#tags for easier access excluding my old ones

[pleafyistired]

INTRO POST!! :3

Hai there!! I'm pleafy, but feel free to make up new nicknames for me lol :3 i use he/them. im just a silly guy having fun here! :3 feel free to send ask i enjoy them very much 🌟

I like a lot of stuffs, so you'll see a lot of fandoms lol, i dont make sideblogs for my interests. Im rn into centricide and ava/avm but some other fandoms im in but not limited to are: marikinonline4, cookie run kingdom, the magnus archive, hermitcraft/life series, rtumblr (rtgame's tumblr fandom) and lego monkie kid! im forgetting a lot others probably lol <:3

But also im very much about my ocs!! i have. so much written out about them. do ask about them if you want :3 no i cant ever talk about my ocs in less than 2k words /silly

this is my main blog, and it is very messy and unorganized. sorry for that lol, im not the best at tagging stuffs (its mostly for organization sake, and im Not the best at it lol) but if you really want something consistently tagged, feel free to shoot me an ask!

Some frequent tags i use:

#advice, #resources, #fave (also #i need a tag stronger than fave): what it says on the tin, theyre collections of in order, advices, resources and posts i think are fucking awesome

#moodboard: honestly just me saving up reaction images in this tag

#save and #hoarded pile of posts ^^ are two very old tags i used to use, but dropped, theyre both just posts i wanted to look at later or think is cool

#Inspiral astrum: the tag for my ocs!! :3

some fandom tags i Sometimes use: #ava #mo4 and a new one #centalks

Most importantly, i hope you guys have fun here!! <33 Have a good one!! <33 - ☘️💫

^im busy with irl shit again </3

[mixelation]

Official Plasticity + AUs Masterpost

Okay folks! Here it is. A masterpost for the Toriverse. I'm going to add it as a link in my header for easy access. Apologies that this is about as confusing as some comic book series. If you are new, scroll down past the cheat sheet for a more in-depth explanation.

AU CHEAT SHEET:

plasticity - og fic (tag: #fic: plasticity; chrono; #plasticity art tag)

mutagenicity/"reborn au" - the time-travel style one where everyone is reincarnated as their old selves (tag: #reborn au; chrono; #mutagenicity art tag)

toxicity/"reborn au au" - the AU of mutagenicity where obito is also reborn (tag: #reborn au au: it's gotten sillier; chrono)

(a)synchronicity - the one where plasticity!tori time travels to the third shinobi war and stalks minato (tag: #asynchronicity; chrono)

sasori girls - sasori has fans! (tag: #tori 'if there must be sasori girls i think i should be the main one' mendoza; chrono)

torito/kakashi - In which Tori and Obito are both awful people, and Kakashi experiences some sort of wild Cyrano de Bergerac situation (tag: #torito/kakashi; chrono)

social media au - social media inexplicably exist in the plasticity verse. tori starts a true crime show. (tag: #tori 'ring that bell' mendoza; chrono)

velocity - aka "speedrun au" - a mutagenicity AU where tori ends up in Konoha at age 8 instead of 12 (tag: #speedrun au; chrono)

#toriverse (chrono) - i am working on tagging all posts in all aus this. there are a bunch of rando posts about tori that don't fit specific aus, and i think it will make tori content easier to blacklist. However, I only started doing this recently, so there's a backlog of posts not tagged yet.

also, it's about magic eyeball biology is now tumblr-only

A longer explanation of this mess for new people:

NOTE: I am providing links to both the standard tag and the chronological view ("chrono") option. This will show posts in the order they were posted, which is NOT necessarily the order than things happen within the AU. Chrono is, AFAIK, only available on desktop. I turned off infinite scrolling, so make sure to check for a NEXT button if you reach the end fo a page. Use this if you are new, or else you will only get a mess.

Plasticity is the OG fanfic. Read it AO3. Here's a summary:

plas·tic·i·ty /plaˈstisədē/ BIOLOGY the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment PHYSICS the ability of a solid material to undergo permanent deformation, a non-reversible change of shape in response to applied forces In which a biology student falls face-first into the Naruto universe and becomes... well, we won't say villain quite yet.

Plasticity follows the misadventures of the OC/SI Tori, who is meant to be a 2010-era "girl falls through a plot hole into the Akatsuki lair" OC but played (relatively) straight. For posts related directly to the OG fic, use the tag #fic: plasticity (chrono). I also have a dedicated art tag: #plasticity art tag. Plasticity also has some little one-shots with it in its AO3 series.

A couple years ago I started posting about if Tori was a reincarnation style OC instead of a "fell through a plothole" one. However, I didn't want to undo all her characterization, so this AU is about if late-game Plasticity!Tori and the entire Akatsuki were "reborn." It is functionally a sequel that start as a bunch of random tumblr posts. The OG name of this AU is "reborn AU" but its series on AO3 is titled Mutagenicity. Reborn AU and Mutagenicity are used interchangeably on here. The dedicated tag is #reborn au (chrono). It also has an art tag: #mutagenicity art tag.

Reborn AU excludes Obito because Obito ruins everything. However, worry not! We now also have Reborn AU AU, aka Toxicity. Toxicity is the same premise as Mutagenicity, except Obito is also there, and he makes everyone around him worse. The tag is #reborn au au: it's gotten sillier (chrono).

Also within the Mutagenicity 'verse (sub-universe?! what have i done) is Velocity, aka "speedrun au." This one happened because I thought to myself: "What if someone caught Tori [spoiler which makes no sense without context]?" She ends up in Konoha at age 8 rather than 12, hence "speedrun." Focuses on the Uzumaki-Namikaze family. The tag is #speedrun au (chrono).

The final "big" AU is (a)Synchronicity (often shorted to "async"), which has maybe the most embarrassing explanation yet. For unknown reasons I became fixed on Minato. I started posting ideas for Minato/OC concepts and at least one person asked for Minato/Tori, and obviously I couldn't not do it. This one is about late-game Tori accidentally time traveling back to the third shinobi war (this time in her adult body!) and becoming fixated on Minato after he is vaguely nice to her one (1) time. Not on AO3 yet. The tag is #asynchronicity (chrono).

Some smaller AUs:

torito/kakashi - As part of his incredibly homoerotic Kakashi fixation, Obito sends Tori in to ""investigate"" Kakashi's sexual prowess. Tori is lying to both of them and having a GREAT time. A fine and healthy relationship dynamic. The tag is #torito/kakashi (chrono).

social media au - YouTube and other types of social media inexplicably exist in the Plasticity 'verse. Tori starts her own ninja true crime show and it spirals out of her control to a full-Akatsuki ordeal. The tag is #tori 'ring that bell' mendoza (chrono).

sasori girls - the context for this one was i was wondering about if missing-nin have fans the way IRL serial killers do, and then i decided sasori is DEFINITELY popular because he's pretty. then somehow tori got involved as someone fascinated by fan content and also someone who knows sasori personally. the tag is #tori 'if there must be sasori girls i think i should be the main one' mendoza (chrono).

it's about magical eyeball biology started as a tag where i debated ninja alt eyeball biology, and at some point i wrote a fic about tori discovering it. this was meant to be a funny AU unrelated to the "canon" of any other AU. however, i removed it from AO3 because people kept commenting about it on an unrelated fic and it super annoyed me. Read it here on tumblr.

