Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern is “widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset” and I've been reading his weekly newsletter New Thinking for a good 5 years now. In a recent issue he writes about the core skills in writing content for the web:

1. Writing using words for how people search

We need to use the words that [people] use, rather than the words that we might like to use.

I have found this to be ever more relevant in my work in improving sites' visibility on the Internet. Here's my tip: you can find out the words people search for by the free service Yahoo Search Marketing's Keyword Selector Tool. That way you get a pretty good idea of how many times a day a certain keyphrase is searched for.

2. Making your copy reader-friendly

People scan-read your webpages, and scan-reading is actually another type of search, where people are searching on the page for the words that they care about.

That means a lot of self-explanatory sub headings, italics, and bold text to facilitate scanning.

3. Writing quality links

Your links are signposts. Your readers are asking you directions and they are following your signposts.

In other words, using links to describe the destination such as “Testimonials of people who have used our product X” rather than just using “click here”.

If you are at all involved with web content creation, Gerry's newsletter is a must.

Almost every week there seems to be a great new application of technology on the Internet. Here are some recent examples to do with uses of an Internet wonder in its own right, Google Maps:

forest fire in Louisiana

Google Sightseeing: blog made up of photos of the Google Satellite site, with detailed aerial views of the entire continental USA. They list photos of natural wonders, famous landmarks and more. By the way, Google Satellite is an awesome feature of Google Maps which allows you to see a satellite photo of any map. Here's an example of a Google Satellite image of where I live:

satellite photo of Palo Alto (where I live) from Google Satellite - note Stanford in the lower left and San Francisco Bay in the upper right

HousingMaps: using Google maps again to provide the geographical data, this site allows you to pin point which places are for rent and for how much, and as you can see below you can click on a pin to see price and photos. The image below represents the same area as the one above.

this is the same area as the satellite map above with pins for rental housing

Yahoo Maps now also shows traffic: at least in the US, you can find a map and get a good idea of traffic conditions. You can also find information on road works and accidents.

And as a bonus check out the neighblogging map on the righthand column (towards the bottom) which maps out all the blogs in my neighborhood. There's at least one I recognize, my friend Enoch's medmusings