content and metas!

  While creating a keyword rich title which is optimized for multiple phrases and also catchy to the eye might not be easy, make sure that you at least have the most important keywords in there!

  If you’ve done Adwords before, you know that having the Keyword in the title towards the beginning is recommended. Why? Because that way people click more on them.

  If you want to attack multiple keywords with a single page, you’ll have to optimize the title for multiple keywords and also take advantage of headings, bold text and content.

  An easy way of increasing your chances is using the CognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to optimize your content for multiple keywords. Start with the most important and then add keywords in the order of importance.

    The meta description is also very important because it affects you CTR in the search engines. Make sure you also have important keywords there, because Google shows them in bold text and it makes your result stand out. Add a call to action as well, something like “Visit our website for details!”.

  4. Claim Google My Business

  If you’re a local business, having your listing secured is a must!

  Not to say that creating a Google MyBusiness page is really easy. All you have to do is go to https://www.google.com/business/ and create an account. Then, follow the steps they show you.

    It’s a great way of ranking your business multiple times on Google.

  5. Target Less Competitive Keywords

  Targeting the most competitive keywords is a good idea. Or at least that’s what market leaders such as Brian Dean suggest. Brian tried many things during his career as an SEO and learned through failure. Now he truly is an expert and an innovator in the field. He usually talks about long content and premium design. Which, if you reverse engineer him, he does. Quite well.

  What Brian doesn’t state, however, is that he spends a lot of money to get things right and create that amazing content that he does.

  He’s not a designer. He’s not very good with videos. He probably doesn’t edit his own HTML and CSS to make his web pages look so good. He also probably doesn’t promote his content all by his own (not sure about this one though).

  On average, I’d say that his Ultimate Guides cost at least $1000 each to set up, with writing, editing, design and promotion. And if you add the videos, it’s probably more.

  That’s not what most people (or clients) want to spend. Sure, you can do it all by yourself, but you might not know design or you might not be a good writer or you might have no idea on how to do outreach.

  Also, Brian already posts once per month or so, so it will probably take you more than that to get it done all by yourself. And if you have no idea how to draw, edit or write, it will take you even longer to learn it.

  The solution here is to start with less competitive keywords and build your way up. As your business grows, you’ll get more and more experience and you’ll have more capital to outsource different tasks that are out of your area of expertise (such as design) to professionals.

  You can use the CognitiveSEO Keyword Tool to find out how competitive a keyword is. Usually, what’s over 60 is considered a pretty difficult keyword to rank for. However, you have a list of other keywords below. Look for ones with lower search volume (although keep the relevancy score high).

    But if you have the money (or client budget) already, hell, go for it. Take the top keyword and make the best possible content using the best possible team. Just make sure it’s a profitable niche and that there will be ROI.

  6. Write More Content

  One simple way of improving your content is writing more content.

  You’ll hear different opinions on this topic. Some say that people don’t have the patience to read through 2,000 words. While that might be true for click-bait posts on Social Media, it’s definitely not the case when someone’s trying to cure hemorrhoids.

  The fact that longer content ranks better in search engines is pretty much accepted as true by most of the SEOs. New research backs this up.

  So, if you have a content that doesn’t yet make it to the top, add more words to it and you might see an improvement.

  However, just adding random content won’t help much. Make sure you cover adjacent topics to make your content as relevant as possible. You can always use the CognitiveSEO Content Assistant to help you cover the most relevant points regarding your topic.

  You’ll also score bonus points for content freshness if you update your old content.

  Another great way of increasing your SEO visibility is publishing more often. If you write 2 articles per month, you’ll cover two topics. If you write 4 you’ll cover 4 topics. It’s simple math. 

  7. Compress Images

  Slow websites impact conversions and they also impact SEO. Google doesn’t want their users to wait very much for websites to load.

  One of the leading causes of slow loading websites are images. It’s also a problem with a very simple solution.

  Don’t upload big images. Generally, they should not exceed 100-200kb in size. You should also try to find the right size in pixels. There’s no point in loading a 2000×2000 pixels image if you’ll only display it 200×200 pixels on screen.

  You can also use image compression plugins. You can find plenty on Google for different content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla. If you can’t find one, you can try using 3rd party tools such as TinyPNG (manual) or ShortPixel (can be automated with API).