[gaylittlewizardcat]

gaylittlewizardcat’s tag master post

The purpose of this post is to avoid duplicate tags (such as having both “Mister Mistoffelees” and “Mr. Mistoffelees” as tags) and to easier navigate my blog (both for others and myself). It will probably get updated a lot with time

This post also includes tags I think I may have use for in the future, even if I haven’t used them yet, and may exclude some other tags I have used for varying reasons

(This also applies to reblogs on my main)

Accessibility tags:

I do my best to tag triggering content, though the format varies a bit (such as using tw or cw, putting it before or after etc) if there’s ever a post you feel is triggering that doesn’t have proper warnings please don’t hesitate to tell me! Anons are on if that makes you more comfortable :]

Negativity: the tag I use when complaining about stuff. I try to keep my blog fun and light hearted so it’s nothing super upsetting, but if you don’t want that this is the tag to blacklist

Undescribed: I try to add image descriptions to all posts with gifs or images, but sometimes I don’t have time or aren’t sure how to describe something, in which case they get this tag so I can easily come back to it later. Things like bingos, “get to know my ship” templates or videos are never described because I simply do not know how to format them in a sensible way. If you use a screen reader and would like for me to add a description to a specific image let me know and I’ll try to prioritize that post! Anons are on if that makes you more comfortable

“Type of content” tags:

My art: art I made!

Doodle: silly very low effort art I made!

Writing: something I wrote or plan on writing, really pretty much anything writing related

Drabble: something small I wrote, usually also has the “writing” tag

Fanfiction: something I wrote I also posted on AO3, always also has the “writing” tag

Gif: this post includes gif(s) I’ve made

Gay little ramblings: me just spewing whatever nonsense is in my brain in the moment

Reblog: self explanatory

Excellent addition: when someone adds stuff to my post I think is neat, always also has the reblog tag

Fandom event: sometimes people do things like ship weeks or gift exchanges! Sometimes I participate!

Cats fanart: both my own and gift exchange stuff!

Incorrect cats: incorrect quotes

Source: my wretched brain: Incorrect quotes I’ve thought up myself

Jellicle queues: queue tag, rarely sees usage lol

Jellicle memes: memes

Jellicle polls: polls! I think they’re fun and I post them sometimes

Jellicle asks: invitations to send asks (such as ask games)

Jellicle answers: answered asks

Cosplay: Cosplay stuff, mostly added to this list symbolically since most posts tagged with this are gay little ramblings about WISHING I did cosplay but not actually doing it

Video: some type of content in video form, most likely edits of some kind

Audio: sometimes I edit audios, most of the time they also have the “video” tag because I upload them in a video format

Edit: a variety of stuff, but usually me doodling over a screenshot

Year in review: yearly tumblr check-in cause I love stats and organization

Discord shenanigans: Discord related shenanigans

Character tags and any possible specific tags that only concerns one character:

Alonzo cats

Amunet cats (I also tend to tag her with “Exotica cats” so people who like her have an easier time finding her, but I use the name Amunet otherwise)

Asparagus Jr

Bombalurina

Bustopher Jones

Cassandra cats

Coricopat

Demeter cats

Electra cats (Autistic Electra)

Etcetera cats (Autistic Cettie)

The Everlasting Cat

Jellicle dog George

Grizabella

Gus the theatre cat

Jellylorum

Jemima cats (Cryptid Jemmy)

Jennyanydots

Macavity

Mistoffelees (Cryptid Misto, Autistic Misto, Mute Misto, Misto and the Glitter Chronicles)

Mungojerrie (Trans Mungojerrie)

Munkustrap (Autistic Munkus)

Old Deuteronomy

Plato cats

Pouncival

Rum tum tugger

Rumpleteazer

Skimbleshanks

Tantomile

Tumblebrutus

Victoria the white cat (Deaf Vicky)

Relationship tags (these tags may or may not get used together with both/all relevant character tags, depending on the specific post):

Bombatuggoffelees

Bombatuggoffeleesandra (I am in rarepair hell)

Cassoffelees (platonic? romantic? qpr? Yes.)

Demecavity (Mostly past Demecavity)

Demelurina

Demestrap

Electcetera

Platoria

Tuggerlurina

Tuggoffelees

Victeazer

Monochromatic siblings (Mistoffelees and Victoria)

Monochromatic family (Mistoffelees, Victoria and Bustopher (occasionally Alonzo too but much less frequently))

Chaos twins (Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer)

Chaos trio (Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer and Mistoffelees)

Mystic twins (Tantomile and Coricopat)

Mystic trio (Tantomile, Coricopat and Mistoffelees)

Deuteronomy brothers (Munkustrap and Rum Tum Tugger)

QPR Amulorum (queer-platonic relactionship between Amunet and Jellylorum)

Oldie squad (Jenny, Jelly, Amunet, Asparagus, Skimble, Bustopher, Gus and Ol’ Deut, on rare occasions also Griz)

The kittens (Electra, Etcetera, Jemima, Tumblebrutus, Pouncival, and sometimes Victoria)

Other tags:

Jellicle Cats

Pollicle Dogs

Cats OLC

Cats OBC

Timothy Scott (I usually don’t post about actors but I have a habit of not shutting up about Scoffelees)

Cats 1998

Cats international tour 2022

Cats non replica

I’m not going to mention all the different productions, I don’t keep great track of them so I just,,,, tag them only sometimes

Jellicle folklore (the Everlasting Cat as a deity and the beliefs Jellicles may hold regaring Her, and some stuff about how the magic in this world may work)

The man over there (sometimes the character himself, but mostly me complaining about people who hate on or fundamentally don’t understand the musical)

Human AU

Which Misto makeup design am I going to be Not Normal about today? (I am completely 100% biased but I think Mistoffelees has some of the most interesting makeup designs and they make me go just a little bit feral sometimes)

peak autism moment (when cats the musical,,,,, but autism <3)

[ggukkiereads]

Hey I was the anon who asked for your ao3, totally fine that you don’t want to share your username so I will gladly accept any tips on how to navigate ao3 🥺🥺 bc I try navigating by just using the guys name or the group name and yeah most of the fics that appear aren’t really my style. ao3 it’s a really overwhelming space 😔 so please help this dumb girl

🌷 hello, AO3 anon! It’s not that I don’t want to share, I just feel like it’s going to overwhelm others (with my 1K bookmarked fics). I am not an expert on AO3 and I’m trying to recall how I navigated through it. Though to be honest, I don’t recall much. I just remember visiting ao3 years ago to check yoonia’s Carousel fic and some other fics I got from those twitter fic recs threads. I sort of took note of the fics separately (like a note app where I list down fics I was monitoring) but AO3 actually has this feature and it should be easy breezy once you get the hang of it! 

