Since my first explorations, a handful of modules have made great progress and you can achieve full-featured mega menus with the excellent Megamenu module. There are also some other now-mature projects like Nice Menus, and the Superfish module, which includes mega menu support. Upon further reflection, though, I became increasingly troubled by various usability drawbacks and SEO concerns. My notes on the topic got rather long, so I’ve divided them into a series that sums up some thoughts on the usability advantages and disadvantages of mega menus and then looks at the SEO concerns with mega menus. You can see an example here from the new YosemitePark.com site (click to view full size):

Lots of Options!

You might be able to see some potential problem areas there, but let’s take a look at the good, bad and ugly of mega menus in the next post. Read on about Mega Menus and usability ——»

Usability Advantages of Mega Menus

• All options visible. A traditional dropdown menu hides almost all options from the user until she hovers over the parent category. If the user does not think with the same hierarchy as the designer, she will have to play Treasure Hunt, hovering over many parent items to find an item. This can lead to frustration too if the dropdown keeps disappearing when the user is not asbolutely precise with the cursor. In theory, mega menus can solve that problem.
• Organizing options. Mega menus allow friendly and visual grouping of options into logical groups. A traditional dropdown becomes completely dizzying when the number of options gets too large.
• Images and Icons. Often, mega menus are designed to have images or icons that correspond to, and quickly confirm for the visitor, the content of the menu. So the Contact category might be illustrated with an address book or telephone icon or some such thing.

Usability Concerns

So mega menus are a no-brainer right? What could go wrong? As it turns out, plenty. Jakob Nielsen has highlighted a few mega menu usability issues. Usability expert Jared Spool noted early on that mega menus could get you into trouble in his article on 6 Epic Forces Battling Your Mega Menus. Usability aside, Spool explains the sudden popularity of mega menus thus:

Mega menus seem like such a good idea. After all, they make the marketing team happy, as they remove all that nasty navigation away from the prime real estate of the home page, leaving room for the team’s messaging goodness. At the same time, the mega menu gives the design team a rich sandbox to play in, with much flexibility on how they display the site’s main links.

He lays out his six arguments against mega menus, most of which are in fact not unique to mega menus at all and I don’t find them inherently problematic (not that germane here; scroll to the bottom of the article for some thoughts on Spool’s six problems). He notes that Amazon, a rigorous conversion optimizer, tried mega menus for a year and dropped them. Spool concludes:

If your design would benefit in some desperate manner from this navigation cliché, go ahead and use it. However, you probably want to watch it real close. Make sure you’re watching your users and your key performance indicators (especially revenue, if you’re an e-commerce concern).

I wouldn’t go so far as that, but the it’s easy to see some of the issues that might arise with mega menus.

1. Forest of Options Obscures the Trees. I know, that metaphor usually runs the other way around, but with mega menu, you often see a pretty forest, but have trouble finding the tree you want. You can see in my screenshot from the introduction, there is a temptation to make the mega menu into a sitemap (cick image to enlarge).
   

   Lots of Options!

   Since you can throw in every imaginable option, you do. As a result, the user is presented with a dizzying array of options and, one might guess, becomes paralyzed by the number of options. It creates an easy out for designers and site architects who don’t want to make choices. Now, I don’t want to get into the old saw about only presenting users with seven choices in menus. It is not true now and never was, but at a certain point, the number of options becomes visually distracting and difficult to read, and it seems to me quite common to see mega menus cross that line simply because they can.

2. Screen Size problems. This is not unique to mega menus. This can be a problem with options dropdowns (i.e. select boxes) that have long options or standard dropdown menus if they get big enough. The problem is that the mega menu is, well, mega, so this is a lot more common. You can see from this screenshot that mega menus can become completely non-functional if the window is narrow, as on a mobile device, or short, as on a netbook (click images to see full-sized):
   

   Oops! A not-so-mega menu

   

   Oops! Short window problems

   You can see that the mega menu is cut off on a narrow or a short screen. Anything that sticks out past the browser window is missing. With most types of content, this isn’t a big deal. Sure, the user has to scroll right to see it, which is annoying, but it can be done. With a mega menu, however, the user cannot scroll! Why? Because it only stays displayed when the mouse is hovering over the menu. Move the cursor down to the scroll bar, and the mega menu disappears. Scroll, and the link goes off screen. You literally cannot use the mega menu on a narrow screen.

