An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

In the early days of the world wide web, most links to external sites were, in my opinion, "legitimate" rather than contrived. My first site dated back to 1994, and consisted of a landing page along with some samples of my academic writing. Back then, besides having no Wikipedia (but a plethora of Usenet newsgroups to refer to), I was able to mainly browse and select what I considered to be quality sites to which to link, and I gave no thought to soliciting inbound links from those destinations. Something that I recall about Japanese sites before the turn of the millennium, is that the cultural concept of " giri " was being commonly applied to making links mutual, and more interestingly, that authors of content gave explicit permission to have their content linked to by strangers, with the proper etiquette that when one created an external link, the owner(s) of the destination page would be notified. Now, most SEO blogs and resources speak of the painstaking ro

Casting my mind back to (well) over a decade ago, I still remember being taught some principles of short essay writing: The title should reflect the primary topic. As with well-formed markup language (HTML, XML), the opening and closing sentences should summarize the topic, assertion or opinion.  Each of the middle paragraphs should cover interrelated ideas that expound upon the main topic, and be ordered logically, building upon the prior paragraph. Boldface and italics can emphasize important points, though they should be used sparingly. In looking at Google's algorithm for keyword density and prominence factors, we see that they seem to expect these exact best practices in every web page in order to determine what the topic is for said page: The <title> and <h1> tags should contain the primary keyword - the prominence is also dependent upon overall length of the text strings, and the position in which it occurs. The keyword should occur in the first and closi

I have found  a site  that contained a quote that I agree with:  Search engine optimization is just a means to help distribute your message. Nothing more, nothing less. Calling search engine optimization unethical is similar to calling creating a website or printing a newspaper unethical. When I started in the Web Effectiveness role just over a year ago, the concept of white and black hat practices also became part of my consciousness. The Wikipedia article  on white vs. black hat also mentions the existence of grey hat techniques, which implies that instead of a dichotomy, there in fact exists a continuum of optimizing measures, where web pages can be boosted in SERP (search engine result page) rankings. This leads me to believe that there is no such thing as pure white or black practices in SEO, only shades of grey . Search engine ranking algorithms are not just multi-layered and complicated, but also ever changing. I would describe black hat practices as not so much ways to contr

When I moved countries, my role focussed on (though it wasn't strictly limited to) managing the web personalization ( p13n ) programme for my employer. This meant that there was pre-existing tooling that I had to promote to various internal adopters and webmasters, along with some supervisory work to maintain data. The succinct slogan I created to describe the aim of the programme was the following: To present the right content to the right audience at the right time. For various reasons, as of last year I joined the ranks of those already involved in what we call "Web Effectiveness" work. Here, usability and organic SEO are the main topics (with a side order of paid search optimization). It occurs to me that, in fact, that p13n slogan that I'd created can directly be applied to what I'm still doing. Sure, the tooling is different, and my stakeholders are also different. But there, the dissimilarities end. My team essentially helps web content owners to op

That's right folks - localizing text, in particular marketing and promotional copy, is not simply a matter of finding a competent translator who has native fluency in both source and target languages. And I'm sure many of my readers already knew that. So why mention it here? Because I've entered the land of SEO, particularly in the context of a multinational company where most localization starts with a central (and usually English language) source which is then adopted by a subset of our countries. An organically search engine optimized English web page will not be automatically optimized in the localized version. In other words, having the most effective keywords determined for the source language cannot and will not absolve the page owner of the localized version of ensuring that someone performs keyword research for this content. To delve further into the best practices of text localization, I've found that it involves a profound knowledge of how one can reali