How to Plan an Effective Virtual Town Hall

Daniel J. Cohen April 1, 2020

How to Plan an Effective Virtual Town Hall

While the town hall is a classic way for people to get together to discuss ideas and trade stories, social distancing thanks to the Coronavirus has essentially sidelined the traditional town hall for an indefinite period. Fortunately, technology gives us an alternative: the virtual town hall!

Any business owner, advocate, professional, executive, artist, or really anyone else, can effectively congregate with other people to share ideas, exchange information, and discuss important matters in spite of our distance, as long as they follow the guidelines of putting on an effective town hall.

Here’s how.

Let's Talk Tech

**Free or Cheapest Version*
NOTE: Companies may provide some custom-designed features, but these packages reflect the current standard offering.

Before we get into the town hall itself, and what you should do or shouldn’t do to plan it, let’s talk a little about the technology people are using to hold them. A lot of people are going with Zoom right now because it is intuitive, allows for screen sharing, has strict mute/display settings controlled by the administrator, and a fairly robust free package that hosts up to 100 people. 100 people is plenty for many small groups, departments, businesses, and organizations. Even if you need more capacity, Zoom is still an affordable option with a chat function and polling and Q&A options. They even have a nifty tutorial section for new users picking up Zoom because of COVID-19.

Functionally, the downside of Zoom is that it does not have some of the more advanced polling, breakout, and side room features of some tools such as Igloo, Zoho Connect, or Public Input. If you are looking for a long-term solution and cannot afford to “fail forward” by experimenting, one of these other tools may be better for you. Zoom is also ripe for something called “Zoom Bombing”, which allows trolls to infiltrate your discussion. You can avoid Zoom Bombing by adjusting feature settings prior to your call.

Structurally, Zoom also has some privacy-based security concerns that you need to know about if you are dealing with more sensitive, in-house company issues at your town hall. (To learn more about its gaps and whether or not they affect your goals, check out this piece from The Verge).

For small meetings, Zoom, Skype, and Google Hangouts all have the functionality you need. If you’re just lonely and need to talk, you can always pick up the phone. (Also, if you’re lonely, RedShift Writers sends virtual hugs).

Whatever town hall software you run with, make sure you have a good handle on it before holding your actual town hall. You should always test equipment before using it, no matter what it is.

Figure Out Which Features to Use

You’re holding a town hall to accomplish something. Remember to stay true to that goal. Write down your goal and the details of the meeting just as you would before a live, in-person town hall. Figure out what would appeal to people in the room.

Set group roles before the meeting to determine:

Who is facilitating or hosting;
Who is presenting and in what order;
The tik-tok (a schedule outlining the order of events for your meeting, when each section; should start and how long each section should take);
Who is addressing questions in the chat log;
How to handle disruptive guests if you have them; and
Anything else that comes to mind.

Before the meeting, make sure everyone signs in. Google Forms are very useful for capturing information; Zapier has an excellent guide on using Google Forms.

Keep your meeting on schedule as you would any other meeting. Remember to give people a chance to ask questions as needed. The cool thing about most conference tools is that they allow for a chat log so you can tackle questions one at a time in a manageable way.

End with Something Fun

I’ve been on some massive conference calls and teleconferences. One way to make everyone feel connected together is to take everyone off mute and say bye all at once and wave if you have video capabilities turned on. It’s really fun, and leaves people with a good, connected feeling, no matter how many miles apart they live.

You may also want to show everyone something fun in your screenshare, or challenge people to drop funny memes and videos in the chat box as a way to connect and catch up. Try to close out with something that really brings everyone together and strengthens the bond of the group.

While technology may not be able to accomplish everything, it has closed the gap for many of our communities and made the challenges of our world logistically easier to solve by giving us an interface by which anyone with a computer can see other people.

Set up a virtual town hall to bring people who are socially distant a little closer together.

Want to plan your town hall? Contact RedShift Writers about programming a town hall that accomplishes your company goals.

Blog

What Makes a Great Memoir?

Willow Curry March 27, 2020

What Makes a Great Memoir?

