How to improve the readability of content Creating content and reaching the target audience is a whole process. It is like joining the dots and reaching the end of a puzzle. Many factors impact the content we write, and one major factor is readability. Readability is how easily a text can be read and understood without difficulty. Here, let’s look at some points to improve the readability of content. Use short sentences Shorter sentences give readers time to understand what we intend to tell them. Longer sentences often confuse people, it takes time to process, and they end up not reading or losing interest in the content. Use short and simple words. Simple words used in content always have an advantage, as they keep the audience glued and engaged. While writing, always try to limit the usage of difficult words. Some people will be able to understand it, but the majority of people prefer a more simple language. With a slight adjustment, a long word can be made short. For example, the words ‘moreover’ and ‘additionally’ can become ‘also’ which conveys the same meaning. Use friendly fonts When conveying a message through content, one should aim to be a delivery person, not an artist. In plain terms, using fancy fonts won’t appeal to the audience, and it further complicates reading. Using fonts like Times New Roman and Arial will do the job instead. Paragraphs and Headings Make sure to write clear paragraphs, stuffing too much information in a paragraph can go wrong. Try to convey the information or message in that paragraph and move onto the next one. Shorter paragraphs with commas and line spacing will work and gives time for people to read it. Proper heading for the content is a must, it will be the starting point to get people’s attention. Then, adding subheadings is equally important, as they can provide the audience with an idea of what the content is, and it makes for easier reading. Add Visuals Visuals play an important role in content marketing. An all-text article or blog can become boring, and adding the right images to support the writing will be a useful plus. The images present can bring a fresh feel to the content. Also, when you are including any facts or numbers, try to present them in Infographics. Infographics and images improve the content structure and make the content more readable. Avoid using Passive voice The readability of the content is affected when you use passive voice. For example, Mark changed the flat tyre (active voice) The flat tyre was changed by Mark (passive voice) The passive voice places the focus on the verb (“changed”) rather than the subject (“Mark”). The subject is important in the content and active voice is bold and direct. Passive voice creates unnecessary long sentences, and it is better to avoid using them. Useful Tools If you are looking to improve, and want to make your content more readable, investing time in some useful tools will do a world of good for your writing. Tools like Hemingway Editor and Grammarly help you with the grammar, your readability score and they point out the errors in writing. Using these apps will surely improve the readability and make your writing crisp and clear. Some other points like using transition words like similarly and but will aid in connecting the sentences and improves the writing flow. Sticking to the point or topic and not deviating from it will also be useful to engage people and improve readability. Including the right keywords and Content readability also influences the search rankings in one way or another. Improving your content readability not only enhances the audience’s reading experience, it also proves helpful to the overall SEO as well. With good practice and these tips, you can take your content to the next level. Some more tips: Stick to commonly used words. Keep it simple. Bear in mind not everyone who’s reading has that Master’s degree you might. Don’t make people look up a dictionary if it’s material meant to promote your business. As a thumb rule, an eighth grader should be able to understand your written content.Say what you want in the shortest way possible. That’s it.Avoid flowery/ornamental adjectives and adverbs. Don’t show off. It’s fine in a thesis, not for promotional material or anything that you’re hoping will increase footfall.Flow into the topic like you would in a conversation with another human being. You don’t just jump from one unrelated thing to another do you, in a conversation? Same rule here. Introduce a subject you want to write about, then follow a logical sequence covering all the points you want mentioned and sum it up or wrap the conversation with a brief concluding summary at the end. Break into different paragraphs just like you would take a pause when you talk. Use headers and subheadings judiciously. Remember some lazy people just read the ‘bold text.’ Write in active voice, never passive.Try to rouse one strong emotion through your writing and/or pictures. It could be joy, humour, pride, a sense of belonging, etc. It’s important to make that emotional connect with your reader to move them into doing what you want them to.Check grammar, spelling, spacing, proper usage of the parts of speech, punctuation. Don’t be that person who writes: “She finds inspiration in cooking her family and dog.”