   The Yosemite Park site solves this by allowing you to click on the root term and be taken to an index page, where the sub-options are displayed by default. That’s a pretty good solution, but it means the user needs to know, or guess, that the root term is a link and is clickable. It would be interesting to track visitors and see how they ultimately use this navigation.

This was part of what ultimately took the blush off mega menus for me personally. I just found that you compound implementation problems and if you’re not careful and don’t test on a lot of platforms, you have a high chance of letting a significant usability problem creep in. In addition, I was also concerned with the SEO impacts of mega menus (next section) ——».

Addendum: Spool’s issues with mega menus

If you’re really interested in Jared Spool’s Six Epic Problems, here’s a quick rundown, but it’s really more the SEO issues that you should read about next. Anyway, I’m not all that concerned with most of these issues, but here are some supplementary thoughts on Spool’s Six Epic Problems.

1. Menus are not Buttons. Since a menu isn’t a button, users don’t know they have to do something to make it expand. Realistically, they may simply not know it expands and will go there to click, only to see more options revealed. It’s better than not expanding.
2. Missing Trigger Words. In other words, since most options are hidden, users can’t see that they exist. But short of the navigation taking up the whole page as a sitemap, you’re not going to change this, and a mega menu at least gets you half way, though as you’ll see in the next part on the SEO problems with mega menus, that halfway solution is often a result of a bad information architecture decision.
3. Category Names not always inherently sensible. Well, of course not. This is a problem with any navigation and, again, is an information architecture problem more than a user interface problem.
4. Users Wait Before Moving Their Mouse. In other words, if they can’t see what they want, users sit there paralyzed and won’t click anything at all. Again, mega menus aren’t the root problem. If the design only allows, say, seven navigation links, then that’s what there is and they may not always have enough information scent to get the user to click, whether on hover those menu items reveal nothing (i.e. it’s a single-level menu hierarchy), reveals a cascade of hierarchical dropdowns (classic model) or is a mega menu. Realistically, the mega menu at least removes a one or more decision points vis-à-vis the classic hierarchical dropdown, where the user will have the “pause” problem at every level, instead of just at the root level.
5. Mega menus hide the information that’s under them. That’s a problem when the user accidently hovers over the menu while trying to read the content, which suddenly get’s hidden. That can be annoying, but in a minimally usable design, the mega menu should disappear simply on mousing out and most users today will know this. I find this a much less problematic usability issue than the one I noted where in a small screen, parts of the mega menu are not visible, clickable or usable at all.
6. Problems with hoverless devices. As we move to devices that don’t have cursors and mouses, they can have trouble triggering the menu expansion. Of course, this again is not unique to mega menus, but concerns anything that uses hover behavior as a trigger. This has become so ubiquitous that I think this is largely solved by most devices these days, though I am an iPad virgin, so I can’t say for sure.

Read on about the SEO impacts of mega menus (next section) ——».

Mega Menus and Search Engine Optimization Problems

Ultimately, it wasn’t the usability questions that brought me up short with respect to mega menus. It was the SEO concerns. Mega menus end up putting lots of links at the top of the page, sometimes hundreds. Google itself says in its Webmaster Guidelines that webmasters should “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.” Google’s official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) recommends that webmasters should avoid “creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page” (p. 12). When the mega menu gets truly large, it effectively ends up doing just that or very nearly.

Few voices in the Search Engine Optimization community are more respected, experienced, and authoritative than Ted Ulle. Back in 2008, Ted had a number of clients with -950 penalties and one of the common characteristics that jumped out was a tendency to have site navigation with tons of links. In internet years, 2008 is a while ago, but Ted continued to see this problem in 2010 and 2011, as we’ll see. Also, in 2010, Jane Copland of SEOMoz said that in her opinion “massive drop-downs certainly aren’t adhering to SEO best practices.”