I tried to make it as understandable as possible. Please see below the cut

🌷 So there are ways to navigate through fics: 

1) through the filters per fandoms, per member - this is usually the sidebar portion if on desktop

2) through the tags themselves - just click on any tags you like 

3) by subscribing to the author or fic

First, do you need to create an account?

It depends on you. Personally, I tried both. Not having an account, you can still comment but it’s kind of hard for me to keep track of my favorites or fics I’ve already read. Plus if you have an account, you can subscribe to fics or to authors so you get notified every time there is an update. You can also bookmark fics you like or fics you want to read. All up to you how you want to use the bookmarking tool.

I use my secondary email, the one I use for random subscriptions to stuff like games, netflix, etc. I feel more comfortable using secondary or dummy email as I call it. 

1) NAVIGATING THROUGH filters per fandoms, per member

I screenshot below the sidebar which allows you to filter content. If you prefer reading FxM fics, then choose that. If you’re in the mood for member x member scenarios then choose MxM. 

Additionally, you can adjust settings too for what to exclude. In my example below, say I don’t feel like reading multi-member fics and I just want FLUFFY fics. I can also adjust in the “exclude” settings.

You can also sort them per recent post, per hits, or per comments. I personally mix this because I also like discovering new fics. So, daily or every other day, it’s set to “date posted” so I get to see new fics. Earlier I had an ask re: a fic on AO3 and that was something I was able to read right away and commented on upon its drop (because the filter settings allowed me to see it right away way before it got popular). 

The Hits or Kudos or Comments filter allows you to see which ones are already popular among readers and I guess initially you want to try this settings to help you get started. Not all of the choices will be according to your taste though. It doesn’t mean it’s popular that it’s going to be to your liking 

🌷TIP:

Once I figured out the filter settings I want (which was more of the recent fics, mostly FxM), I  saved or bookmarked the url. I just clicked on the link and it directs me right away to pre-made filter settings (then I’d get to see new fics for the day)

2) NAVIGATING through the tags themselves

So this is helpful when you’re in the mood for certain tropes or genres. Like there was a time I was  in the mood for roommate AUs and I just binge-read all the fics in the results

So, for example this particular fic has well-defined tags ( I am reading this fic by the way. It’s rockstar Jungkook lol). Example you want to just read “friends with benefits” fics, you can click the link and it will give you ALL FICS that are under the same tag

This will give you ALL RESULTS (screenshot below shows you all fics from various fandoms, AUs, etc).  Repeat after me: the SIDEBAR is your friend. You can filter the results further by choosing the settings you want. 

Same process as #1, use the filter and use the settings you need. You want FxM, filter it to BTS fandom only, maybe for relationships you’re in the mood for just Yoongi x Reader? 

Take note that sometimes you have to apply the settings first before you can set another filter. For example, I set it to FxM and then BTS fandom first then clicked SORT and FILTER. That’s the only time these relationship filters will show (it’s like funneling. Once you’re in the “BTS fandom filter”, it will show you the other filters available to that category.. So for relationships there will be Jungkook x Reader, Yoongi x Reader, and so on and so forth): 

I read all members so I don’t really filter it to any specific members. I really go by the summary of the fic and the tags if they look interesting to me at the moment. 

3) Last, NAVIGATING  by subscribing to the author or fic

So, I actually subscribed to a lot of authors but they are usually on TUMBLR too. I guess, I read more series on AO3 since it is easier to navigate? 

Plus there are authors whose fics are available on AO3 but not on Tumblr. koyamuses for example, has their old fics like River Run (sea serpent!yoongi) and Mangata (pirate!jungkook) on AO3 but I remember their more recent ones are housed on tumblr. Obiwrites, a reader’s favorite, actually started on tumblr but they decided to use ao3 as a sole platform. I think she reposted some of her olds fics (but not all, still waiting for hoseok’s fic depaysement and that yoongi cinderella fic 😭)

There are also authors who have pseuds on AO3 and they post different content. gukluvr, for example, has an ao3 and the fics are different from her tumblr fics.

The beauty of subscribing to an author (say you like their body of work), is you get to see updates as they come. You get an email notif that [ _____ posted  fic title ] - I highlighted those with tumblrs too. It’s easier because with tumblr you search for fics manually but here ao3 does the work for you and just send you the email.

Even if they don’t post anything new, it’s just fun to see all the authors you like in one place in case you want to binge read per author. You can access it through your AO3 profile (if you set up an account)

You can also subscribe to a series only (meaning you don’t feel like subscribing to the author yet). If you subscribe to the author, you get notifs on EVERY FIC they will post. So if the author posts for other fandoms like Harry Potter or Star Wars, then you’d get these notifs too. So, it’s upto you

This is me subscribing per fic/work: (though this is not updated, some of these fics are already completed and I should start “unsubscribing”)

per series (though take note some of these have been completed). I am also subscribed to the authors so it’s kind double but you only get one email notif, don’t worry. 

ONCE YOU GET USED TO the navigation, you can bookmark the fics you like or mark them for later. Some bookmark fics they want to read while others bookmark their favorites. 

In my case, I bookmark all fics I’ve read and categorize them under collections like favorites, etc (but you don’t have to do this; this is just my method to remember fics), I haven’t really updated my bookmarks/collections so 🤷‍♀️. But that’s okay, it’s my own organized chaos so I can easily navigate through it.

For fics I want to read or re-read, I just mark them for later which you can access on the HISTORY page. 

Best to try all these on desktop. Once you get used to it, you can just play around on mobile. Sometimes, I just wait for notifs from my subscribed accounts/series; I just read it right away and mark them on my email as done once I’ve read or bookmark on AO3.

Don’t forget to give kudos to writers you like the stories of! I love giving kudos and I comment sometimes =) 

Okay, whew! I can’t believe I just wrote down a pseudo tutorial on AO3 navigation 🤭. I really hope it’s an easy tutorial for you to go through. Otherwise, I don’t know how I can further explain it. You can use the search bar of AO3 too! Just type, say “friends with benefits” and it will give you all types of fics. But, I just used this so I can click on the FWB tag (see #2 process)

There are so many fun stories or fics on AO3 too! And there are writers you won’t see on tumblr. 

I wish you good luck on your AO3 journey. It might be overwhelming, but it’ll get easier once you get used to it 🌷🧚‍♀️🥰

Enjoy!

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Ian Martin’s Strange Paradise, Part II: The Top 5 Worst Things

Last week, I listed my top five favorite things about the first 44 episodes of Strange Paradise, when Ian Martin was headwriter and when the show had a very different feel to it than in the final four weeks of the Maljardin arc. But no creative work is perfect, and, despite my fondness for this show, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think that the writing for early Maljardin had several glaring flaws. Unlike Danny Horn, I don’t think that Ron Sproat was a better writer than Martin (actually, I consider Sproat the worst writer on SP), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also feel that his writing needed some improvement. Note that this entry is specifically about the writing during this period, so things outside his creative control (e.g. the Conjure Man’s questionable casting) will be excluded from the list.

