Local SEO, Content Writers, Traditional SEO, Social and Email
SEO-Focused Web Content Writers
Girls Needed. An issue of gender and tech jobs
3 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
I hope this holiday season has brought you much joy and success. Today, I’m asking you to finish 2013 with an impact on the future of girls in America and the technology industry that increasingly powers more of our lives.
You hear all over the place that the U.S. economy isn’t where it should be, and there aren’t enough jobs to go around. However, that is only partially true.
The Deptartment of Labor and Industry predicts 1.5 million technology jobs will be added to the U.S. market over the next five year period. That’s certainly not surprising, considering that technology keeps us safe, healthy, productive and entertained.
But it is also predicted that less than half of those jobs can be filled by qualified candidates here at home. Talk with any tech company and they will say they’re already starting to feel the pinch of limited - and qualified - resources to do the work at hand. When this happens you see increased offshoring of jobs, low prioritization of consumer needs, and continued quick and chaotic deployments like the famous Affordable Care Act site launch.
What is causing this lack of talent? One great place to start is with women. They comprise 61% of college graduates but only 25% of them have a job related to technology. These jobs also tend to be high paying, with great career advancement potential, and with the flexible work-life conditions that especially cater to women with children, and families in general. So why are they opting out of tech type jobs? The research shows that career path preference is often chosen way back in middle school, and girls are increasingly choosing to opt out of this perceived “men’s work”.
There are organizations that are trying to address this challenge. One great group is TechGirlz, who’s’ mission is supported by industry, research, White House, parents and educators all across the country. If you’d like to learn more about them and supporting the growth of America’s economy by inspiring girls into technology, visit their website. This problem won’t go away on its own, so it is incumbent on everyone to make sure women, and younger girls, know that the tech field can hold great promise for them if they give it a try.
Web Content and Other Online Marketing Needs Mobile, Too
3 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
The chart shows the percent of media consumption time that Americans have spent on each medium in the past five years.
The message is clear:
Mobile digital media are growing, everything else is shrinking.
Should You Optimize Content for Google’s In-Depth Article Results?
3 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Content Marketing Trends - Google’s New In-Depth Article Results
Last year Google texted 150 randomly as part of an experiment, asking them “What did you want to know recently?” This was designed to uncover what thinks people needed to know but didn’t consider using Google to find. And the research was almost surely a driver in Google’s newest algorithm change, called Hummingbird.
Both the in-depth article results and Hummingbird seem to follow a similar pattern: Google doesn’t just want to provide you with what you’re looking for, but also results that address WHY you’re looking for it. In other words, Google doesn’t want to just provide search results, they want to provide answers.
Google’s research has found that up to 10% of their users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic, and this has led them to provide new search results that help users find in-depth articles.
What does this mean for content marketers?
If you want to create a content plan for appearing in in-depth article results, you could consider taking Google up on a few of its suggestions, like:
Use schema article markup
Use Google Authorship markup
Use proper coding for paginated articles
Use schemas to highlight your organization’s logo
Create compelling in-depth content
This makes it sound like content marketers have an opportunity to follow these guidelines and get their content to appear in the in-depth search results. But it may not be as easy as it sounds.
Research on the above factors and how they actually impact the results has recently been done, to determine if content marketers can or should try to optimize their content plan in order to appear as in-depth articles.
On The Official Google Search blog, Pandu Nayak mentions how publisher status factors into the in-depth search results: “In addition to well-known publishers, you’ll also find some great articles from lesser-known publications and blogs.”
But recent research done by the Content Marketing Institute showed that although publisher status and page rank were extremely critical for in-depth article rankings. In fact, in all of the test searches done by the institute, having a page rank of 7 or higher was essentially mandatory (only one search result had a lower ranking, a 6).
Their findings on each of the other criteria as they related to the search results they found were also contradictory to their previous stated list.
Google suggested that publishers “provide Authorship markup” in order to increase the odds of appearing in in-depth search results, however not one of the results found had the proper authorship citations.
Google also has said they are happy to see people continue to invest in thoughtful in-depth content that remains relevant for months or ever years after publication. This would seem to indicate that the in-depth article results may include articles with older post dates. However, once again the search results tell a different story. The CMI research showed that articles from 2012 made their in-depth list 6 out of 18 times, while only two articles were 2008 or earlier (the earliest was from 2003).
The research also showed that the number of social shares at this time seems to have little impact, with the number of Google+’s seems to have an even smaller impact.
Google’s webmaster tools help page states, “For this feature, it’s particularly helpful if you can implement certain aspects of the Schema.org article markup.” It goes on to list the most important schema markup (aka HTML tag) attributes of content:
headline
alternativeHeadline (a secondary headline, or subheading)
image (i.e., the URL of the image, as it must be crawlable and indexable)
description (a short description of the content)
datePublished
articleBody
Out of random searches that produced in-depth article results, 22 of the 59 articles included no schema markup, and another 22 out of 59 had “some” schema markup.
Google’s in-depth article search results have only been around for two months. Currently, it doesn’t seem that Google’s initial guidelines have much impact on what actually shows in search results, but this could change at any time of course.
For content marketers, it probably isn’t wise to put much effort into trying to appear in in-depth article search at the moment. Rather, it seems we should just continue doing what Google and readers want us to do most, which is to provide answers and solutions through quality content.