So why would a large collection of links in the page templage create problems? There are a number of possible reasons. Unlike some of the usability issues, none of these are unique to menus formatted as classic mega menus. Instead, they are a simple function of the number of links, but I do believe that once the mega menu tool is available to the design team, the number of links tends to explode. So it is more an enabler than a cause per se.

1. Confused Relevancy Signals. It helps the search engines determine what a page is about if you keep it laser-focussed on the topic at hand. Normal navigation adds a handful of keywords that can confuse the signal a bit, but it compensates by helping focus the search engine’s understanding of overall site content and spotlight the most important pages. Mega menus, on the other hand, can add hundreds of keywords that confuse the signal. In information theory, the keywords in the mega menu are “noise” and it make it harder for the search engines to figure out the “signal” (page topic) and therefore figure out relevancy of the page to a given search.

   Google is getting better at ignoring navigation and boilerplate content. Some people contend that, therefore, this is not a problem. But Ted Ulle stated in January 2011 that he still believed that a large number of links in the page template is problematic for relevancy. In brief, you are challenging the search engine by adding this much noise to the signal and you have to ask whether or not you really want to depend on the strength of the Google or Bing algorithm to sort out your “semantic chaos” as Ted calls it.

2. Link Equity Dilution. This is similar to the semantic confusion caused by the forest of anchor text in your navigation. Each page has a certain strength and each link passes some of that page rank to the pages it links to. You can stop passing that equity by using the nofollow attribute on your link, but you can’t preserve the link equity this way. When you add a nofollow attribute to the link, it still leaks equity from the source page, it just doesn’t add it to the target page. So no matter how you cut it, they massive number of links are diluting the link strength of the page and tending to make it harder for the engines to figure out which parts of the site are important.
3. Crawl Challenges. This was more of an issue in the old days when search engines crawled only the first 100KB of code or so, but even with improvements, you’re putting a bigger challenge before the search engine.
4. Page Load Times. Again, this is a minor issue, but a massive collection of links in the navigation will slow down load times and rendering. Of course, one decent image or a large CSS file will quickly outweigh this, but we do know that load times are or soon will be taken into account in the Google algorithm at least, and we can expect other engines to follow suit.

Fixing the Mega Menu Problem

So what is an enterprising webmaster to do? You have a number of options, some better than others.

1. Reduce the number of links.good results with clients by reducing navigation from over 60 links down to 22. By tracking click patterns, Ted and his team found that a single link accounted for 60% of the clicks from the front page and the top ten links accounted for 99% of all clicks. So with some serious thinking about information architecture and some good analytics, you can simply reduce the number of links which will also improve usability. If you can get buy in, this is the preferred solution of course, but buy in will be difficult in any large organization unless you have the data and a strong case. And even then, some doorkeeper with a love of the current layout may block any and all arguments, no matter how reasonable.
2. Source-Ordered ContentIt is quite possible to put your menu at the end of your code and get your main page content at the top, but then display the page with the header (and thus the navigation) at the top. This is relatively easy to implement and I used to do it systematically (less so now), but of course, the links are still on your page. So though it mitigates the effects of having all that anchor text and links high on the page, the noise is still there.
3. iframe for navigation. I’ve never actually done this, but some people recommend it for boilerplate content in the site footer. The problem with doing this for the navigation is that you’ve entirely removed the navigation as an on-page factor for relevancy and so forth. So yes, you get rid of the noise in the signal, but you also get rid of a lot of the signal and your ability to build link flow throw the site. It seems like a collossally bad idea.
4. Use HTML 5 and hope the search engines understand. The HTML 5 spec includes the ability to specifically denote part of your document as navigation using the nav element. Of course, this is bleeding edge, so it’s rather early to expect the search engines to be smart enough to understand this and act appropriately. But let’s just assume it’s 2015 and they all “get” this. You still have the fundamental problem that your navigation is a key tool in telling the search engine what your site is about, and by including a massive number of links, you’ve given up your chance to provide signal to help the search engine cut through noise. In other words, at a certain number of links, you’re still adding noise rather than adding signal. So, again, it may mitigate the ill effects of the design, but it still misses out on a great opportunity.
5. Lazy Loading. Lazy loading is where delay loading content until the user wants it. So you images that are low on the page, for example, don’t get loaded until the user scrolls down. There are some excellent JQuery lazy loader plugins that let you implement this simply enough. So that would keep it out of the search engines, but the navigation needs to be responsive and readily available to the user, so load on demand seems like a terrible solution in this case.