Innovator’s mindset
INNOVATORS The capacity of human mind is massive with millions of neurons and sensitive parts. According to research the brain has more connections that the entire stars in the galaxy. Hence imagine what could be its capabilities with billion GB memory and fast information transfer within it. It is a supercomputer on its own. However, we haven’t discovered its fullest capacity yet. Even though we use only a part of our brains capacity we can achieve so much. The common question that arises in every individual’s mind is how can we use it well? Well the answer is innovation. Every discovery is an innovation of something that has existed. What makes it innovative is the efficiency and performance of the innovation. Innovation is nothing but building something more efficient and easier than the existing product. Innovation makes us stand out from the crowd. That’s how Steve Jobs and Elon Musk became biggest innovators of our society. Let’s understand this with an example. Imagine a smooth road that recently got blocked by a big boulder. The vehicles going that way were obstructed because of this boulder. Generic people showed generic reaction of complaining and taking a rough route around the boulder. This route was neither smooth nor consumed less fuel. However, nobody thought of a better solution until one day when a man arrived and started to break the rock into bits. People ridiculed him for being dumb trying to break the boulder painstakingly. The others were however continuing the same route that was bumpy and long. After few days he restored the road to its glory and set up a toll booth. He demanded any vehicle passing by to pay toll for the shorter smoother road. So, people now started to pay him which made him an entrepreneur and an innovator. The basic oxygen for innovation is finding a problem and bring the solution. People wanted to talk to each other instantly all over the world but couldn’t find a way other than phones. So Facebook was invented. People wanted to get food at their doorstep rather than waiting at hotels swiggy, Zomato etc came in. People wanted to buy stuffs easily and get it delivered at home, amazon was invented. Just like the man in the story everyone could solve one problem in the society and become innovators in the future. Follow this and you could be on articles and magazines featuring innovators too.
The word passion baffles many.
As a kid we all would have loved to do certain activities such as driving with dad or helping mom. And at school too we would have shown interest in different activities. We would have been good at some or we would have had a natural flare for them. Yet the most common question asked whether it is a child or a grown-up adult in the interview panel is “what is your passion?”. What is this word so common yet so complex to give an answer? It a word that baffles our own mind. It is however the most misunderstood word in the vocabulary called life. Passion is something that you love from every inch of your soul. It sparks something inside of you each time you do it or hear about it. It has a deep emotional connect with you. That’s why a person with passion achieves the crown in his field. Passion can be on anything and not on just sports or studying. It has taken different forms and impact on different people. For instance the passion of a voyager for travel made him find new worlds, the passion of a warrior towards conquest made him conquer many nations, the passion to explore the space made man land on moon and come up with technologies and inventions. Well passion comes naturally like love at first sight and it cannot be attained or acquired. Its simply a fiery feeling that drives us to do more of what we love each day. Like the Thomas Hawkins poem. “There is a road laid out before me I know not where it goes for its path is never shown to me where it ends nobody knows” I wasn’t a topper nor a backbencher but an average student till 8th grade. This really intimidated my parents and they were worried about my future. Just when one day there was a function at my house and nearly 130 guests attended the function. One thing that struck me was that there were completely two classes of humans in the gathering. One part of the people was dressed decently, spoke well and had a good appeal. These people were the tiny part of my village who studied and got into professional lifestyle. The other part were the typical people from village and most of them were farmers. The clear line between the educated and the others made me realise how important education is. Thereafter I focused on my studies and improved well. It helped me get high scores in the board exams and I got the opportunity of studying engineering. There too the flare in me paved way for good grades and skill development making me the first in college. For me passion at that time was studying and getting high scores. Similarly, many of you would have immense joy and talent in certain fields. Find your passion and work hard with determination to conquer your flare.
Why does website need a sitemap?
