May 28, 2016 at 7:17 am

@bestwriter I have to agree with you that a preview and an edit function are much needed here. @support has said several times that the admin are expecting things from us, but often it does feel as if we are creating with our hands tied. We could also very much use an HTML view in the submit form, and not just the rich text or WYSIWYG view. This would save a lot of time and hassles over formatting, and encourage writers like me to submit more content.

As for the posts for this challenge, yes do submit them to LB! Then once published, you can come back here to post the link 🙂

May 28, 2016 at 5:35 am

@morgoodie Now if you saw that image on Twitter or Facebook, wouldn’t it make you want to click? This is why @support emphasized the value of a featured image. But it shouldn’t just be an old image, as we saw with the post by @bestwriter when staff added an image because the one she tried to add wouldn’t upload. It has to be appealing to the reader 🙂

I look forward to reading your post – and if you can’t stop at five, just write a second one!

May 28, 2016 at 12:11 am

I think individual kids are probably no less respectful than we were in the 70s. But I do believe that the group mentality is stronger, and groups are more daring about what they do. Also less respectful both of property or their elders, but also just of life and living things in general.

May 27, 2016 at 3:48 pm

I think you’ve got some rather good, concrete information about the product. That is something I often find lacking in posts on health and beauty topics, so big points for that. But I noticed a number of small typographical errors, such as “mor” instead of “more.”

There were also places where punctuation could have improved the readability. Here’s an example: “Looking at a celebrity’s before and after picture scores of celebrities have gone in for this treatment – something brand new and never heard of before.” This actually feels like a sentence fragment tacked to the beginning of a sentence.

Looking at your source, you’ll notice there is a great deal more urgency and emotion in that article, both in the title and the body text. This isn’t necessarily the kind of piece that would appeal to me as a reader, but a lot of others do go for that and it rates well with the search engines. I also think that using specific case studies helped that article because it gives the reader people to identify with. In your post, you simply mentioned the generic “celebrities,” and I kept wondering who?

It’s a good, solid post. It could use a bit of proofreading and more length. Adding a hint of emotion to the headline could be helpful, and a bit more specificity about people who are getting results from the product would be great if you can do it without simply paraphrasing the source.

May 26, 2016 at 2:41 pm

Keywords are not as important as they used to be, especially in titles. Now the trend is towards “long-tail” keywords, or keyword phrases that someone might search for. So returning to our example of writing about dogs, I would no longer simply use single keywords like “dog,” “dogs,” “puppies,” or even short phrases like, “German Shepherd.”

The long-tail keyword would be something more like, “potty training Lhasa Apso puppies.” It’s much more specific, but that’s the way people search the internet today. Just think of how you would search for a topic you want to write about. Then include some of the search strings in your text, in a natural way that flows.

Basic SEO is not brain surgery. The experts need to know much more, but for a web writer it’s enough to understand how people search, and to focus on the things Google likes: longer posts written in grammatically correct English and aimed at English-speaking audiences.

If you are looking for trends, you can check out any number of places where trending topics are listed: Twitter is a good example of a site that mentions current trends. Also just read the news on the internet. And there are specialized sites that list trends too, like Google Trends.

May 26, 2016 at 3:48 am

Thinking of you @kaka135, as you bring your new little one into the world! May it be a safe delivery for you both, and may you and your husband rejoice in this new life you have created together <3

May 26, 2016 at 3:28 am

@4cryingoutloud You’d be surprised to learn how much your own thinking will probably match with what the search engines are looking for! Mostly, if you’d search for something on Google, others will too 🙂

May 26, 2016 at 2:09 am

Before I forget, I also wanted to mention to @admin and @support that some images on posts here on the site are in violation of copyrights. It’s not hard to find out who owns the copyright of a photo, even if the author of the post hasn’t supplied a source. I would highly recommend that this site publish a proper image use policy to guide the members in how to select and give credit for images that do not belong to them. Both the author and the site risk legal ramifications, if ever a copyright owner were to track down a post that displays an image that violates international copyright law.

I would suggest that the submit form be edited to add fields for image attribution, source, and licensing terms (public domain or CC0, CC BY-SA, etc.) Not many of the users here know how to write proper image credits, but it’s pretty easy to just plug such information into a form when uploading.

