I’ve written many times on SEO (internal link) and how as a writer I feel compromised and sad that today’s most important reader is a machine.
Humans don’t collect their thoughts and organize their tasks the way search engines do. Therefore, we have to alter our own preferences to cater to bots and algorithms. Otherwise, a client will not get on page one when Google returns results. And if they are not on page one then they are invisible.
A two, three, or four hundred page website is commonly built for businesses in extremely competitive markets. Say, an injury attorney in Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Diego, or Chicago. (A massive web presence responds to massive compettion.)
Given that digital deluge, let me describe the importance of content to the search engines. After all, content is king. Right?
Let’s assume a three hundred page website covering every basic aspect of law in a practitioner’s field, something often done to implement what is called topic authority. Considering this is The Law, most humans would prioritize on keeping any existing page current. Statutory and case law are always changing and a lawyer always wants to be accurate and up-to-date.
Google doesn’t see it that way.
A brand new page with fresh content on a very minor bit of law will drive that site’s statistics upward more than revising an existing, important page. Go figure.
It is a truly weird world when a lawyer goes to trial with the latest cites and yet their website may discuss old cites.
Given the economies of the day, no lawyer has the budget to continually update 300 pages, aside from those inaccurate pages pointed out by real humans.
Instead, that new page on dog bite law for a particular community, say one of 15 in a large metro that the attorney covers, wins out, stat wise, over updating an important page on child custody law. Why?
Because another page on a new topic has been added to that practitioner’s site. Google favors authoritative sources and it considers a website covering every topic niche to be authoritative.
Statistics prove this again and again. It’s not the way any organized business worker works. Yet, here we are, accepting inaccuracy and maintaining digital libraries with out of date books.
You see the results of this whenever you search on a changing topic like fixing a computer glitch. Advice less than six month old is probably worthless or confusing.
That’s because the article came out before the problem was fixed with an update. Or, perhaps a system software redesign leaves you staring at a blank field where the old advice said a critical checkbox should be.
We can time limit Google searches to help out with our own personal searches. But who cleans up the client’s website? Who cleans up the web?
What next?
Resources
Some of my writing related to this page (all internal links)
I’d like to see if putting the transcript of this video at another site (mine), and sharing the video on my site will increase its views. This is not a commercial for David Khalil, I do not know the man but I enjoy his videos. Which seem very small compared to the quality of video he produces. So, over the next few weeks I’ll be watching to see how his numbers do.
The transcript isn’t perfect, by the way, it was generated by YouTube and I cleaned it up a little bit. Not completely. The strange headings were put in by me for, well, let’s just leave that alone for now.
November 20, 2020 5,067 views
5,067 views.
April 11, 2020 1,632 views
Welcome back to the channel guys. I really hope you enjoyed this intro and if you have, please make sure to smash that like button now. Lange is a brand that gave me a lot of hope that a newcomer could break through the marquee and provide us with nice quality elegant looking watches Lange is relatively a young brand and it was relaunched in which puts it far behind other watchmakers but I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase that age is just a number and in this case, it is spot on: age is just a number while being a young brand is light years ahead of many watchmakers and its functionality design fit and finish are only comparable to the likes of Patek, Philippe and in some case even better.
Do A Lange and Sohne hold their value?
Whether you manufacture watches cars or anything else usually the main objective is the best quality you can in the shortest time possible hence increasing production numbers and being German made that is what you would expect from Lange every part in the Langer movement is finished to the best standards the parts are assembled oiled regulated and tested for accuracy and once the movement passes their standards it’s now ready to be cased also you would think Lange then strips the whole movement apart cleans it refinish polish engrave replace the temporary jig screws with the iconic thermally blue screws then all to be handed to one single watchmaker to put everything back together regulate attest it and once it passes the movement is now ready to be cased and that is what Lange referred to as the two-fold assembly but I like to call it that’s how things should be done.
Who owns a lange and Sohne?
Lange produces around watches a year if you’re new to watches it may soundalike a lot butler me put you in perspective Rolex produces around eight hundred thousandth a million watches a yearend as exclusive as Patek Philippe are they produce around watches years now it looks like a pin in a haystack. Lange could easily double their production by assembling watches only once but that’s not what they’re about that’s not what they stand for they stand for perfection this is the Lange one time zone in rose gold with a silver dial and solid gold hands and applied hour markers the main feature of the watch is the wall time function the problem with complicated watches is the dials are often too busy to the point that they defeat the main purpose which is the ability to easily tell time at a glance but making clean dials is something that Lange has always perfected – this is by far the best and the cleanest wall time display I’ve ever seen on a watch period.