Importance of a Sitemap What is a sitemap? A sitemap is a file that list all the webpages on your website. Sitemaps can be divided into two categories. Sitemap for crawlers and the sitemap for visitors. Sitemap for visitors (html sitemaps) Sitemap for visitors/html sitemap is a page that allows visitors to see the layout of your pages and posts in one location. Some of these sitemaps include all pages, but you can limit it to just your top level pages. Excerpt from each page can also be included in the visual sitemap, giving your visitors an idea of the content contained on each of the page. An added bonus to a html sitemap is that is allows for all the pages you add to the sitemap to have internal links to each of your pages, making it easier for spiders and crawlers to see associations with your content. Sitemap for crawlers (xml sitemaps) Sitemaps for crawlers/xml sitemap are files created to tell search engines, like Google and Bing, about the pages on your website and how they are organized. Crawlers are able to read these files and crawl your site thoroughly. These sitemaps can contain valuable metadata associated with your site’s pages. Metadata allows the bot to know information like when the page was last updated, how often each page is updated and the importance of the page relative to other pages on your site. Metadata can also be used to give information about specific types of content on your pages, including mobile view, images, and video. These types of sitemaps are intended to be submitted to the search engines through google search engine console or analytics account. These type of sitemaps are limited to 10MB and 50,000urls. If you have a site larger than this, you can break your sitemap up into smaller files and include a sitemap index file with your submission of the sitemap to search engines. Why you need a sitemap? Sitemaps are not required but are highly recommended for all websites. A sitemap allows the crawlers of your site to get to all areas of your website no matter the size. This helps with Search Engine Optimization because it makes it easier for search engines to find all the content on your website. Sitemaps are especially important for new websites, very large sites, or sites with large archives. For new websites, there are very few external links coming into your site, so crawlers may have a hard time finding all of the pages on your site. Having a sitemap for the website will eliminate such problems. Benefits of having a sitemap XML sitemaps help search engines understand what you would like to index on your website and prioritize the crawling process. If your site has a deep directory structure, a sitemap will act like a guide for search engines so they don’t miss valuable content. If it’s a brand new site, adding a sitemap will be a good way to let search robots and the whole world know about it and index it accordingly. Sitemaps help you control indexing of certain pages in Google Search Console. An XML sitemap is your legal helper in confirming your content rights as it mentions the page publication and update time.
Why robots.txt is so important for search engines?
Robots.txt is a text file used by websites used to communicate with the web crawlers and other web robots. The standard specifies how to inform the web crawlers about which pages of the website should be crawled and which part of the websites should not be crawled. Most of the search engines recognise and obey robots.txt requests. . Basic format: User-agent: [user-agent name] Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled] Importance of robots.txt Google can usually find and index all of the important pages on your site. And they will not index pages that are not important or duplicate versions of other pages. However, there are 3 main reasons that you’d want to use a robots.txt file. Block Non-Public Pages: Sometimes you have pages on your site that you don’t want it to be indexed. For example, you might have a staging version of a page. Or a login page. These pages need to exist. But you don’t want random people landing on them. This is a case where you’d use robots.txt to block these pages from search engine crawlers and bots. Maximize Crawl Budget: If you’re having a tough time getting all of your pages indexed, you might have a crawl budget problem. By blocking unimportant pages with robots.txt, Googlebot can spend more of your crawl budget on the pages that actually matter. Prevent Indexing of Resources: Using meta directives can work just as well as robots.txt for preventing pages from getting indexed. However, meta directives don’t work well for multimedia resources, like PDFs and images. Best Practices to create a robots.txt file Since it is a text file, you can create a robots.txt file using a notepad. The format for creating robots.txt file will be the same in every case. User-agent: X Disallow: Y User-agent is the specific bot and everything that comes after “disallow” are pages or sections that you want to block. For example: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /images This rule would tell Googlebot not to index the image folder of your website. You can also use an asterisk (*) to speak to any and all bots that stop by your website. For example: User-agent: * Disallow: /images The “*” tells all spiders to NOT crawl your images folder. Search engine has two main jobs, crawling the webpages to discover the content and indexing the content for the purpose of serving the content to users whenever they are searching for the information. To crawl sites, search engines follow links to get from