Hint: you don’t have to travel the world or experience spiritual/romantic/culinary awakenings; you certainly don’t have to be famous.

On any given Sunday, depending on your feelings about gambling on the Lord’s day, you can place fairly certain bets on a few things: fanciful hats will be in abundance after morning church service, students will be hurrying to finish homework that they should have started Friday, and at least one memoir will be on the New York Times’ Best Seller list. Memoirs of all kinds and qualities saturate the shelves of bookstores and stockrooms of online retailers, to the point that even the most voracious reader might feel overwhelmed or simply over the genre.

You, the aspiring memoirist, might feel something more akin to desperation. You have an idea and want to put pen to paper, but what would make people want to read your story out of all the others—especially when, unlike fiction, it’s not just your story, but your life? In our view, the question isn’t ‘What makes your story worth reading?’, it’s ‘What makes any memoir great?’

A Great Memoir Fosters Empathy and Recognition

When Jeannette Walls’ indelible memoir The Glass Castle opens, we’re there with her as she looks out of a taxi window and catches a glimpse of her unwashed and disheveled mother dumpster diving. What follows is the story of how her family has come to this point; how Jeannette and her siblings survived and escaped poverty and abuse, and why their parents chose to remain.

Published in 2005, the book had such an effect that it remained on the New York Times nonfiction paperback Best Seller list until October 2018, having remained there for 440 consecutive weeks. It will likely never go out of print. Why? It makes readers who are unfamiliar with poverty and dysfunction empathize with people and situations they might usually judge or pity or ignore, opening up their world; readers who are familiar with some or most of the circumstances recognize parts of themselves or the people in their lives, and feel less alone with that recognition. In either position, the reader comes to identify with the author’s story.

A Great Memoir Highlights The Humor In Everyday Life

With no prior knowledge about David Sedaris, if one were to visit the Wikipedia page for his autobiographical essay collection Me Talk Pretty One Day and read the single-line synopses of each essay, a person might question why this guy thought that any of these experiences were book-worthy. “Today’s Special” is commentary on the descriptions of food on the menus of upscale restaurants. “The Learning Curve” chronicles his experiences as a writing teacher. “21 Down” is about his love for crossword puzzles. It’s life as we generally know it best—fairly average. Upon opening the first page, however, the unfamiliar reader quickly learns that everyday life, in Sedaris’s telling, is filled with the absurd, the nonsensical, the unfair, and the plain terrible—and all of that is able to be playfully or mercilessly roasted.

Me Talk Pretty One Day is not Sedaris’s first or last foray into memoir. His essay collections Naked, Holidays on Ice, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames round out the set thus far, and all have gone on to become New York Times Best Sellers. They’ve also cemented his legacy as one of the finest humorists in American literature. His success both in writing and speaking about his life experiences upends the commonly-held view that one has to have extraordinary life experiences in order to write a memoir. Like a friend who is able to spin uproarious tales about life events, Sedaris’s chronicles are compelling because they reveal the absurdity in what’s perceived as normal, and use humor to make those absurdities evident. And like that friend, having a David Sedaris book around is absolutely essential for an enjoyable time.

A Great Memoir Grants Us Access to Lives and Experiences We Wouldn’t Otherwise Know About

“I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.”

So begins the second chapter of Margo Jefferson’s memoir Negroland, an account of elite Black society from her perspective of having grown up within it, in mid-20th century Chicago. From the get-go, Jefferson gives the reader a view not only of her own life, but also the history of her world. On one page we get a scene of five-year-old Margo dancing at a recital full of “excited Jack and Jillers,” members of the prestigious Black social and cultural club Jack and Jill of America. On another, we learn of Anthony and Mary Johnson, African indentured servants brought to the American colonies in the 1620s who, after buying their own freedom, accumulated 550 acres of land, numerous indentured servants, and became some of the first legal slaveholders.