  If you’re a photographer, you’ll probably want your images to be HD. If this is the case, then one trick would be to create a separate link for your HD versions. If you still aren’t satisfied with the quality, then you’ll need a faster server, but also take into account that the user’s internet speed matters as well.

  8. Take Advantage of Caching & Minification

  Again, another simple fix that can make a big difference is taking advantage of caching.

  Cache files are stored into your users’ browsers. When users access your site a second time, instead of downloading those files (such as images, css files and javascript files) the browser uses the stored ones to load the site faster.

  Most of the time, it’s really easy to minify and compress files and to enable caching. You can do it with a plugin such as W3 Total Cache if you run on WordPress, but there are plugins for all kinds of CMS.

  Sometimes, however, minifying and compressing css/javascript files might affect your site’s design and functionality, so make sure you test thoroughly if everything works fine.

  9. Claim Social Media Profiles

  Social Media profiles can also rank in Google, if they’re public pages. You can optimize them for slightly different keywords, but still keep your brand and main keywords somewhere in the title.

  Different platforms are fit for different types of audience so choose wisely where you decide to invest most of your time and money.

      Either way, it’s a good idea to secure accounts on all of the popular platforms, just in case. You never know when you become an industry leader and someone else owns your page name on Facebook.

  10. Ask Customers for Reviews (Use Incentives)

  If you want your Google MyBusiness page to be at the top, you’ll need good reviews.

  But how can you get them?

  Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking them to. However, it’s a good idea to ask them on the spot and see them leave the review on their mobile device. If Google tracks their location, it will see that the review is genuine and that the person actually visited the business.

    Other times it’s not that easy and you might have to incentivize them. You can ask them for a review through an e-mail after a week or so of purchasing an item. You can offer a discount for their next purchase if they offer the review.

  Note that there’s a higher change of users leaving negative reviews than positive ones, so you always have to try to get happy users to write about you.

  11. Optimize Internal Links & Adopt Internal Linking Practices

  Internal linking is very important for both crawling and indexing as well as keyword optimization.

  First you have to take care of your navigation. Do you use the proper anchor texts when linking to important pages from your navigation?

  For example, on our site we use the most searched for keywords to link to our most important pages (because we want to rank for those keywords).

    We also link to other very important resources on our site, such as the case studies we’ve worked on and published over the years. This shows search engines that those pages are highly important, since we’ve made them accessible directly from our top menu.

  Then make sure you link between articles and pages when relevant. I’ve done this plenty of times throughout this article. It’s a good idea to also make a habit and edit old articles and link from them to the newly published ones (hopefully, Cornelia does this from time to time as I don’t have access to modify already published articles #theydonttrustme).

  You can always use the cognitiveSEO Site Audit to better understand your site’s internal linking structure.

    Another interesting practice is to link internally to random pages from your 404 pages. This works very well for big sites which often have 404 issues.

  Don’t overdo this. Although Gary Illiyes said you can overoptimize this without a direct hit/penalty on SEO, it might affect the user experience which eventually leads to problems.

  12. Remove Unnecessary Plugins/Features

  Don’t add things that you don’t really need on your website.

  A good example of a feature many webmasters think they need are sliders. Sliders kill conversions and they also make your site a lot slower, because most of them load the necessary JS files on all the pages of the site, while the slider probably runs only on the homepage.

  Also, if you’ve decided you don’t longer need a feature, make sure you also uninstall that plugin/extension. Don’t just deactivate it. You should also check and clean your database from time to time of unnecessary tables and entries, but make sure you backup everything before you make any modifications.

  13. Create Linkable Resources

  When you create content, your first thought is probably to rank for that keyword. So you try to optimize the content for keywords and probably write more content, as I’ve already told you before in this article.

  However, it’s known that you can’t really rank high without links. It’s also known that trying to hack your way into links is a risky thing and can get you into trouble.

  So what’s a really good way to get natural backlinks? The secret is to rank for link worthy topics. A good example are studies.

  Actually, I have an example right in this article:

    If you use the CognitiveSEO Site Explorer, you can see that websites in industries where people are interested in studies and statistics take advantage of this.