Lange 1 steel
You may not have noticed but this Lange’s eight indicators on the dial large day indicator at one o’clock a large power reserve indicator between two and four o’clock local time zone display at five o’clock with a gold arrow pointing towards Thaiday and night indicator for a local time sub second display at eight o’clock home time display at nine o’clock day and night indicator for home time near o’clock and last but not least a ring surrounding the dial with the city name so the dial looks so cleans if you can add more to it.
Why is a Lange Sohne so expensive?
Let’s compare it to another high-end witchlike the Patek Philippe wall time noting that the Patek has a fraction of the complications that the Lange has on his dials which one looks cleaner to you and which one can you tell the local and home time easier at a glance let me know your thoughts in the comment section below it really is a true beauty both frontend
How do you wind a Lange watch?
back sapphire crystals arenol-reflective and it really helps you admire the beauty of the watch and often find myself taking the watch off just to stare at the movement the deploying class by the way feels superbly solid and is beautifully finished the case is . millimeter wide and millimeter thick although on paper it sounds like a large watch but because of the design of the case and how the lugs curve it really wears more like a or a mil watch it is very comfortable to wear especially with the lever strap and the side pushes are solid and really make it a breeze to set the wall time function and the date and it makes it super intuitive.
How Much Is A Lange and Sohne watch?
I always say Lange make very intuitive user-friendly watches and from my perspective as a watch dealer I’ve seen quite a few movements and I’ve seen inside a lot of watches and one thing I can tell you is to make watch that is super user friendly usually means it’s super complicated on the inside now I’ve been praising longhand this watch quite a lot in this video but this is hardly a commercial benefit in no way whether longer sell less or more watches I just like the brand and I like what they do and I really like this watch and I just can’t fault it, it’s a very well designed watch it is manual wind but before you lose interest it has an hour power reserve; you will not really be winding this watch every day plus I think people misjudge manual binge-watches love the interaction with the watchband actually sometimes I wind my automatic watches just for the sake of it just to hear the gears moving so time keeping how accurate is this watch well the answer is it’s irrelevant.
What is a datograph?
The watch is accurate enough to tell you the right time I’ve been wearing this watch for think two months now and I’ve never had to reset the watch at any point I think you get to a point in hierarchy where time keeping is not mentioned and becomes irrelevant and watches become appraised less like atoll and more like a piece of art and I think that’s where Lange is you often find watches on the other side of the spectrum like Rolex, Omega, and Seiko boasting about time keeping but Lange is past that point when do you ever hear Patek Philippe boasting about the timekeeping of their watches matter of fact since Patek movements have different seal rather than a Geneva seal because they believe their standards are higher and rightfully seven tourbillons nowadays are used for purely aesthetic reasons and just the way of a watchmaker showing off what they’re capable of doing mechanically but if you look at it from a mechanical aspect it’s completely irrelevant when it comes to watches because the idea of a tourbillon was invented to sort out the issue with the pocket watch sitting in one position all day and wrist watches continuously move on your wrist so you don’t actually need a tourbillon but it’s just aesthetically pleasing.
How many watches does Lange make a year?
So if you want the answer of how accurate is this watch very this watch retails at two hundred or so stub as it’s currently under appreciated it goes for around twenty five thousand pounds on the second hand markets it’s quite of a hefty discount so should you buy it hundred percent recommend it especially with simple stainless steel watches fetching double retail at thermometric watch is a complete bargain on the second hand market especially with everything that it comes with it’s a fairly complicated Wachusett’s super clean to look at and also it’s on the larger end so it doesn’t look small on a tall person but also it doesn’t look big on a person with a small wrist it like I said somehow it looks like a melon my wrist and I’ve got a small wrist myself suit’s a watch that you’d really enjoy and think you get the best value when you put your money into Lange watch and I think now is the best time to buy a Lange because I see a great future for Lange and for other classic complicated watches the hype nowadays has been about stainless steel sporty watches but those actual underappreciated gold classic complicated Pateks Langes, Vacherons, the time will come the time will come I really hope you enjoyed the video and if you have make sure to smash that like button subscribe and hit that notification bell so you’re notified next time I put up a video in the meantime take care and see you in the next.
Search engine optimization means producing high ranking web pages. Quality content isn’t enough, that content must employ a variety of techniques to get your client’s website on the first or second page of Google’s search results. A company might produce the best hiking poles in the business but so what? What good is that if the client can’t be found online?