Negroland won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in addition to being a New York Times Best Seller. The book’s critical and popular appeal is clear. The lives of upper-class Americans have always been obscure, locked behind well-controlled gates, and thus have remained tantalizing to the rest of us. The Black bourgeoisie is even more obscure, and because of structural racism, its existence is all the more fascinating. Through her deft mixture of remembering and reporting, Jefferson grants access to a slice of American society many don’t know about and most will never be a part of. Memoirs like these will forever remain historically and culturally relevant. Research and interviews can only capture so much—nothing compares to a sharply observed first person perspective.

A Great Memoir Gives A Personal Account of Events that Shaped History

Memoirs are, at their core, written portraits of the human condition, and as such, many deal with personal trauma that impacts an individual’s life trajectory. Night, a memoir by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel documenting his experience as a captive in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is one of a very few memoirs that captures the trauma of an entire people, and gives insight into events that forever altered not only those people, but also the entire world. Along the way, Wiesel challenges the meaning of meaning, showing how many of the things that we hold onto—religious faith, communal solidarity, personal moral codes, basic empathy—are shattered when conditions are desperate enough. The only salvation is for the atrocity to end.

Night, an essential book in the canon of Holocaust literature, has sold over ten million copies since its publication in 1960. It’s been translated into 30 different languages, and it spent 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her Book Club in 2006. It was taken off by the paper’s news survey department—they’d decided it was no longer a new bestseller, but a classic. Night is notable for many, many reasons, but for our purposes, it’s an archetypal example of a firsthand account of events that shaped an era. It’s timeless for being wholly a product of its time. With books like these, anyone, from historians to everyday readers, can get a sense of what it was like to live through cultural touchstone events, and that’s something we will always return to.

A Great Memoir Is Innovative

In any genre of literature, as in society at large, classics are made when creators dare to push the envelope and move beyond the forms of their predecessors. Memoir is no exception. Some of the greatest autobiographical works, both historical and contemporary, are those that have chosen to do things differently. Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, published in 1987 and now a classic of feminist literature, weaves together prose memories with analytical political commentary and lyrical poetry. Anzaldúa also liberally mixes Spanish in with the English text, refusing to prioritize a monolingual, Anglophone audience.

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, experiments with language even further—it’s a graphic novel (well, graphic memoir, to be precise) that tells the story of Satrapi’s coming-of-age in Iran in the midst and aftermath of the Iranian Revolution primarily through illustration, with accompanying text. As of 2018, since its publication in 2000, it’s sold more than two million copies worldwide.

Memoirs like Borderlands/La Frontera and Persepolis have made an impact because they’ve combined great storytelling with approaches that push the genre forward, opening up the possibilities for future memoirists (and writers in other genres). They also reflect the authors’ individual experiences and ways of seeing the world. Anzaldúa’s mixing of untranslated Spanish with English reflects how she speaks and thinks in real life at her most comfortable, and Satrapi’s use of the graphic novel form allows her to combine her talent in both visual art and written storytelling. In thinking beyond literary conventions, these authors have given future writers more ways to tell their stories.

And ultimately, that’s what makes a great memoir—when a writer embraces their unique perspective. Readers may open the pages to identify or to learn, and may come away laughing, crying, amazed, or a mixture of all three, but the memoir and the author remain in their hearts and minds. No matter the nature of our life story, we all have that unique perspective and mode of expression. What matters is finding yours.

See you on Sunday’s Best Seller list,

The team at RedShift Writers

Want to tell your story? Contact us to connect and capture your story for generations to come.

Blog, Writing Tips

Google Ngram & Google Trends: Two Google Tools No One Ever Talks About

Daniel J. Cohen February 18, 2019

As evidenced by the obsolescence of phone books and Encyclopedia World Books, it’s no secret that the Internet and the rise of search engines have revolutionized the way people find information over the last several decades. In particular, Google has powered much of the online revolution thanks to its intense interest in how we search, take in information, and what we do with the results of our online queries. As a result, Google is now the world’s most popular search engine and leader in the field of search algorithms and search information. When Google updates its algorithm, the world takes notice and starts its own discussions about the implications the algorithm changes have on public information.