  For example, I’ve searched for Alcohol Statistics and added the domains that ranked first into the site explorer. To no surprise, those very studies that ranked there were the top linked pages on that domain:

      It’s not a foolproof method so you’ll have to get creative. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to find out what’s actually popular at this point in your field/niche. You need to find the gap or outrank the other sites in order for this to work (but hey, we’re SEOs, aren’t we?)

  We’ve used this technique for CognitiveSEO as well. We knew that people kept searching whether “social signals influence SEO”. We also knew most people needed a resource to link to. We also know they wanted it to be credible and that they like numbers. Big numbers. Like 23 million shares. So we analyzed 23 million shares and created this study about social signals and how they affect SEO.

  And guess what? It’s in the top 10 most shared resources on our site, among with the homepage, Site Explorer and Blog page. The difference is that this page is rather new compared to the other most linked to pages on our domain.

  14. Understand User Intent & Optimize for It

  One thing that many webmasters seem to ignore is user intent. Although this might sound like some advanced technique that only the pros do well, the truth is it’s something rather basic.

  How many times have you heard that you must “know your audience”? Probably plenty of times. Well, you also have to know what your user is looking for.

  For example, if you’re trying to book hotel rooms, you might have your Book Now button pretty high. However, do you think that your users will try to book the room as soon as they land on the page? Probably not.

  They will first want to see some pictures, probably the price and then other customer reviews before they decide on booking.

  You have to take these things into account when creating the flow of your page. If on a mobile device the first thing they see is a big Book Now button and then a bunch of keyword rich content, they might leave the page because they were actually looking to see some photos of the room first.

  Note that what I’ve said above was an example and it shouldn’t be taken for granted (although I’m pretty sure that’s the case 99% of the times). You should always test these things constantly to figure out what’s best for your website.

  15. Perform A/B Testing

  A/B Testing is a really good way of finding out what works and what doesn’t.

  It’s something you should be constantly doing, but not as often as to jeopardize your profits too much.

    This is usually the best test for conversions rates. For example, a small change, as minor as switching the button color from green to red might account for a significant increase in click through rates.

  However, you can also test with SEO, but it’s harder to isolate, because so many things can affect SEO at the same time, from Google updates to server issues.

  However, it works very well with CTRs, which means it works well with titles and meta descriptions. You can test two variants, each for one week and see which one did best. For this though, you’ll have to rank in the top 3 positions, at least.

  16. Get an SSL Certificate & Move to HTTPS

  Warning: Merging from HTTP to HTTPS is risky. It’s a good idea to consult an expert before proceeding or at least check a good migration guide.

  SSL certificates don’t have a big impact on your SEO but they can have an impact on trust. As the internet evolves, internet security becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

  Important data circulate on the internet, from names, e-mails and phone numbers to much more sensitive information, such as health or credit card information.

  If your site sends information from the server to the client or vice versa, be it only through a simple contact form, the connection should be secured.

  When browsing your site, people want to see a green lock, not a red one or any warnings.

  via netregistry.com.au

  17. Look at What Your Competitors Are Doing & Do It Better!

  One fail-proof way of ranking to the top is trying to do what your competitors are doing (the ones ranking at the top, of course).

  In the InBound Link Analysis section of the CognitiveSEO Toolset, under the Compare tab, you can find a section called Common Domains.

  If you select “at least 3 sites” you can get a list of domains that are linking to at least 3 sites in your analysis. The goal here is to identify domains that are linking to at least 2-3 of your competitors but not to your site.

    The theory here is that if those sites are already linking to your competitors, there’s a higher chance that they’ll also link to you as well, since they’re already interested in the subject.

  However, you have to be careful not to build spammy links. Make sure you analyze your competitor’s link profile before you build the links. Anyway, it’s an opportunity that your competitors are already taking advantage of, which seems to work.

  Also, this doesn’t only apply to links. Look at where they’re advertising, look at what they’re posting on social media and look at what their content looks like. Ideally, try to do everything better than them!

  18. Get Mobile Friendly

  Now this can be a big modification but I promise you, if your site isn’t displaying well on mobile platforms, you’re losing A LOT!

  Sometimes, the modification might be as simple as installing a responsive website design. Changing themes on content management systems isn’t very difficult.

  However, if your site was running on a separate mobile version before, you also have to take all the redirects into account in order to avoid losing traffic. Make sure you do this by the book and ask for a professional’s advice if this is the case.

