How to Write a Good Text

How to Write a Good Text for a Website

People read about 20% of the words on a website. Since there’s really no telling which words they’ll read, you can’t just have a few sentences designed to act as winners. They all need to be winners. So a bit of good editing will help you create SEO-friendly content.

Editing programs, like Hemingway Editor or Grammarly, cut to the heart of grammatical and readability issues. You won’t need to read the piece with a fine-toothed comb, just fix the problem areas that the editors highlight.  You can then take it a step further and run the piece through a tool like SEMrush’s SEO Content Template for specific SEO recommendations.  

Note that polished writing doesn’t represent a single form. In fact, business blogs, comedy websites, and news articles all require different tones, levels, and styles of writing. So if you’re trying to break into a crowded space, push the boundaries of acceptable content.

Add humor, edge, intelligence, confidence, sarcasm, or charisma. Loosen up the writing and let the metaphors sing. Add soundbites in-between text for interactive content. Shorten up paragraphs and use bullets. Use loose and colorful prose. Find a unique, engaging voice that mimics the demographic lingo. Use Long-form & Short-form Content, but don't forget that with increasingly crowded web spaces and demanding searchers, Google’s algorithms have begun privileging longer and longer content.

If your goal is to satisfy the searcher’s query, and you get to pick between a 250-word article and a 3,000-word article, there’s generally a higher chance that the 3,000-word article contains something in it that satisfies the intent of the searcher.

Yet, sometimes that 250-word article delivers the bullet point answer in a beautiful featured snippet, and those other 2,750 words are no longer needed and definitely not read.

According to an aggregation of research, the ideal content length for high-ranking pages should be around 2,000 words. This is a good starting point and a great place to gauge your word count, but it isn’t the holy grail.

You need to A/B test with your specific visitors to see which kind of content they like best – short or long.

Find clear-cut answers to any question. Photo by Elena.

Originality versus Authority

On the one hand, you’ve been told to value citing sources, authoritative links, expert advice, and claims that are backed up. On the other hand, you’ve also been told to value original research and content that adds value through new claims. Basically, you need to avoid scraping content and avoid unverified claims. Go ahead and lean on the experts, but exceed them. Never overwrite your links and research, but add something new and original, something your specific audience would want.

You need the sources to back up your content, but you need to go beyond the sources to tell a new and compelling story. A few creative links and a compelling story will help your content walk the line between authority and originality.

Mobile Traffic

Mobile traffic is a big business, though keep in mind that mobile searches are generally more specific and targeted than desktop searches. Phone searches are generally more integrated into lifestyles, and things that people are already doing.

If you’ve got content that people will mostly access from a desk, focus on those long-form pieces and keep the shorter informative responses for the mobile users.

Make the Form Match the Content

When we talk about form, we’re talking about:

• Word count.
• Structure of the content.
• Tone of the piece.
• HTML tags.
• Title and meta tags.

If you understand what the content seeks to communicate and what kind of search the content satisfies, you can develop the form of the page around the content.

If its a technical article about plumbing or stock trades, get right to the point in the opening paragraph. If you’ve got a comedy listicle, your audience will be a bit more forgiving about slow starts.

Google’s advice to “make pages for users, not search engines” is still some of the best advice you can get.

Creating a good outline for your content before you begin plugging words into a page will ensure that the article maintains integrity.

The best articles don’t just read like a nice essay, they look like a crisp painting, with tags, titles, font, and headlines that create a unified piece.

Source: searchenginejournal.com/6-tips-for-creating-the-best-seo-friendly-content/314813.

Follow the guidelines for good texts and you'll be able to travel every day of your life! Photo by Elena.

Pixel Smartphones

Pixel Smartphones

(Texts ordered by a company which specializes in dealing with electronics).

Pixel smartphones are the first phones to get the latest Android versions, while other Android and Nexus devices have to wait.

The Pixel smartphone supports all Google services, a Google assistant and the Google Daydream virtual reality platform.

The Pixel's closest competitor is the Apple's iPhone 7, but the Google smartphone features the 3.5 mm audio jack.

The Pixel smartphone lacks the proper water resistance. Here it loses to Sony, Samsung and Apple wearables.

The digital image stabilization system in the Pixel’s camera is tied to the gyroscope and motion sensors. 

The Pixel XL's display measures 5.5 in 1440p AMOLED with a 3450 mAh battery (the standard Pixel's display measures 5 inch). 

While active, the Pixel XL's camera is capturing 30 captures per second, the number of frames can be easily and quickly adjustable. 

The Pixel XL's smartphone comes with the unlimited full-resolution Google Photos backup for the whole life of the phone.

Pixel XL supports Google Assistant. Technical support services are integrated into OS and receives Android updates from Google.

Pixel XL is an Android smartphone designed and marketed by Google. Pixel serve as Google's flag devices. Resistance is futile. 

Google Pixel Phone

The two Pixel models are differentiated by screen and battery size; the standard Pixel's display measures 5 in 1080p AMOLED with a 2770 mAh battery while the Pixel XL's display measures 5.5 in 1440p AMOLED with a 3450 mAh battery. 