Yet even today, some Google tools still go overlooked by the general public. While Google search, Gmail, and Google Chrome are popular with a wide variety of computer users, two of the most impressive Google tools are rarely mentioned: Ngram Viewer and Trends.

With a better understanding of these tools, writers, researchers, and people who are simply fascinated in how the world thinks can gain insights never before possible.

Here’s how they work.

Ngram Viewer
Google Ngram Viewer allows you to look up the frequency of “grams” in every book in the Google Books database. “Grams” are keywords and phrases that appear in books and other writings over time. A “bigram” is two words, such as “pen cap” or “baseball cap”, while a unigram is a single word such as “pen” or “pencap”.

The Google Books database comprises books dating back to 1800 and runs up to the year 2000. You can see the frequency of a given phrase in the entire body of books they have available, giving you an idea of how popular a term may have been over time. Essentially, Ngram Viewer gives us the opportunity to look at the quantity of word and phrase usage within a cross-section of books.

Why Ngram Matters
Books and pamphlets were the central mass media for transporting in-depth ideas during much of that time period. Radio and television did not even begin to make their mark until the 1920s (and for television, it was truly much later than that). Movies with sound were not released until the late 1920s as well. The Internet was only widespread in the last few years of that time period, and early search history was not as well documented (a point we’ll discuss more in a moment). Books were simply the best tool available for unpacking big ideas before the year 2000.

Why is that meaningful? Well, since books were the broadest method of transporting complex ideas, and individual words and phrases in conjunction made up the ideas in books, Ngram Viewer becomes a way of assessing microtrends in broadly shared ideas over those 200 years. With each chart we create in Ngram, we get a different perspective on how people thought, spoke, and spread ideas, improving our theories on collective information and psychology.

Did I mention this tool is free?

Ngram in Action
Let’s assess some generalized fields in Ngram to see it in action. Here is an Ngram search result for “business”, “politics”, and “arts” between the years 1800 and 2000.

You’ll notice that the reference to “business” is far more popular than the other two, which may speak to the field being a bit more common in English practice, or may speak to the versatile nature of the word “business”. In other words, many uses of the unigram may be about “business” as a field of study or practice, but others may be more along the lines of its use as part of the phrase “business as usual”. We have no way of knowing without looking up every cliche involving the word “business” in the Ngram database.

However, it does appear that the concept of business as a whole is far more mentioned and far more popular than those of “art” or “politics”. Furthermore, the relationship between those two latter terms is fascinating, as “politics” surpassed “arts” in usage in 1884.

Then again, the term “arts” is a variation of “art”, which is much more common in usage as a whole.

“Art” shoots over “politics” by quite a bit. Not too surprising given the possibilities for the gram “art” (including its use in the phrase “the art of politics”).

Let’s look at the chart with one more variation, swapping “politics” with “political”:

The “political” nature of things seems to have taken off starting mid-twentieth century. Given that “political” is a term that can be used in a way that is not necessarily about “politics” (as in “The corporate world is extremely political”), it may be the case that the term simply increased in general use. However, this uptick is suspiciously steep, so steep that it seems more likely to have come from an increase in interest and discussion of “political” matters in the literary world. For example, the phrase “The personal is political” AKA “The private is political”, a slogan popularized during Second Wave Feminism, both may account for some of the uptick in the use of the term “political” by authors.

Google Trends
Whereas Ngram Viewer assesses words and phrases used in books, Google Trends assesses words and phrases used as Google search terms. Trends demonstrates frequency of a given search for specific words as weighted against total Google searches. In other words, Trends not only shows you comparative frequency of searches between various words or phrases, but also shows you roughly how popular those words or phrases are in context of total Google searches. While Trends doesn’t show exact number of searches per term, it does assign a weighted number that compares each specific search to the average of other search terms.

Whereas Ngram Viewer covers the years 1800-2000— a period when, as we mentioned, books were used as the main method by which in-depth ideas were spread— Trends covers the years from 2004 to the present. During years covered by the Google Trends database, the Internet has provided an immediate platform for sharing and researching ideas.

