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I don’t often print other people’s work verbatim, but Tina Mancuso’s How to Write Good is too good to tamper with.

I’m not entirely convinced by her list (rules are made to be broken) but it does illustrate well the points it makes.

How To Write Good

Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)

4. Employ the vernacular.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren’t necessary.

9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

10. One should never generalize.

11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

13. Don’t be redundant; don’t more use words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.

14. Profanity sucks.

15. Be more or less specific.

16. Understatement is always best.

17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

20. The passive voice is to be avoided.

21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

24. While a transcendent vocabulary is laudable, one must nevertheless keep incessant surveillance against such loquacious, effusive, voluble verbosity that the calculated objective of communication becomes ensconced in obscurity.

25. In a sentence, the nouns has to match the verbs.

26. Don’t use no double negatives.

27. In writing, few things are, so to speak, more infuriating, than, say, commas, at least when there are too many of them, or when they should be, say, semicolons.

28. Proofread your work, so you don’t leave some out or forget to finish

29. Run-on sentences are really bad because the reader saturates and what you really should be doing is using commas and semicolons and even periods to break the sentence up into more digestible chunks.

30. To have been using excessively complex verb constructions, is to have been bopping the literary baloney.

31. A friend I spoken with recently told me he been forgetting his helper verbs.

Ever wondered how to place a form on a site without tables? If you want your page to be fully semantic XHTML and CSS so that it looks good to screen readers AND search engine spiders, you mustn’t use tables.

Don’t despair, there is an answer. Bring on the definition list <dl>, definition description <dd> and definition term<dt> tags! Definition lists are a special case of <ul>, <ol> and <li> and are usually used to list definitions! Go figure!

<dl>

A definition list is the container element for DT and DD elements. The DL element should be used when you want incorporate a definition of a term in your document, it is often used in glossaries to define many terms, it is also used in “normal” documents when the author wishes to explain a term in a more detail (Like this definition).

<dt>

The term currently being defined in the definition list. This element contains inline data.

<dd>

The definition description element contains data that describes a definition term. This data may be either inline, or it may be block level.

But, definition lists also make a great foundation for web forms, so instead of


<form>
<table>
<tr>
<td><input type=”text” id=”name” name=”name” class=”input” /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type=”text” id=”email” name=”email” class=”input” /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type=”submit” id=”submit” value=”submit” /></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>


you can get the same effect with …


<form>
<dl>
<dt><input type=”text” id=”name” name=”name” class=”input” /></dt>
<dt><input type=”text” id=”email” name=”email” class=”input” /></dt>
<dt><input type=”submit” id=”submit” value=”submit” /></dt>
</dl>
</form>


which is smaller too. Indeed, you can improve matters further by using the <dd> tag to add titles to the table …

<form>
<dl>
<dt>Your name</dt>
<dd><input type=”text” id=”name” name=”name” class=”input” /></dd>
<dt>Your email address</dt>
<dd><input type=”text” id=”email” name=”email” class=”input” /></dd>
<dd><input type=”submit” id=”submit” value=”submit” /></dd>
</dl>
<form>


And add a <label> tag for improved accessibility (screen readers will now know what the column headings are) …

<form>
<dl>
<dt><label for “name”>Your name</label></dt>
<dd><input type=”text” id=”name” name=”name” class=”input” /></dd>
<dt><label for “email”>Your email address</label></dt>
<dd><input type=”text” id=”email” name=”email” class=”input” /></dd>
<dd><input type=”submit” id=”submit” value=”submit” /></dd>
</dl>
<form>

Browser default layout gives an indented style (just like a definition list) but because the <dl>, <dd>, <dt> and <label> tags can be given style information like a <div> tag via CSS, the web designer can indulge in infite layout options while not affecting the accessibility and usability of the page.

Other tags — from <p> and <br /> to accessibility tags such as ABBR, LANG and ACRONYM — can also be used to format and modify the contents.

I’ve had a recommendation of one interesting way to see if your Google Ad Sense is optimised for the number of words.

I have no idea if it works, I can ramble on for ages and this site is more about information than making money, but I leave it to you.

