Arne van Elk's Library tagged tagging →  View Popular

Why don’t we look at our content the way librarians do? It begs for classification, cross-linking, mapping and contextualizing.

Why don’t we look at the design and functionality of our websites the way interaction designers do? Most of our sites would benefit from some serious user testing and usability enhancements.

This question really goes to the heart of what’s curious about Common Tag. Yahoo called it a “new semantic tagging format” in its blog post, but when we asked them why the web needed something new, they clarified that it’s an RDFa vocabulary, not something made from whole cloth. The Common Tag About page also implies that this is really just part of the standards that all the major search engines have joined together to support. “In addition, search engines like Yahoo and Google have begun reading RDFa—the markup standard used by the Common Tag format—to acquire richer information about sites that use it… Google’s new Rich Snippets feature uses the information to apply similar enhancements to Google search results.”

In truth, none of the major search engines are using semantic markup in web search and Google is using existing standards (microformats and RDFa) to display enhanced listings. Both Google and Yahoo have told me that they could use metadata in web search in the future, if it proves to be useful and they can safeguard against spamming. So far, this hasn’t happened.

In fact, one of main purposes of knowledge management is to help
people find good information on which to make better decisions.  This
is far more  involved than people processing email, memos and other
document-centric communications.  People are incredibly adept at
receiving and processing ambient information.  In the office we
overhear other people's conversations, we see what people are working
on, we receive snippets of news from our feeds or the paper, and so
on.  This information is constantly feeding our consciousness. And the
human brain has evolved process these huge volumes of fragmented
ambiguous information.  But if people constantly have their noses in
their inbox, or they are forced into document-centric models of
information sharing, they are  cut off from valuable information
sources and flows.

Online social networking acts as an excellent operational
information filter.  We are used to connecting with people and
exchanging information in spaces, and this behaviour is reflected
online in social and business networking sites like Facebook and
LinkedIn.  Instead of going to Google to search for the best
restaurants in NYC, people now go to their network and get better more
relevant results.

I'm convinced that tags provide us with a fine way to organize our own stuff. After all, I was a member of the Hypertext community before stuff-organizing was fashionable, back when faceted classification was an obscure idea attributed to an Indian librarian named S. R. Ranganathan. Even without facets, you don't have to look very hard to see that people seem to function pretty well in a world full of things that they've organized all by themselves— grocery lists they've written on the back of envelopes and to-do lists based strictly on the satisfaction they get from crossing off things— without leaning on the tricks espoused by Lifehacking gurus like Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann.

But I do need to be persuaded that tags are of use to strangers.

Beeld en Geluid heeft samen met de KRO het annotatiespel voor video Waisda? gelanceerd.

In de vorm van een uitdagend spel wordt de speler gevraagd om trefwoorden aan videomateriaal toe te voegen, om daarmee de doorzoekbaarheid van audiovisuele archieven te vergroten. Waisda? is een initiatief van Beeld en Geluid dat voortbouwt op eerdere experimenten van KRO Internet. Het vloeit voort uit het project Beelden voor de Toekomst dat digitalisering en ontsluiting van audiovisueel erfgoed op grote schaal mogelijk maakt.

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated.

Each web page has a "meta-description" tag in its code, and search engines sometimes use that description as the blurb that runs under the link to your site in search results. So when I do a search for "smoking gun mediashift" on Google, I get the following result at the top:

The problem is that all my meta-descriptions are the same for all my site pages, a generic explanation: "MediaShift is a weblog that tracks the way the Internet and technology are reshaping the mediasphere, with a focus on how blogs, podcasts, wikis, and citizen media are changing culture and society." That description often comes up in Google searches, but that means there's less content that's relevant to the search. In other words, the blurb below the link is more about my blog in general than about Smoking Gun.

"If you grab the first sentence [of your story] or use the same meta-description on every page, it's nowhere near as relevant as the description that Google can pull itself from your site," Wall said. "So if your description is the same on all the pages, you are better off removing it and letting Google auto-generate snippets. They will anyway, but anytime they don't, your listing would look less relevant than your competitor's."

The High Rankings blog offers a helpful rundown of the various ways in which search engine results will display blurbs for your site.

7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.

Another issue I have on MediaShift is a plethora of categories for blog posts. The list on the lower left navigation bar is very long. Wall suggests highlighting only the most important categories and putting the rest on another page, with a link to "See More Categories." The same goes for tags, which I don't use on MediaShift but do use on Idea Lab. Too many tags causes there to be links that aren't very useful. It's better to limit tags to the most important key words on the subject.

Plus, Wall believes I should use the "rel=nofollow" code to tell search engines not to count links to pages without improtant content for search engines, such as the MediaShift Feedback page or the PBS Privacy Policy. This strategy would put more "link equity" in my links to content pages, in turn strengthening MediaShift's association in search engines with the topics those pages cover

Basically, you can divide Newspaper SEO into a few categories:





1. Template - URL optimization
2. Content optimization
3. Improving internal link structure
4. Google News optimization

Improving internal link structure




Getting front page articles indexed isn't hard. The hard part about newspapers, is that they publish such huge amounts of articles (1 million articles large archives are actually pretty normal), that the problem lies in getting the complete archives indexed. This is the long tail theory in it's sweetest form: you only have to get another two visitors to each article each month, and you'll get them a pretty big amount of traffic.




Getting those archives indexed and still relevant isn't the easiest job in the world though. There are a few methods, and I'd recommend using more than one:



• Tagging
  
  If you can get them to tag each new article going into their database with 3-5 tags, and show them that the tag pages you create with these get actual traffic, you can probably persuade them to tag at least a part of their archives as well (all you need for that is a lot of cheap, intelligent labor capable of speaking your language, aka: students).
• Files
  
  Another method is to make files about people, companies and specific subjects. For instance, if you're covering KLM in an article, your first mention of KLM should automatically be linked to a company overview, and all your articles about KLM. Once you create this, not only search engines, but researchers too will love you.
• Categorization
  
  Most newspapers have been doing this for ages, and when it's there, I'd advice you to never take it out. You should look at the categorization with your SEO perspective though: sometimes it's too flat, with all categories straight below the root, and sometimes it's way too deep. In my opinion, most newspapers shouldn't be doing more than 3-4 levels deep, and use tags for the extra specific archiving.



All three of the above methods allow you to compile a list of related links to articles on each article, you should really be doing that.