SEO is a dark art. Google keeps the methods behind its algorithms hidden. Optimizing for Google, therefore, relies on endless speculating, experimenting, and poring over site statistics. Your client’s stats, the stats of their competitors. Google doesn’t want anyone to game or manipulate their system. Despite the sponsored ads and links that Google often presents first, they still want search results to have integrity.
If someone had a sure-fire way of getting a client’s pages always ranked above their competitors, faith in search would be lost. You would have nothing but manipulated results. At least with ads, you know they are ads. And most of us usually skip to the listings below the ads. Which gets us back to producing pages to best attract the search engines.
If you’re producing a personal website like this one you probably don’t care about designing pages with SEO in mind. I don’t. If you are a working writer, however, you need to get familiar with SEO and what it means. You’re not writing for yourself anymore, you are writing for a client. And that client’s great message or great content is invisible if it is on page 12 of a search result. Although this is a speculative number, it could be that 97% of traffic from search comes from the first page of Google’s search results.
That’s why I was disappointed by the Berkeley Extension course I signed up for and then immediately dropped. They offered this hopeful paragraph before the course started but things fell apart when the course was outlined on the first day of class. Here’s how the course was presented:
Writing for Social Media: Prose That Works for Web 2.0
ENGLISH X468
“Learn to write effectively for social media, specifically blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Establish a coherent writing process; learn editing techniques; and examine the interplay among context, content and style. Classes focus primarily on workshop critiques, peer editing and weekly composition of posts and tweets. Note: This course focuses primarily on content writing and editing, not Web technology.”
—
The instructor revealed on the first day that he was focused on helping people write better, something any English 101 class could do. He was silent on SEO at first and then admitted he wouldn’t be addressing it. Nonsense. He described writing effectively for social media. That can only be done with SEO in mind when you are in business or writing for someone else. Again, quality content is not enough, there’s plenty of original writing and wonderful photographs and terrific videos on the web. Too much. Way too much. You could be Hemingway or Twain and it doesn’t matter. Not for the web.
To cut through the noise you have to write for algorithms and bots as well as your human bosses, clients, and the end reader. Quality content is good but, again, not just by itself. Some parts of a post must catch Google’s attention. There are ways to do this. Keywords are still important, external links aren’t anymore, and other methods are catching on. Any technique needs constant testing and analysis and even the analytical tools needed to do this are complicated and often contradictory.
Take using ahrefs.com, for example, an expensive reporting service that throws a fire hose of information at you. Some of its data is good, some not so much. People can completely disagree on what ahrefs means and any value it might assign a web page. Same with Google Analytics, you need to be at least a low-level rocket scientist to interpret its results. When reading about SEO, limit your search results to no more than a month ago. This field gets dated. In a hurry.
If you are interested in SEO then I would recommend trade conferences and not anything associated with academia. You need to meet people working in the field to know the field. My partial involvement in SEO does not require me to attend seminars but I am aware of its importance and I try to keep up on it. Besides the way we write, our team adds other tricks to the way a page is coded or designed internally. This is a big and complex field but I am writing and editing pages with SEO strongly in mind. You should be, too.
Resources
Some of my writing related to this page (all internal links)
Who Are We Writing For? OR For Whom are We Writing?
(I can’t decide which title is grammatically correct)
Who am I writing for? That is the most important question to answer before writing for publication. The final answer, though, is nuanced and complex.
A taxidermy article might seem straightforward, a piece for people interested in taxidermy. Not so fast. What is your audience? Professionals, hobbyists, or general interest readers? Or all three? Each choice demands a different orientation. And that point of view may not be your own choice. First and foremost, you are writing for your editor.
Your contract determines your word count and what is expected of your writing. If you are writing on spec, you have to do your best to conform to the style of the publication you hope to get into. If the editor approves the piece in either situation you will go through a round of revisions before the material gets out the door. To make clear, the end reader still hasn’t seen your work. You first write for your editor.
Perhaps you are selling writing online. Maybe your company sells articles on various subjects to taxidermy websites. That editor will want it to meet the requirements of any potential buyer. Modifications and revisions will ensue after submission between writer and editor. Let’s go over net writing more closely.
Internet writing must satisfy your boss or editor, the client, the client’s customers, and The Bots, the mysterious algorithms that determine placement and prominence on the web. This is your audience, those are your readers. In the internet age, few real people may read your online writing. Maybe only Google. Still, quality writing on every page provides good content for a website and offers a chance that the client’s website will ultimately show higher in search results.
How you fare with any reader beyond your editor is often out of your control. I’m fortunate to work with an internet company that develops websites with ranking in mind. Quality writing is extremely important, especially with the corporate websites we produce. But there are many, many other things, that go beyond writing to get that writing well ranked.