• Resize your browser window to fit 800 by 600 pixel resolution (although most of the world has a bigger screen these days, this size is still counted as the average).
• Create a page with three columns below the page title in a H1 tag. In the first column put your menu. In the third column put an Ad Sense “Wide Skyscraper” ad (160×600).
• Now paste the text into the second column and reload the page to see what the ad bot thinks is appropriate. If the ads match your topic, fine. If not, rewrite the text or add more or remove fillers. If the middle column is taller than the height of the ad then, says the model, you’ve written too much.
• Next, link to the page and leave it alone until Googlebot has fetched it between two And four times (indexing is usually two days). Two days after the last Googlebot visit (around day six) check again to see if the ads still match your content keywords. If not, tweak your wording and go again.
• When all is stable, you know you’ve achieved the optimal number of words per page.

So what’s the “ideal” number of words of text, as far as SEO goes? 300? 500?

Look at Google’s high fliers and you’ll see that their pages weigh in at anything between at 2k and 100k, but what does that mean in word terms? Of course what’s important here is relevance and usability and that is linked to file size: the bigger the file, the longer the text, the more diluted the effect. A page with just three well-constructed sentences can outrank the rest.

If you were to take the position “the longer the better”, you’d need to pack a huge screed of text with an almost limitless supply of fact/keywords to keep the keyword concentration high enough. The result would be a bloated monster of a page that no-one would EVER get to the end of. Spare a thought for your readers; they’re what your doing it for aren’t they?

While it is true that larger pages have a larger pool of query matches — including Long Tail searches — if a page is 2,000 words long, it is likely to have more than one subject. Multiple subjects simply dilute the message and hit the SEO.

If you have several topics on one page, split the page: smaller pages have a limited number of potential query matches, but the split will also increase the number of <title>, <h1> and inbound links. And more pages are good for SEO.

The patent of Google’s extremely complex search engine algorithm implies that it is designed to reward sites which grow content, which good news for the genuine web builder.

The truth is that there is no such thing as ideal page length for Google and the other search engines: if there were, search engine spammers would create sites with all pages at this length. The point with web content is to avoid doing things that look like spam.

The Google algorithm’s complexity also means that it’s much harder for SEO optimisers/spammers to apply a series of rules to get good SERPs: this frees up web content authors to write more for a human audience rather than robots.

Some say Google’s long-term planning is aimed exactly at this goal. Perhaps they are changing their unofficial motto from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Do Something Good”.

People’s view of copyright depends very much on where they stand. I’m not talking about nationality, although that is a problem with the global nature of the web: what may be copyright in one country may be free for all somewhere else. No, what I mean is whether you’re paying for copyright or being paid for it.

Ultimately, under agreed international conventions, an author should be able to enjoy the benefits of their work, be it books or images or even software. That means that anyone who “uses” the author’s work should pay for the privilege, usually in the form of a copyright payment.

Sometimes, such as in the case of books or software, that payment is concealed in the original cost. Other times a small payment is made to the author or his/her agent for a use fee, such as in the case of images, music and such.

At its very heart, copyright is simply payment for work done. Who could argue with that? Plenty of people.

• Software Pirates:
  who can honestly say that they’ve NEVER used software for which they’ve not paid a licence (and that includes copies of WinZip where people just ignore the “nag” screens when it goes past the evaluation period)?
• Peer-to-peer sharers:
  how many of you have mp3s or videos that you couldn’t find on the legal download sites and so were forced to use a torrent program to get? Me neither
• Website images:
  go to any fansite and you’ll see hundreds of images in breach of copyright. (no, it doesn’t make it right to tag on the line: “The copyright remains the property of the original authors”).

Now I hope you’re all thoroughly ashamed of yourselves. Well I can offer you some crumbs of comfort in some cases: it’s called fair use, or by others “a right pain in the ass”.

Fair use can be determined by a four-part test:

1. What is the purpose and character of the use, including the commercial nature?
This has two effects, it allows use if you are quoting parts for review or academic purposes and also allows greater use for non-commercial purposes (this does NOT mean that if you are a non-profit — typically a church or school — you can freely photocopy or otherwise violate others’ copyrights). This applies mostly to written material.