one site to another — ultimately, crawling across many billions of links and websites. This crawling behavior is sometimes known as spidering. After arriving at a website but before spidering it, the search crawler will look for a robots.txt file. If it finds one, the crawler will read that file first before continuing through the page. Because the robots.txt file contains information about how the search engine should crawl, the information found there will instruct further crawler action on this particular site. If the robots.txt file does notcontain any directives that disallow a user-agent’s activity (or if the site doesn’t have a robots.txt file), it will proceed to crawl other information on the site. Things to remember There are certain factors one should always remember before adding robots.txt file. In order to be found, a robots.txt file must be placed in a website’s top-level directory. Robots.txt is case sensitive: the file must be named “robots.txt”. Some robots may choose to ignore your robots.txt file. This is especially common with fraud crawlers like malware robots or email address scrapers. To make robots.txt file publicly available, add /robots.txt to the end of any root domain to see that website’s directives. This means that anyone can see what pages you do or don’t want to be crawled, so don’t use them to hide private user information. Each subdomain on a root domain uses separate robots.txt files. This means that both blog.example.com and example.com should have their own robots.txt files (blog.example.com/robots.txt and example.com/robots.txt). It’s generally a best practice to indicate the location of any sitemaps associated with this domain at the bottom of the robots.txt file. Common language (terms) of robots.txt User agent: The specific web crawler to which you’re giving crawl instructions Disallow: This is the command used to tell a user-agent not to crawl particular URL. Only one “Disallow:” line is allowed for each URL. Allow: This function is only applicable for googlebot, the command to tell googlebot it can access a page or subfolder even though its parent page or subfolder may be disallowed. Crawl-delay: How many seconds a crawler should wait before loading and crawling page content? Note that Googlebot does not acknowledge this command, but crawl rate can be set in Google Search Console. Sitemap: Used to call out the location of any XML sitemaps associated with this URL. Note this command is only supported by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Don’t make biryani without salt
There are times when we think and think and think to the maximum of our brain’s capacity. That’s right, we sometimes exhaust our brain by thinking too much while trying to make decisions in life. As the famous Buddhist saying goes” be like an empty cup, free from all confusions and thoughts. Only then you will give way to new beginnings”. We must spare our mind the burden of overthinking. Overthinking is just as same as being in a comfort zone. It is a place where you can stay forever but it will not let you go anywhere. It makes you like Dormamu and Dr.Strange, stuck in an eternal loop of thinking. I was once a victim of overthinking too. It made me get stuck for weeks thinking through a decision I had to make. But unlike everyone I had a little help. It was my grandma, the angel who lighted up my path which I follow even today. It was such an eye-opening revelation that has been helping me in every situation. So, I decided to share it with you too. I was 23 years old when my grandma taught me the concept of “Don’t Think”. I was struggling to make the most important decision of my life. I couldn’t make any progress because of the situation as I was too involved in trying to figure out what to do. My grandma who was living adjacent to my house decided to pay a visit. She saw me in a state of chaos, so she decided to step up and make the decision on my behalf. Within just two minutes she came to a conclusion and made her decision which I was struggling with for almost two weeks. I was amazed how quick she solved such a complex process. When I asked her, she said it was a simple tool called “Don’t Think”. Educated people complicate things so much thinking we know a lot. As a result, we forget that even complex problems have simple solutions. My grandma was a package of brilliance covered by a village breeze. Not only my grandma but I was born and raised as a villager too. We forget that our villages have a simple cure to even the deadliest diseases in the world. And their lifestyle and thinking gives us the key to unlock great achievements. One such key was given to me by my grandma which is “Don’t Think”. From that day onwards every decision I made was successful. It helped me start a non-profit organisation named IndiaTeam.org along with my friends. Second, I started the community radio at Stanford called Saaral in the year 2003. I worked and lived in US for 15 years as a software engineer. Then too I had to make the difficult decision of returning to India. However, I still had the key my grandma gave me when I was 23 so I came back to India and commenced TICKETGOOSE.COM which quickly crossed to do a 100 core GMV in the year 2007. And then a series of events like setting up a Digital Village and becoming a public speaker to writing y own book my grandma’s advice was a golden key which opened many successful doors in my life. The life of a villager can be divided into three CleanBuildDo Clean: Cleanliness is not just for the body but also for our inner selves. It doesn’t require you to travel to