  19. Use PPC & Advertise

  We all know that SEO takes time. It might take somewhere between 6 months to one full year to see any real results, especially when it comes to services and sales.

  However, if by that time your business goes bankrupt, it won’t help much.

    People always try to compare SEO to PPC but the truth is that they go well together. It helps you grow your business as you’re growing your organic search visibility and even when you’re at the top you can still use PPC to take up an extra spot in the search engine. Combine it with a top maps listing and you’re set!

  20. Avoid Over Optimizing

  Most of the things I’ve said in this article are pretty basic. So if you’re not doing any of that at all, start doing them. But don’t over-do it! If you try to overoptimize, you risk messing up things.

  Don’t try to figure out the next big thing. If a couple of things work and show results, don’t try to abuse them. It might harm you on the long run.

  This doesn’t mean you have to ignore any optimization tip or trick you hear. However, try to take a more ‘back to the basics’ approach and think long term.

  You should still test new things, but one at a time.

  21. Focus on Singular Call to Actions

  Many people make the mistake of having too many offers on their site. You have to think very well what you want your user to do.

  Do you want the user to enroll in an e-mail list? Then don’t show them ads. Do you want them to click on a button? Then don’t put an e-mail sign-up form in the sidebar.

  If you have multiple offers in the same place, users might get confused or distracted and probably skip both.

    Ending note

  Hopefully these tips will help you improve your SEO results quickly with minimal effort. Which technique from above do you think will be the most effective?

  Also, what other techniques have you used that were easy to implement but had visible or even significant results? Share them with us in the comments section!

  The post 21 Easy to Implement SEO Actions That Can Improve Your Rankings Big Time appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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7 Unbelievable Facts About SEO 2019

Businesses need to use 2018 in order in order to the bad habit of looking at aspects of an SEO marketing and advertising strategy being a one-time exercise. It looks generally used in SEO as the general definition for the method that the mathematical detection associated with synonyms, and how certain terms are related to others in the piece of text, is used to the indexing of web pages by search engines like search engines. So if you would become to write 5% for every keyword then your word SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and Article will be within the content 75 times every. Like any good SEO company before concentrating on the info will do a proper hyperlink edit and fix all the particular error pages. Taking the work to comprehend even the essentials of SEO can help your own site gain higher click-through prices, engagement, and of course, ratings. Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the particular Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon research and voice search will become trends in 2019. MarketingVox warns towards getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO practices could bring you down. Your web webpages must earn that high rank with high-quality content and best-practice SEO. Content is the 2nd major SEO ranking factor, plus is just as important because links. Previously known since WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is one of the particular most quintessential WordPress plugins whenever it comes to search motor optimization. While SEOs need in order to understand it is not just about rankings, UX specialists require to admit that user knowledge kicks in even before making use of the website. You can find on-site and off site SEO techniques that you may use to higher your research engine ranking.

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[symbianosgames]

Classic Tools Retrospective: John Romero talks about creating TEd, the tile editor that shipped over 30 games

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

If you were to ask a room of game developers about their first experience making games, many would tell you that it involved using a tool that came with the game that they were already playing. Most likely, they found it tucked away in the same folder as the executable, sporting an enticing name like “editor.exe”.

Many years before Unity 3D, companies such as id Software, Epic, 3D Realms, Blizzard, and BioWare would release tools along with their games, in the hopes that enabling people to create new content would grow the community and extend the lifespan of the game. For many people, these tools were not only exciting to use, but they were also their gateway into the game industry. The content that they created would later become their resumes.

In recent years, retrospectives of classic games have been well received at GDC, but there have been very few stories about classic game tools. This series of articles will attempt to fill that gap, by interviewing key people who were instrumental in the development of those classic game tools.

For the first article of this series, I have the great pleasure of speaking with John Romero about TEd, the tile editor that he created at id Software, which went on to ship 33 games.

DL: Hi, John. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me!

JR: No problem!

DL: Before we talk about TEd, I want to take a step back: In the early 80s, there were very few level editors that came with the game. In your interview for the book Honoring the Code, you spoke about how the Terrain Generator in the game Pegasus ][ was one of the first level editors that you ever played with. What can you tell me about that experience?