2. The nature of the copyrighted work
Does it have copyright? Is it copyright-free? Can it be copyrighted (ideas, for example, cannot be copyrighted)? Is it open source? Do you own the copyright? Has the copyright run out?

3. The proportion that is “taken”
This is the real “pain in the ass” bit — this does NOT mean that you are allowed to sample so many percent of an image or tune or passage; it’s more a case of how substantive is the taking? Does it take the most important, original, or defining part of the copyrighted work and use it in such a way that it takes away the VALUE of the original or use the taken part to give/create value to their own work, in other words, you cannot “write” a column by taking a piece of someone else’s writing, put large chunks of it in quotes and call it a review.

4. The economic impact of the taking
By taking from the copyrighted material, do you inhibit the original author from profiting from their own work?

Commercial concerns should abide by copyright rules — after all, they would be reaching for the lawyer if some started stealing their services; however, in practice, the first test is all that applies for most hobby sites because of their non-commercial nature, although strictly speaking the minute you stick Google Ad-Words on your site you release yourself from the security of non-profit-making status.

And much though legal departments will claim it isn’t so, there is a reluctance to sepnd large amounts of money and court time chasing the little guy for copyright infringements amounting to pennies and winning lots of bad PR in the process. (The music companies are an exception, it seems). However, if you are ever asked to remove copyrighted material by the author or their agents, do so.

Generally, for published material — literary, dramatic, musical and artistic — work remains in copyright in the U.K., the E.U. and the U.S. until 70 years after the death of the author.

Literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works:

• until 70 years after the death of the author

Films:

• 70 years from the death of whoever is last to survive of director, screenwriter or composer

Typographic copyright in the printed page:

• for 25 years from publication in that edition, so a recent edition of a long-dead author cannot be freely copied: the publisher has copyright in the typography and layout.

Sound recordings:

• are protected by copyright for 50 years after they are published or performed (so recordings from before 1954 are in the public domain from 2004)

Photographs:

• for 70 years after a known photographer’s death, or
• 70 years after the publication of the work of an unknown photographer

Databases:

• as well as the full term of copyright in the material included, there is a 15-year database right: this begins from each time the database is updated

Unpublished Material:

• ALL unpublished material is currently in copyright
• pre-1989 material remains in copyright until 2039
• post-1989 material is copyrighted until 70 years after year of creation

Remember that there may be more than one copyright holder (multiple authors; writer and composer, etc.)

This is probably the most crucial question content managers must ask themselves.

Who are you writing for? People? Or Search Engine spiders?

There’s no easy answer. After all, good search engine placings are essential to get people coming to see your content but overdo the SEO and you risk making those visits downright painful.

We’ve all seen examples of pages aimed at spoofing the spiders — hidden text, repeated phrases, endless links — and thankfully search engines are now much better at spotting them and penalising them; however, some other genuine pages are so heavily SEOed that they come close to being unusable as worthwhile content. It’s a fine balance.

Thankfully, good well-written text is as attractive to search engine spiders as it is to human beings. It has to be. Why do search engines exist? To point people in the direction of the websites best suited to their need. And, in an ideal world, the most suitable websites are the ones who display the best information in the best way. So in giving some guidelines for good SEO-friendly content I will hopefully be giving you good guidance for writing interesting content too.

Phantom Keywords

If content is king, then keywords are the princes of content. Good keyword research is essential to attract good rankings but for the purposes of content good keyword research is no more that knowing your subject and not padding out your words: on the web — as in most writing, frankly — keep your text tight and to the point. For instance, if you were trying to get a good ranking for “serviced offices”, your text must have that phrase in it. There would be little point in composing the sentence “it’s good to find an office that is serviced” when what you want to get the spiders to spot “serviced offices”.

Incidentally, the phrase: “His car was regularly serviced. He parked outside his offices” would do quite well for SEO for “serviced offices”. If you can’t use the exact phrase, then keep its components close by.

Many people find SEO difficult for the reason that they are not really passionate about their subject

For SEO purposes, a well-optimised page should contain at least 250 words of text of which the term you are targeting should make up about 5-15%. More than that and you actually risk denting your score. Look at it another way: as a reader, how many times could you cope with variations of the phrase “serviced offices” in a sentence before you started tearing your hair out.