meditation centres all it takes is a little gratitude for oneself and the nature around. Wake up early so that you accompany the sun while it rises. In that way you rise along with the star. Go out for a walk and inhale the fresh air which is a gift not many of us work to receive. Observe the music of the new day and how nature thanks for another beginning by her song through birds and trees. You can also add your own music to it like our villagers who sing while working. Having done these you are 60% villager now. The circle: Eat and burn more, read and write more, share and help more. Whatever we say about people it all comes down to one planet one home and one family. The world is nothing but a giant ball floating in space and we are living on it. Isn’t that enough to make us one big family? There is always someone in need of your help. Like John Masefield’s poem goes “Laugh and be merry together, like brothers akin,Guesting awhile in the rooms of a beautiful inn,Glad till the dancing stops, and the lilt of the music ends.” We are all temporary stayers in a beautiful place. Celebrate it like a new-born and enjoy it like a poem. I DO! Knowledge and talent without action is like biryani without salt. So, get up and do what you wanted to do. Practise if you think you require more skill and don’t forget to think like a villager. That’s how we have Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Karthi Easwaramoorthy. Let’s all practise “Don’t Think! Be a Villager!” Let us start our journey together to understand the life of a villager! Learn the habits of a villager! Experience the life of our villages. Thank you for the journey with me
5 habits to be effective
What is your daily routine? Is it the same every day? For most of us our days don’t go as we have planned. Or at times we may get sulky after a day or two carrying out routines. However, schedules and routines help in keeping us organised and focused without the burden of hustle. Here how I spend a day in my life and the secrets to self-care despite the busy life. Typically, everybody’s day has four divisions just like the chambers of our heart. Personal life: The first one is personal life. Put your personal life first at the start of each day and you have already taken care of the 50%. Our body is the vessel that helps us in this life. It endures so much throughout our lives. Hence it is our duty to put it first under all circumstances. Our bodies have self-healing properties thus it does not ask much from us other than a little care. Wake up early and breathe in the fresh air by going for a walk. Meditate for a few minutes. Now meditation doesn’t require you to sit and sit and realise the meaning of existence. Rather it is a simple way to empty out everything that sets you back. Conscious breathing is one of the ways. All you have to do is simply observe your breathing and thank your body, it has gone through so much for you. Secondly personal hygiene like showering everyday and dressing appropriately. Finally, your diet. Eat healthy and balanced by avoiding ready made food items. Eat to the required quantity and not more or less than that. In summary: Getup early Go for a walk Observer closely Brush, bath and watch your dress Eat less. Social Life: We live in a closely knit environment with millions of people around us every day. There is someone or another in need of your help out there. We don’t have to take the complete responsibility of taking care of everyone. The least we can do is help just one person each day around our locality or community we live in. It not only changes their lives but ours too. We don’t have to be famous or great to be a leader. A small random act of kindness each day will make you a leader. Great leaders like Barack Obama and politicians like Kejriwal were initially community leaders who then rose to become leaders of a nation. The second thing is knowing what is happening around us. Read more and gather information every day. You can only set out to people if you have the knowledge of what is happening around. Stay humble and kind and one day you shall become a great leader too. In summary: Read more Write few Share enough Help a person a day. Professional Life. All of us are the children of the world so accept it or not we have to have a living to survive. That doesn’t mean you have to go chasing glitzy stuffs and work all your life without a purpose. Find your passion, develop your skills in the field and stand out from the crowd. The first rule to becoming skilful is practise. Practise a new skill every week. Learn new things in your industry every day. Practise pays off like miracle. To understand the value of practise, keep a record of your works from the beginning and compare it to the ones you have created after long time practise. You will see the journey from amateur to professional obviously. Such is the power of practise. In summary: Practice! Practice!! Practice!!! Family Life: Last but not least family. Family is the only support system that stays by you side always. There is no better therapy than going back to a family that is anticipating your arrival to help you, support you and share your concerns and happiness. Spend time with your family as much as you can. Eat together and play with your kids as much as possible. No matter what you think of at the start of the day family is the only force that thinks of you at the end of the day. I would like to conclude this article by stressing key 5 habits everyone must follow to become highly effective are Get up early Go for a walk Eat less Read more Help a person a day.