That said, here are my top five least favorite things about the writing in the first nine weeks of Strange Paradise:

5. Cheesy dialogue

More specifically, (1) bad jokes and (2) slang that was already outdated when these episodes originally aired in 1969. This one is #5 because, while these lines are cheesy, I can’t hate them because most of them make me laugh. Even my personal least favorite of Jacques’ jokes, the “pose” line from Episode 18, is kind of funny in an ironic, anti-humor sort of way, like the dad jokes that have become fashionable in recent years. While there are some jokes in this show that I find genuinely funny--Elizabeth’s Song of Solomon joke, for instance, or “the lady doth detest too much”--most others are the epitome of cornball. Sometimes you hear both in the same episode: Episode 21 is loaded with Devil jokes/puns that would be unforgivably corny if Colin Fox didn’t possess enough charisma to sell them, and yet the same episode also features a genuinely hilarious double entendre. The good jokes sneak up on you, sometimes amidst a hurricane of bad ones.

As for the slang, some comments that I’ve read mention that it was largely out of date even in the late sixties. My good friend Steve (with whom I often discuss SP) has told me that “you might not be aware of how campy that slang sounded in 1969 since you obviously did not live through the Sixties--this happened with a lot of TV shows during that period, the most egregious examples being the various ‘evil druggie Hippie’ episodes of DRAGNET.” Apparently Martin became infamous for using outdated slang later on when he wrote for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, putting lines like “I dig a man who’s far-out!” and “I think bein’ around here’s gonna be kicks!” in the mouths of some of his younger characters. Even if he had used up-to-date slang, it most likely would have still aged poorly (as slang typically does), especially for generations born after phrases like “the most” and “making the ___ scene” fell out of use.

4. Slow pace and excessive repetition

This one is also low on the list, because slow pace and repetition weren’t flaws when the show originally aired, but instead have aged poorly because of advances in technology that made them unnecessary. Before the advent of the programmable VCR, you had to be able to catch the program you wanted to watch on time or have someone you knew catch it on time and record it--which, in 1969, would have meant an audio-only tape recording. This meant that only the most fortunate and/or most loyal viewers would have been able to watch Strange Paradise every day, making it necessary to recap all the major events in subsequent episodes for those who missed out. This is also likely the reason why early SP (like most soaps of the time) has a relatively slow pace: if too much happens in one episode, you have to recap more and the people who missed the big episode are more disappointed.

Nowadays, with DVRs, video streaming, and DVD sets--not to mention certain legally-questionable means--it’s nearly impossible to miss an episode of your favorite show (with few exceptions), making extensive recap largely obsolete. Screenwriters can cram as many plot points as they want into one episode and no longer have to write five episodes of the other characters reacting to the news if they don’t want to.

Even so, just because the constant recap served a function at the time doesn’t mean I have to like it. It gets annoying hearing the same plot points reiterated episode after episode. Like I said while reviewing Episode 21, “if someone were to remake this show for Netflix or another streaming service, they could safely ignore about 75 percent of the original scripts and condense the remaining 25 percent quite a bit without omitting anything important.”

And don’t even get me started on the lampshading of absent cast members, like in Episode 9 when Jean Paul and Quito wasted two minutes searching for Raxl just to slow the plot down. It’s nothing compared to Ron Sproat’s “we must search for Quito” filler episode in Desmond Hall (Episode 78), but still, those scenes were pointless.

3. Extreme artistic license with certain historical/cultural details

Although Ian Martin did a surprising amount of research on certain subjects for Strange Paradise, there are some subjects where he either didn’t do enough research, or (more likely) made extensive use of artistic license. The first one is his portrayal of Jacques’ wife Huaco as an Inca princess despite their marriage occurring over a century after the fall of the Inca Empire. I discussed this all the way back in Part II of my review of the pilot, where I invented the theory of Jacques traveling back in time to marry her, but other possible explanations include Huaco being a 17th-century descendant of Inca royalty (as the Quechua people are still alive today), extreme artistic license, and/or critical research failure. I don’t know if we would have eventually gotten a good explanation if Martin had continued writing the series, but we would need a damn good one for the approximate equivalent of having a 21st-century character marry the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and accept it considering that this is a fantasy series, but it still creates a lot of plot holes that need to be filled.[1]

Another example of artistic license about which I feel more ambivalent is the conflation of voodoo with the Aztec-inspired indigenous religion of Maljardin, which I’ve discussed before both in my Episode 23 review and Part I of this post series. I’m not sure if this is genius--religious syncretism is a real phenomenon throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, and some people today do syncretize the vodou Serpent God with Quetzalcoatl--or just an instance of Martin playing fast and loose with facts. I would like to think it’s the former, but it could just as easily be the latter (hence why I referenced it on both lists--I have mixed feelings about it).

2. Annoying inconsistencies

Does Raxl know that Jean Paul is possessed by Jacques Eloi des Mondes? Does Vangie? Why does Jacques’ portrait disappear in some episodes after he possesses Jean Paul, but not in others? All three of these things vary from episode to episode, and change annoyingly often as the plot demands. Steve and I have also discussed this subject in the past, and he believes that Martin used this device to make the story easier to follow; if that’s the case, it appears that he used Raxl and Vangie as audience surrogates, especially for new viewers or people who didn’t tune in every day. But surely there were other ways to do that without creating continuity errors? It may have served a function, but that doesn’t make it good writing. What Martin is essentially doing is filling and reopening the same plothole, episode after episode.

Regarding the portrait, I don’t know how much to blame Martin’s scripts for this inconsistency and how much to blame the directors, as I don’t have access to any SP scripts beyond the pilot script and the Vignettes. However, I’m going to assume that he’s at least partially to blame, because at least the pilot script mentions the disappearing portrait (which literally disappears in all three of the Paperback Library novels), Also, while none of the characters ever mention the portrait vanishing (unlike in the tie-in novels), some of his episodes have characters looking at it while Jacques is controlling Jean Paul and commenting on the uncanny resemblance. See also the diegesis tag for more discussion and analysis of the disappearing portrait.

1. Tim’s subplot

It should surprise none of my regular readers that Tim’s subplot is my #1 least favorite thing about the first nine weeks of Maljardin. I’ve already written an entire post about why I dislike this subplot, so I’ll keep my discussion of it here brief. Jean Paul saves the life of artist Tim Stanton when he hires him to paint Erica’s portrait, but then does nothing to make the commission easy for him--which is not a bad set-up for a plot in and of itself, but the execution is terrible. Tim chooses to use Holly as his model despite her barely resembling Erica, and Martin mostly uses their subsequent interactions to drive the old, tired, clichéd plot where two people who bicker and hate each other at first eventually fall in love (or at least he appears to be setting that up[2]). The payoff for the Holly portrait subplot finally occurs in Episode 33, but it’s underwhelming (not to mention barely recapped) and the already bland Tim quickly becomes a background character. In short, his subplot is a boring waste of time and should have either had more payoff or--preferably--been scrapped altogether.

That concludes my list of the worst things about Ian Martin’s Strange Paradise. Stay tuned for my review of Episode 45 within the next two weeks.