You should also load the most important search terms towards the front. There’s a rule which budding reporters are taught about good writing: put the most important facts as high up the story as possible — many readers only ever read the first few paragraphs. I’m sure you can see the parallel.

Keep mentions of your phrases to around five per block of text: more phrases means more text for high frequency and, if you can, link one of the search phrases to the most relevant page on your site: this will give your rankings a boost.

You can find a handy tool which gives you an idea of good keyword density elsewhere in this site.

SEO and content is a vast subject — possibly the raison d’être of this site — and much too big for one posting, so I’m going to leave the topic here for now. Yet I have one final thought: many people find SEO difficult for the reason that they are not really passionate about their subject (they probably only do it for a living); enthusiasts, on the other hand, live their passion.

For most enthusiasts writing about a hobby or a band or a pastime or an interest, keyword density is not a problem. No, the main hindrance there is jargon … but that’s for another posting.

I’ve been looking at a friend’s website recently. It’s been around a while, sat comfortably at the top of Google’s rankings on keywords and was very popular according to the visitor statistics. That was until mid-December 2006.

There began a slide. He found he wasn’t getting 1 and 2 in the searches any more. He got paranoid. Something was “penalising him on Google” he said.

There was nothing different about the site: apart from updates to his database of punk rock music items, there were no alterations in coding. If Google was indexing him differently, it was because there was something different in the way Google was indexing him.

And it certainly seemed from the buzz around the amateur SEO community that something had changed on Google. All the pundits said Google was doing things differently and that some sites with a long up-time and a good history were feeling the pinch.

Don’t accept the old order. Get rid of it.

— Johnny Rotten

I took a look at his site and made a few tweaks, mainly things like trimming his titles and removing unnecessary comment codes (even these might make Google wrongly identify a site as a link farm or similar). The very next day it shot up the rankings and his site was number one again. He was ecstatic, to say the least. There was much rejoicing.

Yet, the next day, he was back in the doldrums. His placings had crashed back to where they were beforehand. Once more he was Mr Glum.

So, we tried a few other things. Firstly, his page count. Google said he had just 81 pages in his site. His big rival had 500. Of course, his rival’s pages were all flat HTML but it certainly seemed that the page count was a factor.

So I got my friend to hire a freelance coder via getafreelancer.com to create a mod-rewrite script. Put simply, mod-rewrite works in the background to produce a URL and divert existing pages to it. For instance, it can change http://www.vinylonthe.net/default.php?pt=Punk%207%22& pg=genre&mti_1=12&mti_2=14&mti_3=14&FormatID=2 into http://www.vinylonthe.net/7-inch-Punk+seven~genre~12~14~14~2.html. in the future, with a bit more tweaking, we might be able to get http://www.vinylonthe.net/punk/7inch.html.

It was also pointed out to him that with 8,000 plus items on his stock database, he might be able to get 20k+ pages on his site using mod-rewrite!

Incidentally, Getafreelancer.com gives anyone the ability to hire a rated coder to carry out work at an agreed price and set time.

It has paid off: my friend’s Google position is much improved. And because the ranking seem to be sticking, he’s a much happier bunny again.

Of course, as a “Content Guru” I’ve been telling him that he can inprove his SEO stakes by writing a blog. My friend is Britain’s foremost expert on Punk Rock. He has a wealth of experience and knowledge; ideal blog fodder. The plan is that running a blog on his site will draw in traffic, attract links and improve SEO.

Watch this space or go to vinylonthe.net to find out more.

10: LOL
And ROTFLMAO, and STFU, and WT, and all the other acronymns. Save them for Instant Messaging or SMS on your phone. Good web content does not consist of strings of letters who no-one can remember a reason for any more. And the same goes for Smileys! >:(

9: secure
There is no such thing as secure: there is only secure enough. The chances of someone spending billions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to decode your shopping list is remote: but they could do it if they wanted!

8: solution
Web solutions, blogging solutions, email solutions, secure access solutions. In this context, a solution is the answer to a problem, but not everything in life is a problem. Besides, it just looks silly.