Interestingly, Google Trends also gives users the option to measure words as a “topic” rather than just search terms. Whether this means Google is measuring the word as an idea based on all of the terms related to the “topic” or if “topic” is just a synonym for “search term” is unclear.

Google Trends lets you select the terms you want to search, the time range you want to search, categories of online topics, and types of searches within Google (news searches vs. general searches vs. YouTube vs. Image vs. Shopping queries).

Trends in Action
Let’s start by looking at a single phrase assessment on Google Trends so we can see some immediate utility. Here is the search volume trend over time for “frisbee”.

Frisbee is a more popular search during summer months. Not particularly surprising, right? What may be surprising, however, is that the term “frisbee” is actually decreasing in share of overall searches! This is an interesting contrast to the claim of some people that ultimate frisbee is gaining in popularity.

However, the decline of “frisbee” as a search term does not necessarily mean that people are less interested in frisbees than they once were. Early Google searches were often keyword based. Later searches have been more semantic, phrased closer to the way people speak thanks to advancements like voice-to-text and improved geo-search capabilities. Whereas an early Google Search user may have simply typed the word “frisbee”, a modern Google user might use voice-to-text to search the phrase “buy frisbee online” or “ultimate frisbee game in Houston”.

Let’s look at “Skiing” as a subject:

As we might expect, Skiing is more popular as a search term in the winter months. It also has decreased as an overall part of the search environment over time.

Now for a less “seasonal” trend: Tarot. It has felt lately like more people are interested in Tarot, but something like that could also be a function of living in a city, being in my thirties, knowing Bohemian people, etc.

Let’s see if search interest in Tarot aligns with my experience.

Well, I’ll be dipped! Tarot searches are pretty much at an all-time high. May not be a bad time to get into the Tarot card business.

Trends for Business Owners
To see how Trends can help you if you’re a business owner, let’s look at something comparative and practical. RedShift Writers is a content writing firm, so the service we sell might be described as “Copywriting” or as “Content Marketing”. Either term alludes to elements of what we do, so when we are faced with the option of using one or the other, we have to decide which will be more effective.

It has felt over the life of our company (starting in December of 2012) that “copywriting” has become a term of the past, and that “content marketing” and other terms have become more popular. Trends can tell us whether or not my instinct on this is correct.

As it turns out, “Copywriting” is actually still the more popular term. In spite of the fact that it has been trending down while content marketing is trending up, “Copywriting” still enjoys nearly three times the searches.

Something interesting happens when we add the search term “Blogging” to the mix:

As we can see, “blogging” was a scorching hot topic on the Internet in January of 2008. Like, as hot as they come. It was a topic the whole world suddenly wanted to know about.

The popularity of “blogging” as a term correlates to some macroeconomic trends in ways that may lead to interesting potential theories. The bottom of the stock market decline during The Great Recession was March of 2008, marking a time when people were desperately looking for an advantage in the market, or new revenue streams, both of which might come about from blogging, if a person put their mind to it. Today, the term has leveled out to around the same search volume as “Copywriting”.

Fun with Trends
Trends may also be useful if we want to explore the peak of memes. Remember when everyone was making Harlem Shake videos?

If you don’t, here’s the Wiki. Go get a feel for what it is and come back. If you remember it, keep reading.

Trends can tell us the exact month the Harlem Shake peaked, and how the fad flamed out.

We’ll view one more example: seasonal search. For this query, we turn to the “NFL” as a search topic. After all, we’re from Texas. Football is pretty popular here.

Here’s the long-term search trend for “NFL”.

Two trends stand out. First, search volume is growing over time. Second, the search interest in NFL topics usually peaks in January, likely because of the Super Bowl. However, in 2007, 2012, 2013, and 2018 the Super Bowl was not the period when search interest was highest. Theorizing why that was in the case during those four years with any real insight would likely take a person who is a bigger football fan than I am, but it stood out.

Google’s Lost Years: 2000-2004
Since Ngram covers through the end of the year 2000 and Trends begins at the start of 2004, the forward-facing Google dataset is missing four years of data. Trends from this period— celebrities, products, memes, recreation, movies, etc.— are not available to us for in-depth analysis, so we’re missing the high-water mark for post-Y2K analysis: The Strokes, Outkast, and That Seventies Show, among other things.

What Trends Interest You?
What can Ngrams and Trends teach us? They are mostly good for exploring interesting trends. It is limited, though, because correlation of word usage or search term frequency does not necessarily translate to causation.

We’ll continue to investigate these tools and other tools along the way and share more on what we learn and observe. Our hope is that these insights will continue, over time, to yield something useful to everyone in the RedShift Writers community.

Got an interesting idea for Trends, Ngram, other Google tools, or something else altogether? Reach out and let us know at contact@redshiftwriters.com.

RedShift Writers: Stories change history.

Blog, Marketing, SEO, Writing Tips business, Marketing, SEO, Small Business

Red Light, Green Light, SEO: Yoast Plugin for WordPress Explained

Cecile Baltazar February 15, 2019

What all is involved in boosting your website’s ranking on Google? For businesses that haven’t dealt with search engine optimization (SEO) before, the term alone can be intimidating. Afterall, SEO sounds very technical. Plus, you’ve probably heard how expensive paid advertising can get with a non-organic SEO plan. But with a good writer and good tools in place, it doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. SEO tools, like the Yoast plugin for WordPress, simplifies all the technicalities of creating organic SEO content. But how does it work?

How Does the Yoast Plugin for WordPress Help with SEO?

Once you’re ready to enter your blog into WordPress, go to the ‘Add New Post’ tab found on the left side of the page. Enter the title in the title field. Copy and paste your content into the main window. This will activate the alerts in the Yoast plugin. Scroll to the bottom of your blog in WordPress and you’ll see the Yoast SEO window.

There are two main categories—Readability Analysis and Focus Keyphrase—which should be marked with a red, orange, or green light. Let these lights serve as your guide to optimizing the content on your blog. Your goal is to get a green light for each of these categories. A red light means that section needs a lot of work. An orange light means there are a few adjustments that need to be made.

Under these categories are subcategories also marked by a red, orange, or green light. These subcategories don’t necessarily have to all be green in order for you to score a green light in the two main categories. This means you have some wiggle room to write naturally and less like a robot.

The wonderful thing about Yoast is that it makes the rules of SEO pretty easy for writers to understand. Although the rules are pretty straightforward, there’s also the subjective part of content writing that Yoast doesn’t account for. It won’t tell you how to write a more effective title or meta description. It won’t tell you how to persuade the searcher to click through to your website. And it won’t tell you that you need a stronger intro paragraph to keep your audience interested. That’s where having a professional writer helps. But to get you started, let’s take a look at the SEO components Yoast does cover.

What SEO Components Does Yoast Watch For?

Readability Analysis

Sentence Length

If you tend to be wordy, Yoast will challenge you to write more concise sentences. It will alert you with an orange or red light if you have too many long sentences. Why? Studies show that readers tend to stop reading if there are too many long sentences, especially earlier in the copy. Shorter sentences help get your message across to a wider audience. Remember, not everyone who reads your blog is an avid reader.

Rule of thumb: Keep majority of your sentences under 20 words. But it’s okay to mix things up a bit and have a few longer sentences here and there.

Passive Voice

If you’re not a grammar buff, the concept of active vs. passive voice can be a hard one to grasp. But a good writer should be able to ensure that your blog contains mostly an active voice. This is important not only for SEO purposes but also to make your point crystal clear.

Example:

Active Voice: The man played a beautiful song.

Passive Voice: A beautiful song was played by the man.

The example above shows how using an active versus passive voice comes across more concise and natural. Notice how the subject of the sentence (the man) is clearly performing the action. When you change it to a passive voice, the man is no longer the focus of the sentence and the sentence becomes awkward and wordy. Yoast will alert you with an orange or red light if you have too many passive sentences.

Rule of thumb: Keep your passive voice to under 25% of your sentences.

Focus Keyphrase

Frequency, Length, Title, Subheadings, Meta Description

When writing your blog, decide what your keyphrase will be. The focus keyphrase is the word or phrase you want your website to rank the highest for. For instance, if you own a pet services company, your keyword phrase may include everything from “pet grooming” and “pet boarding” to “dog camps” and “dog training.” This keyword phrase should be repeated throughout your blog but in moderation. What Yoast doesn’t account for is how competitive your keyphrase is compared to other marketers. That’s where a good content strategist comes in handy.

Once you dump your blog into WordPress, enter your keyphrase in the Focus Keyphrase field. From there, Yoast will tell you exactly what needs work regarding your keyphrase. Does it show up enough or too much throughout your blog? Yoast triggers an alert if the keyphrase appears in more than 2.5% of your content. Anything above 2.5% appears unnatural. It will also trigger an alert if your keyword phrase is too long or if it doesn’t appear in the title and meta description. You also want to include subheadings (also known as H2, H3, H4) that help break the content up, making it easier to read. Subheadings should introduce the paragraph and be relevant to your keyphrase.

Text Length

Because longer posts outrank shorter posts, Yoast recommends blogs of at least 300 words. You’ll notice a red or orange light if your word count is too low. For a shorter blog, make sure the you optimize it to be useful and informative, not spammy. Use each and every sentence to drive your message home. Blogs of 1000 to 2500 words have a better chance of ranking higher on Google, but you probably want these longer form blogs written by a content writer who can produce professional content and can recommend images to go along with the blog.

Images are also important to make your content interesting. If you don’t include any images, Yoast will remind you with a red or orange light.

Links

Last but certainly not least are internal and external links. The Yoast plugin for WordPress checks for both.

Internal links take the reader from one page on your website to another page on your website. For instance, if you’re talking about how to train your dog, you can link the words “how to train your dog” to your pet training webpage on your website.

External links take the reader from your website to another. These are typically used to validate the credibility of your blog. For instance, if you write about how long it takes to train a dog, you can link the words, “time it takes to train your dog,” to a specific study from a credible source, like the Humane Society.

As long as you adjust your content according to Yoast’s instructions, you should eventually get a green light in both the Readability and Keyphrase categories (you may need to hit the Save as Draft button to refresh the page to see if your adjustments helped or not). Remember, you don’t need to get a green light in all the subcategories. Just aim for green in the two main categories, and you’re off to a good start.

Are your blogs not bringing enough traffic to your website even by using Yoast? RedShift Writers provides consultation and writing services to generate more interest in your content. Connect with us today.

Blog, Writing Tips Plug-ins, SEO, WordPress

We’re Reading to Kids for Our 4th Birthday

Admin December 3, 2016

This December, RedShift Writers turns 4 years old. To commemorate our achievement and encourage people to keep reading, RedShift Writers is holding a RedShift Readers Day to provide readers and books to Legacy Health Centers December 22nd, 9:00 AM – 4 PM at the Southwest location at . High Star Dr., Houston, TX, 77074. Throughout the day, we will read books to the more than 300 kids (average) coming through that location in a given day while their parents talk to doctors and nurses.

Many of the families coming through Legacy Community Centers do not have many books (if any) at home. The staff at these centers not only read to those kids but also give them books of their very own. These kids are 5 and under, so many are in a very fast development impact phase of their childhoods. Reading to them and encouraging them to read can change the trajectory of their lives, and better the community.

If you are interested in contributing, here are the two main ways you can get involved:

1) Join the readers program! You can join us to read at that location that day, or at many other locations during the weekdays from 9 to 4 across the City of Houston. We would love to see you December 9th, but any day you can go is great.

2) Donate books to the cause! Any books work, really. I think new ones are nice because they’re shiny, and kids like that, but there is also an adult literacy program, so all kinds of books are good. This is about encouraging a community and culture of reading.

To donate books or get paperwork to become a volunteer, please email Debbie Costello at dcostello@legacycommunityhealth.org.

I hope you’ll join us and get involved in the cause. It will bring a little something extra to the holiday outreach that can benefit people in a heartwarming way now and a world-changing way later.

Hope to see you there!

-Daniel

Blog, News Houston