{<- Previous: The Top 5 Best Things }

Note

[1] Interestingly, there is a possible (if unlikely) historical explanation for Huaco’s sister Rahua having “skin as white as goat’s milk” and “hair like ripened wheat.” An early Spanish account of the Chachapoya people (aka Cloud People) of the Northern Andes describe them as “the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.” Assuming the Spanish account isn’t made up, this proves that reality is sometimes unrealistic.

[2] Thankfully, given the soap opera genre, it’s unlikely that Tim and Holly would have stayed together forever, even if they had eventually fallen in love during their painting-and-bickering sessions. Even so, that doesn’t make it a good subplot.

[margridarnauds]

thoughts on archiveofourown?

Honestly, probably the best fanfiction site we’ve got and a godsend to fandom. My first fandom experiences were on fanfiction.net, back around 2009-2010-ish; I remember the disclaimers and the fear around incurring the wrath of certain authors, and it honestly boggles my mind that that’s something that modern fandom really doesn’t have to worry about. Like, I can think “I want to look up Lestat/Louis fanfiction, despite never having consumed any content for Interview With a Vampire,” and I can find it, just as easily as typing their names into a search bar. Anne Rice can’t touch it, and that’s still something that tbh is bizarre to me. Like, a part of me STILL says that I should put disclaimers on everything. 

I remember “This fic is rated M for yaoi. THAT MEANS BOYS KISSING, DON’T LIKE DON’T READ.” And I do mean “boys kissing” because it seems like (1) Most of the ships were conventionally attractive dudes [though…how much has changed? I’m not complaining as someone who WRITES slashfic for conventionally attractive dudes, but…] and (2) Just the simplest form of affection for same sex couples was treated on a much higher severity level. And how it was treated was so variable depending on which archive you went on. Whereas now, two people of the same sex exchanging pecks is just kind of taken for granted? Like, not to wave my figurative Old Lady Cane around, but the parts of fandom that weren’t around to see the pre-AO3 days really take their liberty for granted, imo. to write for even the most sacharinely perfectly pure ship to ever exist.

And, like, the centralization of it is ASTOUNDING to me? Like, come on, I can look up fic for just about everything, and there’s going to be SOMETHING there. Like, a few days ago, I decided to search for The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh to see if I was going to have to create the tag and, lo and behold, it was right there. A 1960s Disney adaptation of a Russell Thorndyke book series that has been only sporadically in circulation since it premiered on the freaking Wonderful World of Color has about 3 fics. I can only imagine how damnably hard it would be to find it if it was divided on different sites, or even if it was on ff.net, forced into one of the misc. categories and accessible only via search. In general, I think that when it comes to that sort of thing, as far as the ease of accessibility and the various exclude/include functions, you can really tell that it was made for ease of access by fans and for fans. 

I understand why some people feel deeply uncomfortable with the stance they take as far as what content is allowed, but I’m also firmly in the camp that it would be utterly impossible to censor based purely on tags or text alone. I think the present tagging system is honestly the best compromise we can get on that front, as far as putting the responsibility for the audience’s consumption on the audience themselves and letting them know what they’re in for. (I mean, come on, who among us wasn’t scarred by a T-Rated fic on FF.net that suddenly threw a wrench in for shock value? I know I was. Or, GOD forbid, how many of us were reading a perfectly normal appearing book from a library before a professional author decided to throw a wrench in for shock value? Three words: The Red Pony. My poor ten year old self was more scarred by that book than any fanfic I have ever read.) 

Sometimes, there are certain formatting issues with fics; I’ll submit something and then WHOOPS the paragraphs are unevenly spaced or something along those lines, but compared to this hellsite? It’s a blessing, and I honestly think that having a nice, centralized, easily searchable database for my fanfic is a solid 70-80% of why I continued on with it rather than giving up. (Also, shoutout to whoever designed the floaty review box tampermonkey…thing; it making reviewing so much easier!) There are times that I wish there was more of a social element involved besides reviews; seeing who follows you, being able to write pms, etc, but I’m also fully aware of why they HAVEN’T implemented those features and I’m grateful for it.  

[hydrus]

Version 330

windows

zip

exe

os x

app

tar.gz

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a great week. There are some more login scripts and a bit of cleanup and speed-up.

The poll for what big thing I will work on next is up! Here are the poll + discussion thread:

https://www.poll-maker.com/poll2148452x73e94E02-60

https://8ch.net/hydrus/res/10654.html

login stuff

The new 'manage logins' dialog is easier to work with. It now shows when it thinks a login will expire, permits you to enter 'empty' credentials if you want to reset/clear a domain, and has a 'scrub invalid' button to reset a login that fails due to server error or similar.

After tweaking for the problem I discovered last week, I was able to write a login script for hentai foundry that uses username and pass. It should inherit the filter settings in your user profile, so you can now easily exclude the things you don't like! (the click-through login, which hydrus has been doing for ages, sets the filters to allow everything every time it works) Just go into manage logins, change the login script for www.hentai-foundry.com to the new login script, and put in some (throwaway) credentials, and you should be good to go.

I am also rolling out login scripts for shimmie, sankaku, and e-hentai, thanks to Cuddlebear (and possibly other users) on the github (which, reminder, is here: https://github.com/CuddleBear92/Hydrus-Presets-and-Scripts/tree/master/Download%20System ).

Pixiv seem to be changing some of their login rules, as many NSFW images now work for a logged-out hydrus client. The pixiv parser handles 'you need to be logged in' failures more gracefully, but I am not sure if that even happens any more! In any case, if you discover some class of pixiv URLs are giving you 'ignored' results because you are not logged in, please let me know the details.

Also, the Deviant Art parser can now fetch a sometimes-there larger version of images and only pulls from the download button (which is the 'true' best, when it is available) if it looks like an image. It should no longer download 140MB zips of brushes!

other stuff

Some kinds of tag searches (usually those on clients with large inboxes) should now be much faster!

Repository processing should also be faster, although I am interested in how it goes for different users. If you are on an HDD or have otherwise seen slow tag rows/s, please let me know if you notice a difference this week, for better or worse. The new system essentially opens the 'new tags m8' firehose pretty wide, but if that pressure is a problem for some people, I'll give it a more adaptable nozzle.

Many of the various 'select from a list of texts' dialogs across the program will now size themselves bigger if they can. This means, for example, that the gallery selector should now show everything in one go! The manage import/export folder dialogs are also moved to the new panel system, so if you have had trouble with these and a small screen, let me know how it looks for you now.

