Writeyness :: Info to snack on

All I want for Christmas is a blanket with sleeves. Luckily, The Slanket (”The Loungin’ Blanket”) is exactly that.

And it’s proof that the best ideas are the simplest ones.

The Slanket creator, Gary Clegg, was hunkered down in his student dorm room one night, wrapped up in his sleeping bag watching TV, when he discovered he couldn’t work the remote without exposing his arms to the bitter cold that is life in a frigid dorm room.

A few snips of the scissors later and an early prototype of The Slanket was born. Several years, a manufacturing deal, and one website later and The Slanket 2.0 is a raging success. Even, dare I say, a hot product (sorry).

It’s (now warm) creator is committed not only to keeping the world warm while it plays Playstation and eat popcorn on the sofa, but to bringing it together: “Across oceans, across cultural boundaries, let’s unify! One Slanket at a time.” is the handwritten message overseas buyers receive with their package of fleecy goodness.

Search Engine Land is the new venture of Search Engine guru Danny Sullivan.

There are a couple of excellent posts on the blog just now looking at two issues relevant to any website looking to improve their search engine rankings:

Google’s Tips On Duplicate Content Worries looks at how Google views duplicate content.

Stop The Freak Out Over Linking looks at the dos and don’ts of using links to give your ranking a boost.

Anyone involved in working on their business’s website should keep up to date with search engine developments, and Search Engine Land is another great resource to add to your list.

The Guardian has published a list of their most useful websites of 2006 — The new 100 most useful sites.

It’s interesting to compare this list to their previous one in 2004 — Cream of the crop: 100 most useful websites.

They rightly point out (taking the UK-view, as a British newspaper):

“In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn’t have broadband. That’s changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of users have broadband, and the arrival of Web 2.0 has brought sites where the interaction is as fast as if it were on your machine.”

Don’t know your “404″ from your “LSI”?

SEO Book has an excellent Search Engine Marketing Glossary.

Writing for the Web is different from print and other mediums because, on the Web, people are actively searching for information – possible related to your products or services. And you have the opportunity to direct those people who fall within your target market to your site.

That’s why content is still king online — image-heavy and Flash sites do look great as an online brochure, but they won’t draw in extra traffic. So that’s why your website should include keyword-rich copy, i.e., copy containing keywords used by your target audience to search for information.

Finding the right keywords — and how best to use them on your site — is a very involved process I won’t go into here, but it’s very useful to get an insight into how people — Internet users — search for stuff on the Internet.

It’s easy to forget — especially if you’re pretty Internet savvy yourself — that a lot of people out there think Google (or Yahoo for that matter) IS the Internet. And the fact is, people search online in a large number of ways. Many people don’t use the address bar at all and instead type things like eBay.com or even Google into the search box. It’s quicker to do this and click on the top link than type the whole URL into the address bar! I do it myself.

There’s a great post on the Morget Designs blog — How Do People Use Search Engines — that talks about this, including a link to a video to a talk given by Google research scientist (now there’s a job title!) Dan Russell. There’s also some discussion on this over at the excellent new SEO blog, Searchland — Why do People Google Google?.

The fact is, not everyone searches for “[My widget’s name and model number]”. So you have to think creatively when compiling a list of keywords.

A great starting point is to do a little user-study of your own. If you want to sell a particular product, ask friends and family to search for information related to it and look at what words they use, in what order, and so on.

If you already have a site, you should also look at your website stats to see which keywords people use to find you. It gives you a clear insight into the thought process of your target market, and can even generate ideas for new products.