JR: Well, the first time I saw Pegasus ][ was at Sierra College, in the Apple  room. It was one of the very first things I saw on an Apple. While playing it, I saw that there was this option to do terrain generation. I thought that it was pretty cool that it has this tool built in to generate gameplay.

It’s funny to think now that this is one of the earliest games that let you generate mods. This was the first time I saw anything like this. I thought it was really cool. It's funny, I never thought "why don't other games have that?"… I just never expected it!

  DL: OK, so, let's move on to talking about TEd.

[While we are talking, I launch two instances of DOSBox so we can look at TEd and Deluxe Paint, side-by-side]

  The first thing I want to talk about is the TEd splash screen. It says Deluxe Paint for Tile Maps. So, anyone who has read a bit about the history of id Software knows that Adrian Carmack used Deluxe Paint…

JR: The whole industry did.

DL: Yeah! Well, one of the first things that struck me was that the menu at the top of Deluxe Paint and TEd are very similar, in terms of look and feel. Were you trying to make something that was familiar to users of Deluxe Paint, or were you re-using something that was coming from Deluxe Paint?

JR: Before id Software, I had written some tools at SoftDisk and I was writing them on PC. I wrote a program called Pixel Puzzle Maker which was a tool used to create puzzles for a Softdisk game called Pixel Puzzler. So I wrote a pull-down menu system for Pixel Puzzle maker and then I did some modifications to it. I think I created some more tools for PC at Softdisk, then when I was doing the id stuff I think I created another one, because it was pretty easy to make this pull-down menu system.

It wasn't based on Deluxe Paint, because I never used Deluxe Paint, but I just thought having a pull-down menu it was much easier compared to dealing with a whole bunch of hotkeys… even though there are a lot of hotkeys!

  DL: Speaking of hotkeys, there are other similarities that I noticed. These days, we're very familiar with the Control-Z hotkey being for undo, but back then - at least in the case of Deluxe Paint and TEd - it's just the “u” key on the keyboard.

JR: [Laughs] Wow. Is that what I did?

DL: Yes! Here, if I fill in a few squares and press "u", it goes back...

[I draw some tiles, and then press “u” to undo the last action]

JR: [Laughs] Nice.

Oh, by the way, you're using DOSBox, and when you scroll around the screen, that is super slow compared to how fast it actually was on a 386 back in the day. It was lightning fast.

"EGA Scrolling using Latch mode was so fast back then, you had to tap the keys quickly because it was just flying by."

DL: Oh yeah? No kidding?

JR: DOSBox is slowing it way down for some reason. EGA Scrolling using Latch mode was so fast back then, you had to tap the keys because it was just flying by. So, you're getting to see a weird super chuggy slow version.

[Author’s note: Here is John as “user42604” on StackExchange explaining EGA Scrolling using Latch mode: http://ift.tt/2lc24UU]

DL: OK, so, we were saying that TEd has a lot of hotkeys. At the time that TEd was being used, you often had to read the help file to figure out how to use tools like these.

JR: Oh yeah, definitely, and I think some people were still at the tail-end of WordStar, which was like a nightmare of hotkeys.

DL: [Laughs]

JR: Back then, we were playing Ultima, and in Ultima, every letter on the keyboard was used, so it was not difficult to remember what things did when you were used to that, back then.

    [Author's Note: I dug up the manual for Ultima 1, and John is absolutely right... almost every key on the keyboard was mapped to an action!]

DL: For sure! So, when it comes to designing a level at that time in the games industry, you might use a piece of graph paper to decide where the tiles would go, and then you would type them in one at a time.

JR: Yeah.

  [Author's Note: After our interview, John sent me this graph paper drawing for a game he created called Mach Six. Also, click here to see an article on Gamasutra about how Nintendo used graph paper to design levels for the original Zelda on NES]

DL: So, at which point was it decided at id Software that it was necessary to create TEd?

JR: When I created Dangerous Dave in 1988, I needed to create levels for it, and I decided "well, why don't I just use the game itself, and just let my own game create levels, and save them out". So, that's what I did with Dangerous Dave.

So, when John Carmack saw that - because he was an Apple II guy - he was really impressed, because he was used to just using text to represent graphics. When we were first starting to make stuff together, I made TEd 1.0, and it evolved over the next six months to be TEd 5.0, which was used for 33 shipped games.