The duplicate filter page now has a button to edit your various duplicate merge options. The small button on the viewer was too-easily missed, so this should make it a bit easier!

full list

login:

added a proper username/password login script for hentai foundry--double-check your hf filters are set how you want in your profile, and your hydrus should inherit the same rules

fixed the gelbooru login script from last week, which typoed safebooru.com instead of .org

fixed the pixiv login 'link' to correctly say nsfw rather than everything, which wasn't going through last week right

improved the pixiv file page api parser to veto on 'could not access nsfw due to not logged in' status, although in further testing, this state seems to be rarer than previously/completely gone

added login scripts from the github for shimmie, sankaku, and e-hentai--thanks to Cuddlebear and any other users who helped put these together

added safebooru.donmai.us to danbooru login

improved the deviant art file page parser to get the 'full' embedded image link at higher preference than the standard embed, and only get the 'download' button if it looks like an image (hence, deviant art should stop getting 140MB brush zips!)

the manage logins panel now says when a login is expected to expire

the manage logins dialog now has a 'scrub invalidity' button to 'try again' a login that broke due to server error or similar

entering blank/invalid credentials is now permitted in the manage logins panel, and if entered on an 'active' domain, it will additionally deactivate it automatically

the manage logins panel is better at figuring out and updating validity after changes

the 'required cookies' in login scripts and steps now use string match names! hence, dynamically named cookies can now be checked! all existing checks are updated to fixed-string string matches

improved some cookie lookup code

improved some login manager script-updating code

deleted all the old legacy login code

misc login ui cleanup and fixes

.

other:

sped up tag searches in certain situations (usually huge inbox) by using a different optimisation

increased the repository mappings processing chunk size from 1k to 50k, which greatly increases processing in certain situations. let's see how it goes for different users--I may revisit the pipeline here to make it more flexible for faster and slower hard drives

many of the 'select from a list of texts' dialogs--such as when you select a gallery to download from--are now on the new panel system. the list will grow and shrink depending on its length and available screen real estate

.

misc:

extended my new dialog panel code so it can ask a question before an OK happens

fixed an issue with scanning through videos that have non-integer frame-counts due to previous misparsing

fixed a issue where file import objects that have been removed from the list but were still lingering on the list ui were not rendering their (invalid) index correctly

when export folders fail to do their work, the error is now presented in a better way and all export folders are paused

fixed an issue where the export files dialog could not boot if the most previous export phrase was invalid

the duplicate filter page now has a button to more easily edit the default merge options

increased the sibling/parent refresh delay for 1s to 8s

hydrus repository sync fails due to network login issues or manual network user cancel will now be caught properly and a reasonable delay added

additional errors on repository sync will cause a reasonable delay on future work but still elevate the error

converted import folder management ui to the new panel system

refactored import folder ui code to ClientGUIImport.py

converted export folder management ui to the new panel system

refactored export folder ui code to the new ClientGUIExport.py

refactored manual file export ui code to ClientGUIExport.py

deleted some very old imageboard dumping management code

deleted some very old contact management code

did a little prep work for some 'show background image behind thumbs', including the start of a bitmap manager. I'll give it another go later

next week

I have about eight jobs left on the login manager, which is mostly a manual 'do login now' button on manage logins and some help on how to use and make in the system. I feel good about it overall and am thankful it didn't explode completely. Beyond finishing this off, I plan to continue doing small work like ui improvement and cleanup until the 12th December, when I will take about four weeks off over the holiday to update to python 3. In the new year, I will begin work on what gets voted on in the poll.

[allbeendonebefore]

@ask-aph-acadia, @lilcutiebear, I’m making a new thread to reply to you both here p:

lilcutiebear: I took French immersion from k-12 so I’m very much in support of learning a second language and not monolingual. Personally I think there are two big factors in animosity towards French immersion in the west that have nothing to do with dislike of francophones. One is that I have seen articles complaining that it is like having a private school within the public school system (I’ve seen articles like that from basically every part of the country not just the west). More particular to the west is that many ppl here aren’t French Canadians or English Canadians and think it would make more sense to teach another language like German or Ukrainian or Chinese or Cree since more people here have those kinds of ancestry. So sometimes it feels like the east is pushing its linguistic divide onto us. I also feel like Anglophones here are different from Anglophones out east because a lot on Anglophones here are only Anglophones because their ancestors were forced to attend school in English rather than their native language. (I.e. My grandpa’s first language is Polish and even though he grew up in a community that was evenly split between poles and Ukrainians (with most kids understanding at least part of both)and his teacher was Ukrainian she wasn’t allowed to teach in any language other than English).

yes absolutely, this is another aspect of the issue that gets totally glossed over in the anglo/franco division. I don’t know about my personal family line but certainly people with my ancestry were discriminated against, forced to learn English, and also put in internment camps for their heritage and speaking Ukrainian. Canada making everything into a Catholic/Protestant or a French/English binary really does not evenly apply to the history of the West in particular but also can cause similar rifts elsewhere. Like we recognize bilingualism is good but 1. our educational systems are often garbage and 2. finding exposure to a native speaker of a target language can vary wildly, and learning French across Canada can be difficult if you are learning International French at School and Quebecois, Acadian or backwater prairie French at home. and 3. it’s always been grating that French (and English) are always prioritized over languages people already speak- we recognize Canada is a bilingual country, but there is not enough motivation or access to materials or native speakers in all locations unless you’re Really Super Determined to get a government job and can afford to move to a city with the programs. Canada is also a country of immigrants, and multilingualism should be celebrated beyond French and English.

ask-aph-acadia: For the criticism: I do remember seeing a few people draw the territories with darker skin, but since I couldn’t really see a big difference in their traits and the other provinces’ in the old art, I really had a hard time seeing if they were white or not, even though I know that First nations and Métis can have paler skin ( One of my characters is actually Métis and has pale skin, but I tried to make it easier to see with the other traits. ) I should maybe watch more of the ProCan videos though, just to make sure I don’t say things that were changed.

Lol i mean good luck, we basically do one video every three years and the projo has come to a standstill but yes Attempts Were Made 

I think that if PEI didn,t exist as a province at all I wouldn’t have had that much problems with NB and NS being a couple. I remember thinking that making it this way was excluding PEI from Acadia ( I can’t really say the Maritimes for this situation, since Newfoundland doesn’t have much to do with all of that ), forgetting that it’s been a part of NS too, maybe for a smaller time, but it still happened and gets forgotten a lot in designs for Acadia. PEI was also there when NB and NS talked about becoming one colony, so again seeing them as a couple made me feel like the smaller one was being kind of forgotten. I usually see people making PEI Nova Scotia’s sister/brother, while leaving NB and NS as a couple and I’ve always wondered what made them that different from Prince Ed for other people. 

Obviously I’m not a Maritimer, and I do tend to have my reading of the history shaped by what people have done in the past so I can absolutely see that there’s ambiguity in those relationships. I can’t speak for Sherry’s interpretations, I can only attempt to justify them in my own readings. I did get the sense that PEI has a very strong little sibling vibe i.e. the strong independence streak without wanting the responsibility, but I can read NS as the long suffering big brother figure for either of them. I think it’s the strong Scottish heritage that tends to tie NS and PEI together more than NS to NB, but I could be wrong.

As for Alberta and Saskatchewan, I think a lot of people see them as “sister provinces”, me included, and that’s why we usually see them as siblings, without mentionning the project of “Buffalo” ( I think that’s what it was called? Correct me if I’m wrong ).

