I've been reading Built to Last, a 1994 book about successful businesses. None of the business models relied on the internet, and many of them already had many decades of history behind them. I noticed that the jargon in the book is quite different from today's.
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Monday, October 5, 2020
What Edison can teach us about SEO
en.wikipedia.org |
No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization. But he did make a habit of tinkering around until he found what worked. You have to do the same to optimize your SEO.
Are we really going to talk about Edison? Yes. The first lesson of SEO is that the title
must match the content because it is the promise you make that the content has to deliver.
You want to build an audience by giving them content that they find so good, they share it.
Clickbait always disappoints and so would only be shared by those who don’t really read
the content.
Why SEO is important
People put a lot of trust in what comes up as a result in organic search precisely because itcomes across as information they seek rather than ads people paid to have shown to them.
While it’s easier to get fast results when you pay for ads, a solid content strategy that
What people get wrong about SEO
The biggest mistake people make when deciding to implement SEO is thinking of it as a
You don’t just read up on some SEO tips, apply them, and expect surges of traffic overnight.
As is always the case of seeing results from content marketing, you have to allow six months to see measurable results from working through necessary tweaks
to titles, keywords, tags, etc.
Improving it involves understanding what brings people to your content, what they’re
looking for, and how they’re phrasing their searches. That can inform your strategy
for creating content that is is is both relevant to your brand and to your audience’s
concerns, so the context within your work is important.
Understanding SEO in context of your content
As someone who has blogged for fun since 2005, I’ve written about a variety of topics that
interest me without any though of popularity or monetization. Google Search Console
reports give me valuable insights into SEO by showing me not just which posts gets clicks
but which queries bring them to people's attention.
Lightbulb* interest persists
Google doesn’t just provide me with the statistics here; it shows me what brings people to a post with emails that offer updates on performance, as well as the queries people type in that drives them to my site.
The latest one offered this insight:
I wrote the blog on Edison back in 2015 when my curiosity was piqued about the myth of a thousand attempts to get it right after visiting his lab and home in New Jersey. Clearly many
others share that curiosity, and it is their query that drives traffic to the blog, delivering SEO
results that far exceed what I could get on social media.
Keep your content updated
Another thing to remember is this: the lightbulb’s development certainly didn’t
end when Edison filed for a patent on the bamboo filament version. It continued
to evolve over time, and your content has to as well, to stay relevant and rank well.
Accordingly, in 2020 I added several updates to the blog. They ranged from warnings about the Edison sites having closed to visitors and offering only virtual tours to more details about the evolution of the lightbulb until Edison’s patent, including the work of Lewis Howard Latimer, who was obliquely referenced by Joe Biden in the summer.
In 2022, I added a reference to the HBO series, The Gilded Age because the seventh episode
makes a point of bringing up Latimer in connection with Edison. The problem with that is
that show is set in 1882 when Latimer was still working for Edison's competitor. Though
he did come to work for Edison, that was in 1884. He also was working in the New York
office, primarily on patent issues -- not in the Menlo Park lab where the tinkering took
place.
Google is constantly adjusting its algorithms, so you have to constantly adjust your own
content to keep it optimized. SEO is not an ultimate destination but constantly evolving
journey of discovery.
*Note on "lightbulb" as one word. I opted for that here because it is AP style; however, writing it as two words is also correct.
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Friday, July 21, 2017
AI: a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization according to Elon Musk
photohttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/ Comic-Con_2004_-_Terminator_statue.jpg |
Elon Musk Sounds Alarm on AI
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Canada welcomes AI
pic from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Flag_of_Canada_%281964%29.svg/2000px-Flag_of_Canada_%281964%29.svg.png |
research with the expectation that it will benefit the country in general.
“Deep AI is a platform technology that cuts across virtually all sectors of the economy, with the potential to improve people’s lives. It will help build a stronger and more innovative economy, create high value jobs, improve transportation and lead to better and more efficient health care and social services.”
AI Arrives in Canada: Will Prosperity Follow?
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Depositphotos Nearly every day, we hear about new advances in AI that enable new ways to monitor activities and people, transforming m...
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en.wikipedia.org No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization. But he did make a habit of tinkering around until he found what...
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Bridge near Bear Mountain, photo by Ariella Brown I saw the title in my email and knew I really shouldn't click it, but my curiosity go...
I turned to Bard ( see why here) for the answer, which also explains why this term emerged only in the post-internet world. This is what it wrote, and I have to admit being somewhat amused by the somewhat pushy CTA at the end and if the "I" is meant to be the AI itself:
Notice that Bard is very bullish on ICPs, even pushy, I'd venture to say. That turns out to be a bit funny when it fails to recognize the acronym for my next query for a more recent business bible.
Clowns you say?
Knowing that when you work with generative AI you have to try your prompt multiple times, I get it another whirl and wrote out "ideal customer profile" for the query. Now Bard grasped what I was asking and responded: