Blog

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NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING ?

01 March 2020

Future proof
This technology is able to comprehend language in its natural form (whether that is a legal contract or a spoken question).
Early attempts to program a computer to understand language involved a series of rules.
While this is fine for some basic concepts, it becomes complicated as you cater for exceptions to the rules.
Increasing computer power means that instead of trying to codify thought processes as rules,
the latest machine learning tools use statistical pattern recognition techniques to create their own rules (known as predictive algorithms) from large volumes of examples.
For example, if you show such a system a collection of documents and their translations into another language,


the system can determine the statistical patterns between the documents and work out how to translate from one language to the other,
without having to understand what the individual words mean or the underlying rules of grammar.

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Opportunities

Blogging and SEO: 5 Easy Steps to Rank Your Blog

03 March 2020

This is pretty standard, and some would even argue that it’s not that important since people are trained to scroll,
but in my own tests and the tests of others, I’ve seen it proven over and over again.
So, keep the important information in those top 768 pixels. Research has shown that people do scroll, but they actually spend 80% of their time above the fold and only 20% below.
This is pretty standard, and some would even argue that it’s not that important since people are trained to scroll,
but in my own tests and the tests of others, I’ve seen it proven over and over again. So, keep the important information in those top 768 pixels. Research has shown that people do scroll,
but they actually spend 80% of their time above the fold and only 20% below.

This brings us to the topic of sliders, which are pretty popular. I’m not a fan of sliders because they tend to confuse the user.
When a user arrives on a page and the real estate above the fold is dominated by a slider, the hunt is on.

That’s never a good user experience. Instead, if you decide to use a slider, make sure that its position is justified. In other words, make sure that a slider is the most
important thing you want a user to see/do when he or she arrives at your website/blog.

For example, it might be justified to use a slider to feature your top products or top content on a site. It’s justified on Entrepreneur:
entrepreneur slider But notice how the user stays in complete control. That is another essential factor you must keep in mind when creating a slider.

In the case of Quick Sprout, the important information is two-fold: the latest blog post and the call-to-action for a free report.
So, always determine what is the single purpose of the page…and then make sure it is above the fold.

2. Keep the number of links on a page under 100 While Google recommends that you keep the number of links on a page under 100, this is not for search purposes, but design and user experience purposes.
In fact, Matt Cutts published a page with close to 200 links on it.

Why does Google recommend you limit the number of links to 100? It used to be that Google would only index up to 100 kilobytes of a page…that equalled to about 100 links. Now Google can easily index a page much larger than that.

So, what happens if you decide to place more than 100 links on a page? Google might crawl you and look at you like a spammer.

However, what you do might be legitimate, and having over a hundred links, like Cutts does, can also work if it is justified.
In that case, you will only pass on a limited amount of PageRank because there are tons of links on that page.

How the user experiences the page is more important these days than PageRank or pure SEO measures, so limiting 100 links to a page is a good idea.

3. Create hub pages One of the best ways to get your content out of the archives and delivering SEO value to your site is by creating a hub page of your best content.

For example, you could divide content into beginner, novice and expert advice on a particular topic and then link to all that content on a single page.
You could also break it down by themes like Problogger does on its Archive page:

Early attempts to program a computer to understand language involved a series of rules.

While this is fine for some basic concepts, it becomes complicated as you cater for exceptions to the rules.

For example, if you show such a system a collection of documents and their translations into another language,


the system can determine the statistical patterns between the documents and work out how to translate from one language to the other,
without having to understand what the individual words mean or the underlying rules of grammar.

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Keep your images small

Size does matter

07 March 2020

I can’t express enough how important images are to web content these days.
This is why I’ve written articles like Forget Blogging as Usual,
which demonstrate that to draw in readers, you need to provide images and graphics.

But a bloated image can slow that page download, thus decreasing site speed. So, the simplest way to do this is to save images as .jpgs and text/headers as .gifs.
If you have an image that’s not a .jpg, use a tool to save it as a .jpg.

The Performance Golden Rule says that 80%-90% of user experience is based on downloading images, stylesheets, flash, etc.,
thus it’s a good idea to spread that content over multiple servers using a Content Delivery Network like Akamai A CDN is a set of servers that cache your web objects like scripts, URLs, text and graphics, in effect increasing bandwidth,
which reduces site latency and stress on a single server. In other words, you improve site speed.

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