I am not normally concerned in my writing and editing with what is called search engine optimization or SEO. Some of my work, however, is along these lines. One current research task requires six open browser windows and three monitors. My desk no longer has room for my cat.
I can’t write about what we do but the point to remember is that a writer’s audience today is varied and not always a person. Writing for a machine may seem unworldly but that reader is here and now and on your page. Better get to know him.
Resources
Some of my writing related to this page (all internal links)
Shorter sentences tend to be more readable than long ones. Since I usually write long sentences in my first drafts (a part of brainstorming, writing whatever comes to mind), my revisions find me breaking those long sentences into shorter ones. The problem is that short sentences tend to be choppy. Not as smooth as extended copy. The trick then is finding a way to make short sentences flow as well as uninterrupted sentences. It’s not easy.
I got to thinking about this while editing and revising the work of another writer. Light editing doesn’t usually change how well a writer’s sentences flow into one another. But I’ve had to make so many revisions for one writer that their posts now sound fragmented and choppy. This is a serious problem. The only way to smooth out their writing would be for them to do a complete rewrite with my changes in mind. There’s no time or budget for that.
The consoling thought, at least for web work, is that ultimately most of us are not writing for readers but for robots. Much of this content generation is for higher search results rankings, the subject of search engine optimization or SEO. I often wonder, as I pen the blog posts I am paid to write, if anyone reads them at all. Or if all those words, no matter the writing style, simply go to improving a client’s website in the rankings. Today, readability may play less importance than coming up on the first page of Google’s search results.
When I’m writing newspaper or magazine articles I don’t worry about SEO ideas like unique content and unique value. My research and writing is original and I have no worry that I will be ranked lower due to repetitive content. But because I often have to rewrite news stories for my Vancouver employer I should probably learn more about these related subjects.
I’ve touched on unique content before (internal link). Copying a story word for word produces no unique content. Google doesn’t like that. So we rewrite. Substantially rewriting a story produces a higher unique content simply by using different words than in the original story. Run your variation through Copyscape (external link) to see how it passes. Let’s take an extreme example.
A famous Melville quote goes like this:
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
One might rewrite it thus:
I’m coming after you Mr Unstoppable Whale, rowing to you in my longboat. I’m going to fight you to the end, chuck my spear into you, and, just because I hate you so much, spit on your watery grave.”
This would achieve a 0% match with the original. You’ve just rewritten a story that Google should now see as unique content. But you’ve added no unique value. Nothing of your own has been added.
Rewriting the whale story with unique value would mean more than adding a quote from Wikipedia or a purloined anecdote from a whale expert at the Discovery Channel. Ideally, you would bring in your own original experiences with a whale, along with original images.
This is totally impossible, of course, when you have to rewrite news stories that are breaking and have to be posted immediately. Perhaps the best we can achieve is a rewrite. But how much of a rewrite? We certainly don’t have time for 100% unique. What then? 50% unique? 25%?
I’m still mulling over these ideas. A great video presentation on the topic is at the link below. Check it out to learn about a vexing problem in our information age:
Google’s search engine likes fresh content but dislikes repetition. A website should have regularly updated pages or a blog that’s frequently contributed to, to rank higher in search. But what if you have pages that require disclaimers, similar text that will occur over and over throughout your pages or blog?
One solution is to have a single disclaimer page and hope that everyone on your site reads it before they try practicing surgery on themselves. The other solution is to put up the repetitive text as an image file, like what you see below.
There! Google will not read an image and therefore not penalize you for using the same content on many pages. It’s a somewhat clumsy solution in that an image file will not adjust to screen sizes as easily as text on a web page. (The text will be tiny on tiny screens.) This disclaimer approach, however, will inform your readers without pulling your ranking down.
As an older writer I’m used to old things. A copy of the TheChicago Manual of Style, Strunk’s Element’s of Style, and a good thesaurus. Things change. Now, writing for the web, I have to add new tools for new writing.
Internet writing demands acquaintance with so called keywords, familiarity with Google Analytics, and a passing knowledge of SEO, search engine optimization. The key to remember is this: your writing matters little if someone can’t find it. And nobody can find it unless your writing ranks high in search results.
I’m now writing exclusively for the web. The content I generate, and I despise that wording, is linked inexorably to the algorithms that search engines employ. I can be more valuable to my employers, my clients, if I know more about search. Can anyone recommend a good primer? Right now I am learning as I go, and it is indeed a new world filled with new tools.