  DL: Wow… now, when you say 33 shipped games, that’s not only stuff that was within id - like the Commander Keen and Wolfenstein series - but also outside of id as well, like Rise of the Triad?

JR: Yeah! Also, Corridor 7, and stuff at Gamer's Edge, like Shadow Knights, Slordax, Dangerous Dave and the Haunted Mansion, Rescue Rover 1 and 2, BioMenace... a bunch of games! 

DL: So, is it also true that TEd was not only used -- from a side perspective -- to create levels for two dimensional side scrolling games, but it was also used -- from a top perspective -- to create levels for three dimensional first person shooter games?

JR: Yeah. TEd 5.0 is the same tool that created all those games.

DL: OK, on that topic, I was wondering: At a certain point at id Software, you guys went from making two dimensional games to three dimensional games. Did you ever debate the idea of creating a new editor versus re-using TEd?

JR: Yeah, I think we talked pretty quickly about it. We were saying "we're going to have a 2D matrix to represent the level. Cool, we'll just use TEd for it." Yup, that was it! [Laughs] It was very simple.

DL: So, there’s something else I wanted to ask you: In the Rise of the Triad help file – written by Tom Hall – he quotes you as saying this: "Once in a while a programmer really writes something he's proud of, a slick, elegant, blazingly fast routine that stands as a benchmark against which other code will be judged by. However, this is not the case with TEd's fill routine. This slow, stupid algorithm will casually fill one plane of data in a painfully creeping manner. Press ESC when it gets confused."

JR: [Laughs]

  DL: [Laughs] So, why did you write that? Is there a story behind the fill routine?

JR: Well, the fill routine had some bugs in it. I didn't spend a lot of time writing it, and it *mostly* worked, but sometimes it wouldn't fully flood fill, so you had to keep on clicking to fill all the areas. It was easy to use.

[As we are talking, I start using the Flood Fill routine, and TEd crashes inside DOSBox with a "Divide by zero" error]

JR: [Laughs]

DL: [Laughs] True to form! It's funny, because I was playing around with it before our interview, and I was saying to myself "I don't know why he was quoted as saying that, it works fine for me!"

JR: [Laughs] Well, it didn't ever divide by zero when we were using it... OK I think the problem is that you didn't have a tile selected. It will blow up if you try to flood fill with no tile.

[I restart TEd, which shows the graphics installation dialog]

  See that graphics installation right here? What TEd would do is it would actually let you edit maps in CGA, EGA, and VGA and it would move all of the graphics data up into XMS memory, so it could pull it out of XMS when you wanted to switch graphics modes. So if you had a game that had all three graphic modes, then it would let you pull down those tiles. You could pull the VGA tiles down because you're switching to VGA mode, so they would all be loaded up and sitting in memory.

DL: Yes, I read that was a pretty revolutionary feature at that time.

"Totally! [That error message] was totally for Tom [Hall]!"

JR: Yeah. The other thing I did was that if you had a cursor somewhere in the level, you could press Alt-L, and it will launch the game and put you right at that location in the level. See if it will work.

[When I place my cursor in the level and press Alt-L, an error message appears]

DL: [Laughs] So, this is the other thing I wanted to talk to you about...

JR: [Laughs] 

DL: I took a screenshot of this error message as I was playing around with TEd earlier, because I wanted to ask you about it. You wouldn't see this kind of error message in Photoshop or Maya these days... [Laughs]

JR: Nope, nope! This tool was only written for me and Tom [Hall]. 

DL: Of course! That's what I wanted to ask you: Did you write this error message specifically for Tom?

JR: Totally! It was totally for Tom. I would never make that error. [Laughs] 

DL: [Laughs] I can imagine him reacting to it when he saw it for the first time.

JR: Oh yeah, he'd be laughing.

[John then shows me that you need to add the name of the executable of the game after the TEd executable so it knows what to launch when pressing Alt-L]

DL: Hey, that worked!

JR: Oh, but it put you at the start of the level. I think the reason why is that you're using a release version of the game, which ignores that command line parameter. The commercial version doesn't allow that, because they you could just cheat!

DL: Yeah, OK, that makes sense. But to me, cheating is one of the things that got people started in game development… you know, having the ability to modify levels in the game to mess with their friends...