Google Pixel smartphone has a highly rated smartphone camera and a battery that lasts all day. It’s the first phone with the Google Assistant built in, and it provides live technical support services integrated into the OS. 

According to the official Google Pixel page, both the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones use an aluminum chassis, with a glass panel on the portion of the 12.3-megapixel rear housing the camera. Both phones use an imprint fingerprint sensor. 

The Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones ship with Android 7.1 "Nougat", an update to 7.0 that was initially exclusive to the Pixel. Google released the OS for existing Nexus phones in December 2016, but certain features remain exclusive to Pixel.device.

We hand evaluate devices sent to us. If we disagree with the condition of the iPhone 4 you want to sell online, the offer may decrease or increase accordingly. In this case we send you an adjustment email with the new value of your iPhone 4. We will explain the reasons of any changes. Photo by Elena.

Paradigms of Interdependence

Paradigms of Interdependence

I once had a friend who was dean of a very prestigious school. He planned and saved for years to provide his son the opportunity to attend that institution, but when the time came, the boy refused to go.

This deeply concerned his father. Graduating from that particular school would have been a great asset to the boy. Besides, it was a family tradition. Three generations of attendance preceded the boy. The father pleaded and urged and talked. He also tried to listen to the boy to understand him, all the while hoping that the son would change his mind.

The subtle message being communicated was one of conditional love. The son felt that in a sense the father's desire for him to attend the school outweighed the value he placed on him as a person and, which was terribly threatening. Consequently, he fought for and with his own identity and integrity, and he increased in his resolve and his efforts to rationalize his decision not to go.

After some intense souls-searching, the father decided to make a sacrifice – to renounce conditional love. He knew that his son might choose differently than he had wished; nevertheless, he and his wife resolved to love their son unconditionally, regardless of his choice. It was an extremely difficult thing to do because the value of his educational experience was so close to their hearts and because it was something they had planned and worked for since his birth.

It would take more nobility of character - more humility, courage and strength - to rebuild one relationship than it would to continue putting in all those hours for all those people and causes. Photo by Elena.

The father and mother went through a very difficult rescripting process, struggling to really understand the nature of unconditional love. They communicated to the boy what they were doing and why, and told him that they had come to the point at which they could say in all honesty that his decision would not affect their complete feeling of unconditional love toward him. They didn't do this to manipulate him, to try to get him to “shape up”. They did it as the logical extension of their growth and character.

The boy didn't give much of a response at the time, but his parents had such a paradigm of unconditional love at that point that it would have made no difference in their feeling for him. About a week later, he told his parents that he had decided not to go. They were perfectly prepared for this response and continued to show unconditional love for him. Everything was settled and life wen along normally.

A short time later, an interesting thing happened. Now that the boy no longer felt he had to defend his position, he searched within himself more deeply and found that he really did want to have this educational experience. He applied for admission, and then he told his father, who again showed unconditional love by fully accepting his son's decision. My friend was happy, but not excessively so, because he had truly learned to love without condition.

(Some of the details of this story have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved).

(The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Paradigms of Interdependence. By Stephen R. Covey).

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses (Dag Hammarskjold). Photograph by Elena.

Understanding the Individual

Understanding the Individual

Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. You simply don't know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual. What might be a deposit for you – going for a walk to talk things over, going out for ice cream together, working on a common project, might not be perceived by someone else as a deposit at all. It might even be perceived as a withdrawal, if it doesn't touch the person's deep interests or needs. One person:s mission is another person's minutiae. To make a deposit, what is important to another person must be as important to you as the other person is to you. You may be working on a high priority project when your six-year-old child interrupts with something that seems trivial to you, but it may be very important from his point of view. It takes Habit 2 to subordinate your schedule to that human priority. By accepting the value he places on what he has to say, you show an understanding of him that makes a great deposit.

I have a friend whose son developed an avid interest in baseball. My friend wasn't interested in baseball at all. But one summer, he took his son to see every major league team play one game. The trip took over six weeks and cost a great deal of money, but ti became a powerful bonding experience in their relationship.

My friend was asked on his return, “Do you like baseball that much?” - “No”, he replied, “but I like my son that much.”

The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Illustration by Elena.

I have another friend, a college professor, who had a terrible relationship with his teenage son. This man's entire life was essentially academic, and he felt his son was totally wasting his life by working with his hands instead of working to develop his mind. As a result, he was almost constantly on the boy's back, and, in moments of regret, he would  try to make deposits that just didn't work. They boy perceived the gestures as new forms of rejection, comparison, and judgment, and they precipitated huge withdrawals. The relationship was turning sour, and it was breaking the father's heart.

One day I shared with him this principle of making what is important to the other persons as important to you as the other person is to you. He took it deeply to heart. He engaged his son in a project to build a miniature Wall of China around their home. It was a consuming project, and they worked side by side on it for over a year and a half.

Through that bonding experience, the son moved through that phase in his life and into an increased desire to develop his mind. But the real benefit was what happened to the relationship. Instead of a sore spot, it became a source of joy and strength to both father and son.