Social Media Impact on Google Search Results
Social Media Impact on Google Search Results is huge. Content that ranks well on Google often also has a lot of shares, retweets, and likes.
Social Media Tips – What to Consider Before Posting?
Follow Social Media Tips to make sure you’re not missing out on anything on your social media marketing efforts. Facebook, Twitter, IG are few apps for use.
How to improve the readability of content?
Why readability is so important? Because it decides the reader to stay on your page or not. Having a super cool idea in your mind is not enough to create content or a blog. You should be able to communicate with your readers and they have to get the idea at the same level you have in your mind about the topic. The success of your writing depends on how happy your readers about your writing. Happy readers aids in more impact on your business and more money. If you consider your written work as a puzzle, your reader can able to solve the puzzle. That is readability. You can use more complex words and vocab on your writing with long hard to get sentences to make the puzzle tough or you can use simple, easy to understand words and convey in a manner even students can easily understand what you are written. Short, simple, easy to understand words can improve readability. Using simple and short words is the primary point in creating good readability content. Remember, when creating a book or a blog or a webpage, it is not a place where you can showcase your vocab or deep knowledge in the language. You are not writing for yourself. The purpose of content creation is to reach people at different levels. So try to make the sentences shorter with easy to understand words. In case you are using any complex or strange words (because sometimes the plot demands it) it is your duty (writer’s duty) to make it clear to the readers in the same sentence or the very next sentence. Never bring multiple ideas in one sentence. If you have more than one idea to convey, use more than one sentence for that. Creating great sentences is not the goal, creating unique complex sentences doesn’t make you a great writer. String together all those ideas in your mind to create simple short sentences, you will be amazed at how great your content can become. Always write sentences in the active voice. Usage of passive voice uses more words and it will unnecessarily bore readers. Use subheadings in your writings for a better understanding of the descriptions. The subheading is the little rest stop along the road. It will also help to organize your writing and give you an alarm when you ramble or going out of context. Adding visual elements to your content is a treat to your readers. When you use charts, infographics, pictures, etc in your content helps the readers to absorb information more easily. Using personal language in writing is a great idea. It will save readers from the boredom of the cliché writing style. A well-organized content will save a lot of time and energy of the user. Adding some humor and entertainment to your content is a good idea. If you can make your writer laugh and entertain they will more likely to stick on to your writings. Benefits of good readability To get rank higher in Search Engine Results Page, your website should be readable. When you make your content readable, more people are likely to frequently visit. Better readability results in more traffic to your site. If your site is full of complex words they will not show in the SERP. Users will search for the keywords they know. So better readability helps to bring more traffic to your website. Your site should be usable by its target audience. Do not be tempted to write content to a readability level that could exclude your ideal viewers. A better readability score equals a higher rate of usability. Improved usability increases page views, engagement, and conversions. Creating content is to increase conversion rates. Micro conversions also impact the business, like clicking a link, watching a video, etc. More readable content means more conversions. What matters more is the readers have to stick on to the webpage to convert. For the success of business high-quality readable contents are important. Readable content keeps them coming and stay, indirectly customers have faith in your business.