7: scaleable
The definition of scalability at Wikipedia is: “a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.” It is not the ability of a single webpage to expand downwards to infinity, or a spambot to send six emails to every man, woman and child on the earth’s surface, and 60 percent of those below it.

6: long tail
The biggest thing in search engine optimisation since keywords, or so the SEO gurus would have you believe. In fact, long tail is just another name for a market segmentation using broad assortments. Old style shopkeepers used to call it the 80-20 rule: 20 per cent of products bring in 80 percent of the turnover, while what’s left sells poorly and represents the long flat part of the sales curve — the Long Tail. With thought, the Long Tail can produce results; of itself, it is neither a marketing revolution, nor a guarantee of success.

5: robust
I had a bank manager once who used to describe his letters to me complaining about my £55 overdraft as “robust”. In the web context, most people use it to say: “I spent more than 15 minutes putting the site together and it won’t break at the first reload.”

4: blogging
Blogging is a shortening of the words “Web Logging” and it’s been responsible for an explosion of content on the internet, much of it interesting, informative and worthwhile. But it’s not compulsory. Save your blog until you have something to say. Please!

3: SEO
Almost everything these days is geared at SEO and while its importance is paramount, much of the stuff we think of as SEO is just plain common sense. There is no mystique to filling your content with keywords; just make it interesting. The search engines will catch on.

2: basically
Not necessarily a web word of itself, but you’ll find it everywhere. Basically, it’s a way of pausing before one says something and basically, it (apparently) gives the speaker some authority to what they’re saying. Basically, it’s a redundant word and should be left out.

1: web 2.0
Okay, so we all know what it means. Or do we? Tech Publisher Tim O’Reilly began touting the phrase in 2003 about internet applications which interact with users and get better as a result: things like StumbleUpon or Digg or deli.cio.us. Problem is, everyone else has their own definition. For me, the all-time worst offenders are people who think web 2.0 means: “Looks like a Mac!”

I’m sure that this isn’t a definitive list. What’s yours?

Suppose, just suppose, that mankind were descended from cats and not primates (I’m not a fan of Intelligent Design), how different would life be.

Well for a start, all those X-Files episodes shot by the light of a eight-year-old’s birthday cake candles, wouldn’t be half as scary because darkness (the absense of good daylight) wouldn’t be so disorienting. And smell would be very important. Indeed, you might argue that smell-o-vision would have been invented before HD-plasma screens.

Our tree dwelling ancestors, however, lived in scent-heavy forests where lines of sight were less than generous. More important to have good binocular colour vision at distances of up to 30 metres. So why then are people so fascinated by blurry, stuttering images on webcams? Possibly, because, for the first time we are able to sit in our office and watch traffic queues half a world away and think how nice it would be to be stuck in them.

There are whole websites devoted to webcams. For about two years from the window of my workstation at TIME, I ran a webcam which showed the front of Somerset House in London’s trendy West End. Every 30 seconds it took a picture — 320 pixels x 170pixels — of the road outside, at a crazy angle. This was because the tiny camera was perched precariously on the catch of the inner window of the secondary double glazing which did it’s best to reduce the noise from the traffic trundling past on Lancaster Place.

Exciting it wasn’t. It did give a good view of the roadworks outside to strengthen Waterloo Bridge and add an access hatch to the Strand Underpass (which even has its own Wikipedia page). The downside was that you only got a glimpse every 30 seconds or so: even British workmen can move faster than that!

You can observe a lot just by watching.

— Yogi Berra

My favourite webcam site is the Times Square HD webcam, and I once made my own .gif movie prancing around in front of this one at 4am in the morning.

The best webcams obviously have the best views, but it’s not as simple as sticking a camera on some lofty building overlooking a recognisable landmark. Take a look at the Hoe Webcam which sits on Plymouth’s old aquarium site and points out over Plymouth Sound. It’s a lovely view, but nothing (much) happens.

In formulating a policy for placing webcam feeds one quickly comes to several conclusions.

• It must be a good view
• Something must happen
• It must be of sufficient size (dimensions)

One thing people forget however is that what may be mundane and boring to one person may be absolutely spellbinding for another. I lived for eight years in Plymouth and almost never appreciated the beauty of my surroundings. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The technology of bringing video to your website is the topic for a later posting. Watch this space.