Content Optimization Insights from Harvard Business Review

Great article from Harvard Business Review on the “Traffic Light Rule”. Is this the same for optimizing content? What rule would you apply?

First 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you, as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and hopefully in service of the other person.

Second 20 seconds of talking, the light turns yellow for the next 20 seconds— now the risk is increasing that the other person is beginning to lose interest or think you’re long-winded.

At the 40-second mark, your light is red. Yes, there’s an occasional time you want to run that red light and keep talking, but the vast majority of the time, you’d better stop or you’re in danger.

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Emoticons SEO

I’ve read various articles about Google rolling out and rolling back emoticons in search results pages. I just typed in “hotels sacramento” into Google and can see the hotel icon appearing to the LHS of the Title Tag (first blue line of resutls) for Expedia and Orbitz. You can see in the HTML of the page the icon sitting inside the Title Tag. Simple enough. The better piece of the equation is to consider how icons/ emoticons make users feel as much as it helps the listing stand out against competitors.

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So as I often do, I asked my daughter why emoticons are so important and she sent me this picture. In a world where search is all about keywords, sometimes an image speaks what words cannot.

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