Buffalo is correct: nowadays we tend to see each other as sister provinces but it can also depend on the reading of the history- Wilfrid Laurier dividing the provinces up can be seen as completely arbitrary with little regard for the people already living there, as an eastern imposition etc, but it rubs me the wrong way to just throw them together because they share a birthday (because I’ve got a personal Dislike of using Confederation as a literal birthday rather than a symbolic birthday and I really don’t like AB/SK portrayed as identical and interchangeable twins (even though lately our politicians have been playing that game loll a story for ANotHER Time). It’s definitely a close relationship that I tend to at least read as adoptive siblings since I’m Not a fan of literal biological relationships- they are definitely the closest out of the former Rupert’s Land territories fam.

For Poutines: I can tell you that when the cheese curds are fresh from today, it’s even better. I live in an area where the milk industry is very big and we’ve got that company called Chalifoux that makes the best cheese curds I’ve ever tasted. A lot of our restaurants use them in their poutines and it’s amazing. I know a few people that prefer shredded cheese but they obviously didn’t taste the best poutine in the region.

Another day another reason to be sad and lactose intolerant ToT and yet i regret nothing

For Alberta: I see that Quebec and Alberta have a very different version of the story. Honestly, I never saw Quebec as a province that tried to bother Alberta, we’re so concentrated on our own politics  that we hardly notice what happens in the rest of the country most of the time. I think the last time I heard about Alberta in the news was during Fort Mac’s wildfires, and a lot happened since it started. But again, we’re so focused on complaining about Phillipe Couillard that we don’t even see what he does, for the most part ( Doesn’t change that he’s a shit PM to me, but that’s a story for another day. ) The only other time I’ve heard about AB in the news was for the pipeline and I can say it’s at that moment that I’ve heard the most people going against the prairies. 

That’s regionalism for you, most of us tend to only focus on our own affairs until the minute someone releases some bad poll data about how much one hates the other online and then everyone goes ballistic. p: Pipelines again are a nuanced issue and while I personally am anti-pipeline i understand the reasons AB doesn’t see it that way, again we just got over a long 44 year political dynasty headed straight towards economic dependence on a single resource that our current government is trying to undo, and frankly it’s overly simplistic to just paint us as the bad guys because we’ve made some dumb decisions and backed ourselves into a corner here. We’re dumb, we get it, but don’t say it to our faces lol. Again if you are interested in this stuff I try to reblog news articles frequently on my personal blog under the yeah y yeah alberta tag  (my political bias is Obvious)

The other part of the story is the federal government is built on pitting regions of Canada against each other, and right now the West is the favourite scapegoat. Former PM Harper did not help our image at all in the 2000s-2010s and I take IMMENSE satisfaction knowing that he’s now got to answer to a Muslim mayor and a New Democrat premier, you have no idea. But it’s fear mongering like that where ohhh the west is all about oiiillll and then ignoring the history of Eastern Canada literally just taking it from us and the federal government making it our current major export etc etc is really hypocritical at best (the scapegoating Alberta for the oil and saying ohhh it’s so baaad and unenvironmental and then wanting to live off the profits is something that really is an easy way to piss us off, and the federal government does it all the time. 

We really saw Alberta and Saskatchewan as the big bad guys and a girl I knew started to DESPISE the provinces, even though she also hated Quebec? ( She’s the one we had drama with when creating our version of the provinces, she hated Alberta so much that she wanted my character to die… That’s a lot of hatred, but that is also a story for another day. ) I think a lot of Quebeckers are not over that yet, it’s probably time for us to go complain about something else than that ahah.

This is one of those touchy subjects and it Really Pisses me Off when people like to use aph Alberta OCs as their stereotypical villain character without ever considering our perspective or history, it’s happened enough that I’ve not been seeking out ocs for my province anymore for that reason. We already get that enough in mainstream politics, and all it does is make us angrier and act even more out of spite. I’ve seen Quebec and Ontario both treated the same way, of course, but QUON is such a popular pairing that more often than not its just Oh here is Loud Obnoxious Alberta Here To Ruin Everything for Us Once Again. They’re all such good and nuanced characters that it makes me real sad to see them reduced like that. I’ve always seen the relationship as playful banter/teasing between the three of us (and really four because BC is up there with us) and I kind of feel partially responsible for my adlibbing in old IAMP episodes being taken Too Seriously.

Also hating a character is once thing, hating them to wanting them to die is beyond rude, and hating an aph oc for representing a place with real people is Beyond offensive to me, sigh... 

For French: I can get why a lot of people complain about having to learn it, it’s a hard language, even for native speakers. We’re also guilty of blaming the “anglos” for making us learn English. I do see how Quebec and Ontario look like they have been working together, but we don’t see it from inside Quebec, since we complain about Ontario as much as we complain about the rest of the provinces ( Ontario is actually our biggest target, it’s easy to do, since we’re so close. ) I don’t mind people complaining about French outside of Quebec, but it’s when people do it inside the province that it bothers me. I already see so many people choosing to speak English instead of French, thus loosing what’s supposed to be their native tongue that I and a lot of other people get on the defensive when we talk about language issues, like when we don’t know what language to speak in in Montreal. Remember when I talked about Phillipe Couillard? Well, he recently asked for English people to come back in the province and I can tell you that it wasn’t welcomed as a good thing by most Quebeckers… ( I could rant about Couillard for hours but I think it’s better if I stop it there) We’re welcoming of tourists but when we hear them complain about how everything’s written in French, it’s at that moment that we get a lot more like the stereotype.I would love to visit one day, and maybe these English class will finally be useful somewhere else than on the internet ahah

(of course once again see Amy’s response above for the western perspective on this issue) 

there’s a lot of common jokes that the only unifying thing about canada is everyone’s hatred of ontario and that the best thing to solve everyone’s problems would be if ontario were to separate and leave the rest of canada alone xDD but of course at the end of the day it’s still nothing personal and as much as I can’t quell the Stereotypical Albertan gut reaction to shake my fist at all things Ontarian, I am very fond of this place and have been treated exceedingly well whenever I’ve visited and I hope my good fortune will continue. But of course I understand wanting to protect French within Quebec, and I do really wish it was a more accessible language in other parts of Canada. But yeah, travel, education, all that gives me hope for the future (too bad Canada is so Damn Big or I’d be all over it already). 

[kadobeclothing]

60 Things to Double-Check Before Launching a Website

Admit it: Launching a new website is stressful — even for the most seasoned digital marketers. Websites are complex. There are so many things that are easily overlooked, like a broken link or a misspelled word.  And of course, a handful of things could go very, very wrong. Like what if you forget to test an important data capture form and then lose out on generating a bunch of new leads? Or worse, what if you forget to properly set up site redirects, and those valuable search engine visitors get a page not found message? Instead of worrying about the what ifs, wouldn’t it be much easier to have a comprehensive website checklist to run down before every site launch? One that you could use for enterprise websites, microsites, landing pages, and everything in between?