JR: Oh yeah! [Laughs]

DL: So, I wanted to wrap up by talking about the future of game development tools.

In the early 90s, when I was getting started making games by using the tools made by you and other developers, it wasn't always easy: you had to read the help file – that is, if it existed. You needed a bit of technical knowledge, and you often had to learn some basic scripting or programming. However, at the same time, you could make some 8-bit pixel art and it could look half-decent. You also had the flexibility to make the levels look any way you wanted.

These days, there are tools like SnapMap which are a lot more accessible to everyone, but there is a lot less flexibility. There's visual scripting, so you don't really have to learn how to script or program. Making assets that look good enough to be in the game is out of reach for most people.

My question to you is: Do you think that some of these modern tools are not giving people who are getting into the industry enough flexibility, or do you think that this is just the evolution of the games development – in the same way that people went from coding in assembler to compilers – and this is just our industry is moving forward?

  JR: This is where it's gotta go. The group who made SnapMap started their careers by playing Doom and using TEd. The company that was embedded inside id Software was called Escalation Studios. They did Doom Resurrection. I've known those people for over 20 years. They're very hardcore gamers, they come from the Doom world, and then the Quake world. They've followed the company since we made Doom. These were people whose lives were about making levels for years.

So, SnapMap was a natural evolution of where tools need to be for people, but on console. Obviously they didn't create Doom using SnapMap, but SnapMap is a really great way for people who have never done level design to – at least – see if they like it, and if they do like that, well there are more powerful things that they can do. Maybe not with this version of Doom, but with the Source engine, and many other engines out there, like Unreal. So this is to give them a taste of what it's like.

DL: OK, that makes sense. So it's not a replacement, it’s a way to get people started on that path.

JR: Yeah, because making the pieces of SnapMap is the hard part. So, if that's something that people can do for the PC version of Doom, then they'll actually know what real level design is like, at least in those modular chunks.

"First, you need to write the tool for the user of the tool."

DL: So, for my last question, I wanted to loop back to where we started: looking back at classic game retrospectives.

Sometimes there are tricks and tips that - over time - get lost. I think that one of the interesting things about the GDC classic game retrospectives is that people who are bringing back knowledge that has gotten lost over time. People like you, who have been in the industry for a while, can pass down this information to people who are just getting in to the industry now.

So, specifically from a tools development standpoint, what advice you would give to tools developers these days?

JR: Yeah, definitely. First, you need to write the tool for the user of the tool. So, if a level designer is going to be using your tool, that's the person that you need to make the tool for. Make it as easy as possible, with as much power as they are asking for. It's also important to take the time to really use the tool yourself, so you can experience what's annoying about it.

"A lot of times, tools programmers don't go far enough asking the questions about 'Why do you want that? What is it that you're actually trying to do?'"

DL: Definitely.

JR: Also, a lot of times, when designers ask for some power, a lot of times, tools programmers don't go far enough asking the questions about "Why do you want that? What is it that you're actually trying to do?" because we can wrap up a lot of functionality for you to make it easy when you want to put these things in the world… versus "here are all these components... have fun, level designers!" and then the programmers run away.

DL: Right! [Laughs]

JR: It's also great if the tools programmers and the users are in the same room, to make sure that the tool is being written with the best communication between the two.

DL: Agreed.

JR: Finally, don't make stuff in assembly. [Laughs] What I mean is, it's really hard to maintain a tool ten years later when it's using languages or features that are so hard-coded for the platform that it's on. So try to abstract the functionality so you can replace it later. I actually had that problem with TEd, where - in 2001 - I needed a tile editor to make levels for a new game I was going to make, and I went back and looked at the TEd 5.0 code, which was from 1991, and I was like "Wow, there's no way I can use this code in any way..." [Laughs]

"Remember, tools live longer than games do."

DL: [Laughs]

JR: Remember, tools live longer than games do.

DL: That's all great advice. Thank you so much, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

JR: Thanks!

David would also like to thank Kris Graft, Marc D’Amico, Shawn Guzzo, and Miles Holmes for their advice in writing this article.

Are you interested in game development tools?

    It will take place on Wednesday, March 1st 2017 at 2:00pm in Room 3005, West Hall.

  See you there!