May 26, 2016 at 2:03 am

@4cryingoutloud Think about it from an SEO point of view. Would you be likely to do a Google search for something like “my dog,” “my best friend,” or “my puppy Fido”? Or would you be more likely to search for specifics like “how to stop a puppy from biting,” “health concerns for (breed name) dogs,” or something similar?

It’s great to write about experiences with your own dog, but a post like that will fare better if it’s within the context of a specific topic like the dog breed, training the dog, dog health, etc. This way, you’d be covering both bases 😀

@rapidblue We’ve asked about image sizes before and been told that for the featured image, the staff recommends 1200 px x 600 px – but these images are cropped around the center when they display on some pages on the site. So it’s best if the important part of your image is near the middle of that 1200-pixel width. See my post on social sharing as an example of a featured image that crops well and displays nicely in the full size too.

For the additional images, we are told to make them 750 px x 750 px. But when we upload, the system automatically forces these images to 150 px x 150 px. If you allow it to upload with this constraint, it changes the size permanently so it becomes blurry if you try to fix the resolution before submitting the post. There is also a really annoying warning about reaching the maximum for image uploads – which shows up even if you’ve only added just the one featured image. It’s very off putting, and I’m sure it discourages people from adding more pictures.

@support This is an issue that needs to be resolved if you want to encourage users to add more than one image to the post. The piddling little size of a 150×150 px image is too small to add much value to a post.

Also, for those who are wanting to promote posts on Pinterest, the recommended size is 736 px x 1102 px. If we can fit a 750 px width, surely we can add images that will work on Pinterest? And images that are wider than they are tall, in order that they’ll be picked up when people share to Google+, Twitter, and Facebook? I would love nothing more than to add a featured image, a Pinterest image, and one horizontal image that will get picked up on the other social media sites. If they would all display properly, I would do this on LiteracyBase the same as I do on other sites and on my own blogs.

I personally see no value at all in adding a square image, especially if it’s going to end up the size of a thumbnail when I upload it to the site. I take as much time in preparing my graphics as I do in writing my content. I’d like to see those graphics displaying properly on LB and not being resized or cropped awkwardly. As a writer, it reflects badly on me when my images look cheap – whether on my posts themselves or when people share my links on social media.

This is why I have stopped adding other images to my posts. Rant over. I hope we can get this fixed so people’s images will truly add value to the posts we publish here.

May 26, 2016 at 1:36 am

Oh, I also wanted to say that I am going to be sharing all the links from this writing challenge on my Facebook author page (#RubyWriter) and pinning them all to my writing challenge board on Pinterest.

In order to help bring more awareness for LiteracyBase and this challenge, I’ve created a special sharing thread on my Facebook writers group, as well. All members of the group can easily add their own posts to the thread here. I will also be adding links for those I know are not really Facebook people. And of course, if you aren’t a member of the FB group and would like to be, feel free to message me on Facebook so I can add you!

May 26, 2016 at 12:39 am

My post takes a bit of a twist towards spending a million dollars to improve the world.

And since @kaka135 is getting ready for her baby and may not be able to add her link here, I found her post on spending a million dollars too. I think she had some of the same ideas I had 🙂

May 26, 2016 at 12:14 am

@kaka135 Yes, most people will begin their search string with the words “How to….” So that’s what you put in your title to help them find it. Simple, isn’t it? You can also include “tutorial,” or simply, “tut” somewhere in your title or in your keywords and tags. It will boost the search ranking.

May 25, 2016 at 4:33 am

@peachpurple Coral is dealing with a lot of personal things at the moment. I’m not sure if she’s active anywhere else, but she’s reconnecting with some people on FB after being absent for over a year….

May 25, 2016 at 3:39 am

@kaka135 A title like “How to spend a million dollars” or “10 Top six-figure jobs that don’t require a degree” are SEO-friendly because they are “how to” or “list” titles. Question titles can also be SEO-friendly. The type of content contributes to the fact that search engines like them, as well. It’s considered “emotional” because people get excited over things like money.

As for me getting my post written fast, it was just good timing for me! I usually don’t get much written for LB.

May 25, 2016 at 2:23 am

@scheng1 I think that’s exactly it: if you need to look online, many others will too. This is a good reason to write about any subject, if it interests us enough to create a post on the subject 🙂

@rapidblue I think this is the best approach. When we try to write about a topic simply because it is trending, for example, it’s harder to produce an interesting text. This is why I sometimes prefer to play around on a social writing site or to post on my own blog, when I could earn more doing work for hire.