Well, you’re in luck because I’ve put together the following list of 60 things to check before launching a website. It’s the same list that our team uses at our digital agency, and it’s a list you can copy, edit, and make your own based on the software you’re using to launch and host your website. We’ve grouped items into seven categories related to page content, design, functionality, SEO, branding, analytics, security, and compliance. Keep on reading to make sure you don’t forget a thing before your next launch. Don’t have time to check all 60? Here’s a list of the most important highlights from each section:

Website Launch Checklist

Web copywriting has been proofread. Spelling and grammar are correct. Company contact details are accurate throughout the website. Rights to images, fonts, and other content have been properly licensed and/or cited. Website pages are compatible across browsers (IE 7 8, 9 and 10, Firefox, Chrome, Safari). Website pages are compatible across devices (Android, iPhone, tablets). Forms are submitting data properly. Internal links across web pages are working properly. Social media share icons are working properly. Company logo is linked to the homepage. Pages have unique page titles (fewer than 70 characters, includes keywords). Pages have unique meta descriptions (fewer than 156 characters, includes keywords). Google Webmaster and Google Analytics accounts have been properly synced. 24/7 monitoring scripts are installed. Ongoing copies of the website are being created and stored on a regular basis. Passwords and other website credentials are stored in a secure place.

Check for Consistent Page Content First, take some time to review all of the content on your website with a fine-tooth comb. Of course, that means page content, but don’t forget about your premium content too. From data-driven content and downloadable documents to rich media such as videos and images, you want to make sure everything is in place, working properly, and looking beautiful. So my suggestion is to check the following items once — and then check them again. You really don’t want to miss a single typo or grammatical error. Make sure text is accurate and error free. Web copywriting has been proofread. Spelling and grammar are correct. Copyright date (perhaps in the footer) includes the current year. Company contact details are accurate throughout the website. Generic content, such as lorem ipsum, has been properly removed and replaced. All premium content, such as case studies, ebooks, and whitepapers, have been proofread. Spelling and grammar are correct. Create clear content structure. Paragraphs, headers, lists, and other formatting are correct. Images are in the correct places, formatted and working on all devices. Videos are in the correct places, formatted and working on all devices. Audio files are in the correct places, formatted and working on all devices. All premium content, such as case studies, ebooks, and whitepapers, are stored in their proper libraries/databases and work properly. Rights to images, fonts, and other content have been properly licensed and/or cited. Test your website design and its functionality. Second, take the necessary steps to ensure that the site design is pixel perfect. If you have a responsive website (and you definitely should), you need to check the design across all devices. Your site should be looking good not just on an office desktop, but also on laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Test the site for User Experience (UX). Website pages are compatible across browsers (IE 7 8, 9 and 10, Firefox, Chrome, Safari). Website pages are compatible across devices (Android, iPhone, tablets). CSS/HTML is properly validated. Insure your design is aesthetically pleasing. Scripts are optimized across web pages. Images are optimized across web pages. CSS is optimized across web pages. Favicon is in place and rendering properly. Paragraph styles are working properly (headers, lists, block quotes). Test your conversion path’s functionality. Third, take some time to test and validate all of the different features on your website. Lead generation forms, social sharing, CRM integration, and any other technology should work flawlessly across your website. Forms are submitting data properly. Thank-you message or page displays after form is submitted. Form data is being emailed to a recipient and/or stored in a company database. Auto-responders are working properly (if applicable). Internal links across web pages are working properly. External links across web pages are working properly, and open in a new tab. Social media share icons are working properly. Feeds are working properly (RSS, news, social media). Company logo is linked to the homepage. Load time for site pages is optimized. 404 Redirect pages are in place (page-not-found.aspx). Integrations with third-party tools, such as your CRM, e-commerce software, and/or marketing platform, are running smoothly. Optimize your site for search engines. Fourth, take some time to ensure that your website has been given a solid foundation for SEO success. From site architecture and content hierarchy to metadata and XML sitemaps, do not leave any stone unturned. Technical SEO Pages have unique page titles (fewer than 70 characters, includes keywords). Pages have unique meta descriptions (fewer than 156 characters, includes keywords). Pages have keywords (fewer than 10, all words appear in page copy). A dynamic XML sitemap has been created. The XML sitemap has been submitted to search engines. Page URLs consistently reflect site information architecture. 301 redirects are in place for all old URLs (redirecting old to new pages). rel=”nofollow” tags are in place on applicable links and pages. Optimize your metadata. Metadata is properly in place for any content in an RSS feed. Metadata is properly in place for any social media sharing content. Spelling and grammar are correct in all metadata. Alt tags have been added to every image. Keep your branding consistent. Once you’ve decided on a brand message and tone, stay consistent throughout all platforms. This will make you look more legitimate, credible, and memorable. Make sure your website’s color scheme is consistent with your previous branded content. Copy edit text for brand voice to ensure consistent brand voice and style. Make sure all company taglines and mission statements are up to date. Prepare to monitor analytics. Fifth, make sure your website is set up to capture web data and analytics. This valuable information will allow you to continually improve your website going forward, so you don’t want to forget this stuff. Your website analytics codes have been inserted on website. Relevant IP addresses have been excluded from analytics tracking. Funnels and goals have been properly created in your analytics software (if applicable). Google Webmaster and Google Analytics accounts have been properly synced. Google Ads accounts have been properly synced (if applicable). Make sure your site is secure and backed up. Sixth, you can prevent loss of data and protect against malware and other damages by properly setting up site security and regular backups. 24/7 monitoring scripts are installed. A copy of the final website has been made for backup purposes. Ongoing copies of the website are being created and stored on a regular basis. Passwords and other website credentials are stored in a secure database. Comply with all applicable laws. Finally, make sure your website complies with any applicable laws and regulations. Internet law can be sticky, and each industry has its own set of rules to follow. So it’s best to consult with your legal counsel to make sure you aren’t missing anything — this post is not legal guidance. Here are a few you might need to know about: Web pages offer accessibility for users with disabilities (WAI-ARIA). Web pages announce if the website uses cookies (required in some countries). Website is compliant with usage rights for purchased or borrowed code, images, and fonts. Terms and privacy policies are visible to website visitors. Website is PCI compliant (if you’re storing and processing credit cards). Resources for Launching Your First Website Launching a new website can be a tedious task, but you can alleviate some of the stress by using this comprehensive website launch checklist. If you’re just getting started on your first website and are looking for tools to help you streamline your process, start your 14-day free trial of our CMS. Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in August 2014, but was updated for comprehensiveness and freshness in January 2019.

Source link

source https://www.kadobeclothing.store/60-things-to-double-check-before-launching-a-website/

[readersforum]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/the-5-seo-recommendations-that-matter-in-the-end/

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO’s ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor’s page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client’s case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii – [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 – [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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

[jiahaothakur]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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

[whitelabelseoreseller]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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

from The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/11188579

[kqxosohomnay]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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

[michaelsmotherman]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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

[mylifeisbeer]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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

[theinjectlikes2]

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

Jobs/recruiting

Events

Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

Follow Google’s recommendations on SD

Test things out 

Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?

Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

Likelihood of these pages to better compete

Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example I made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag

Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?

Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.

Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

Know your primary campaign goal

Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy

Measure results with multiple tools

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

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