Our tendency is to project out of our own autobiographies what we think other people want or need. We project our intentions on the behavior of others. We interpret what constitutes a deposit based on our own needs and desires, either now or when we were at a similar age or stage in life. If they don't interpret our effort as a deposit, our tendency is to take it as a rejection of our well intentioned effort and to give up.

The Golden Rule says to “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you>. While on the surface that could mean to do for them what you would like to have done for you, I think the more essential meaning is to understand them deeply as individuals, the way you would want to be understood, and then to treat them in terms of that understanding. As one successful parent said about raising children, “Treat them all the same by treating them differently.”

Small discourtesies, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things. Illustration by Elena.

Classical Behaviorism and Little Albert

Classical Behaviorism and Little Albert

By the beginning of the XXth century many psychologists had concluded that the human mind could not be adequately studied through introspective methods, and were advocating a switch to the study of the mind through the evidence of behavior in controlled laboratory experiments.

John Watson was not the first advocate of this throughgoing behaviorist approach, but he was certainly the most conspicuous. In a career cut short by his marital infidelity, he became one of the most influential and controversial psychologists of the XXth century. Through his work on the stimulus-response learning theory that had been pioneered by Thorndike, he became regarded as the founding father of behaviorism, and he did much to popularize the use of the term. His 1913 lecture, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, put forward the revolutionary idea that “a truly scientific psychology would abandon talk of mental states... and instead focus on prediction and control of behavior.” This lecture became known to later psychologists as the “behaviorist manifesto.”

Before Watson's research at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, the majority of experiments on behavior, with the results extrapolated to human behavior. Watson himself studied rats and monkeys for his doctorate but (perhaps influenced by his experience working with the military during World War I) was keen to conduct experiments using human subjects. He wanted to study the stimulus-response model of classical conditioning and how it applied to the prediction and control of human behavior. He believed that people have three fundamental emotions – fear, rage and love – and he wanted to find out whether a person could be conditioned into feeling these in response to a stimulus.

Anyone, regardless of their nature, can be trained to be anything. Photo by Elena.

Little Albert

With his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner, Watson began a series of experiments involving  “Albert B.”, a nine-month-old baby chosen from a local children's hospital. The tests were designed to see whether it is possible to teach an infant to fear an animal by repeatedly presenting it at the same time as a loud, frightening noise. Watson also wanted to find out, whether such a fear would transfer to other animals or objects; and how long this fear would persist. Today, his methods would be considered unethical and even cruel, but at the time they were seen as a logical and natural progression from previous animal studies.

In the now famous “Little Albert experiment,” Watson placed the healthy but “on the whole stolid and unemotional” baby Albert on a mattress and then observed his reactions when introduced to a dog, a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, and some inanimate objects, including human masks and burning paper. Albert showed no fear of any of these animals or objects and even reached out to touch them. In this way, Watson established a baseline from which he could measure any change in the child's behavior toward the objects.

On a separate occasion, while Albert was sitting o the mattress, Watso struck a metal bar with a hammer to make a sudden loud noise; unsurprisingly, Albert became frightened ad distressed, bursting into tears. Watson now had an unconditioned stimulus (the loud noise) that he knew elicited a response of fear in the child. By parting this with the sight of the rat, he hypothesized that he would be able to condition little Albert to become afraid of the animal.

When Albert was just over 11 months old, Watson carried out the experiment. The white rat was placed on the mattress with Albert, then Watson hit the hammer on the steel bar when the child touched the rat. The child burst into tears. This procedure was repeated seven times over two sessions, one week apart, after which Albert became distressed as soon as the rat was brought into the room, even when it was not accompanied by the noise.

By repeatedly pairing the rat with the loud noise, Watson was applying the same kind of classical conditioning as Pavlov had in his experiments with dogs. The child's natural response to the noise – fear and distress – had now become associated with the rat. The child had become conditioned to respond to the rat with fear. In terms of classical conditioning, the rat was initially a neutral stimulus eliciting no particular response; the loud noise was an “unconditioned stimulus” (US) that elicited an “unconditioned response” (UR) of fear. After conditioning, the rat had become a “conditioned stimulus” (CS), eliciting the “conditioned response” (CR) of fear.

However, this conditioning seemed to go deeper than simply a fear of the white rat, and appeared to be far from temporary. In order to test whether Albert's fear had “generalized,” or spread to other, similar objects, he was reintroduced to white furry things – including a rabbit, a dog, and a sheepskin coat – five days after the conditioning. Albert showed the same distressed and fearful response to these as to the rat.

In these experiments, Watson demonstrated that human emotions are susceptible to classical conditioning. This was a new finding, because previous stimulus-response experiments had focused on testing the learning of physical behaviors. Watson had discovered that not only can human behavior be predicted, - given certain stimuli and conditions – it can also be controlled and modified. A further check of Albert's reactions to the rat, rabbit, and dog one month later suggested that the effects of this conditioning were long-lasting, but this could not be proven as Albert was soon after removed from the hospital by his mother. It has been suggested that this was a sign of the mother's distress, but according to Watson and Rayner's own account, it occurred on a prearranged date.

(Excerpt The Little Book of Psychology).

Grown-up Little Albert. Illustration by Elena.