So in short, it seems like the best alternative is to use your navigation like a lens to focus the search engine on the main points of your site, and you do that by making hard choices. As I mentioned at the outset of this series, in the end, I found great solutions for mega menus in Drupal , but for all the reasons detailed here, have tended to avoid mega menus if possible.

SEO

• Headspace2 — an SEO Swiss Army Knife. This lets you control titles, control what gets indexed and what doesn’t, create meta descriptions (which are used in the Google results if there is not a matching keyword phrase on your page), integrate analytics packages, use distinct page titles (in the title tag) and post title (in the H1 tag), and much, much more.
• Redirection — Another John Godley plugin like Headspace2. This lets you redirect links, which is useful for at least two situations: 1) you can redirect for pages with obsolete URLs not already handled by WordPress and 2) you can send links to an address like http://yoursite.com/outbound/outgoing—link which allows you to track outbound links and their statistics. If the outbound link may change often, you can redirect to a standard location and just change the URL in one spot.
• Google XML sitemaps — for some reason, the Headspace2 plugin wasn’t working for a while on some sites, so I used this.
• Excerpt Editor — just discovered this one — killer plugin for bulk editing Excerpts on legacy site. The name Excerpt is misleading. In point of fact, what we want is summaries or teasers that give the user a sense of what the article is about, rather than an excerpt (usually the first bit of the post) that may or may not describe the actual content. So this makes the category pages and front page a lot more scannable for the user. Furthermore, since the "excerpts" are not excerpts at all, but unique content, this will help with duplicate content issues (which is why I put it under SEO, though it could just as easily be considered a usability plugin). Anyway, this makes it super easy. I needed to create 25 excerpts quickly on a site the other day and this made it super easy (not so easy that I’ve done it on this blog, but I’m raised by turtles, so things take time).

Interface Customization

• Widget Logic — show/hide widgets for certain categories, pages, users, tags. For example, let’s say you have a text widget that says "Sign up for our newsletter," you might not want this on your newsletter signup page. This lets you show and hide widgets on specific pages and posts, as well as categories pages.
• WP Greet Box — Based on an idea made famous by Seth Godin, which suggest showing some special content only to new users (users with no cookie for your site). So if Greet Box thinks the user has never been to the site before, you could show a header above the post that says "check out these other popular posts" or something like that to orient new users to your site.
• WP Post Admin Column Filter — filters the post admin screen so that it only shows columns you want — no website as I just wrote the pre-alpha version. Very simple and currently hard-coded column selection only.
• Exclude Pages — lets you keep specific pages out of Page widgets/menus. For example, I might want to have a Terms and Conditions page, but I typically wouldn’t want that to show up in my Recent Pages or my main menu. This lets me exclude those.

Spam Protection

• Hashcash — block most spam without making users deal with a CAPTCHA. This can also be used in conjunction with a CAPTCHA or with Akismet (which should be on every WordPress site).

Ad Management

• Ad Injection — inject ad code or any code into posts. A lot of the really major media sites like to put ads in the middle of an article so that the reader has to read over it. This does it automatically for small-timers like us and it could be used for many things besides ads, such as a random image to dress up posts, or whatever.
• Ad rotation — This lets you put a set of ads into rotation for various spots on your site and manage them through a central interface. This is good if you want something simpler than OpenX or Doubleclick for Publishers.

Image Display

• Lightbox Plus — A lightbox, that is a plugin that displays images in a floating layer above the page, without leaving the page. It’s what I’m using on this site.
• Floatbox Plus — a paid lightbox, but very nice. We’re using this on the photo gallery on the site of our Yosemite Vacation Rental.

Debug

• wp pear_debug — sort of like the Drupal devel module. A bit hard to explain and I hope to do a video of this one, but let’s say you need to capture some information about what’s happening inside a plugin. If you have it output all kinds of debug info, that messes up the look and may itself cause things to crash. This lets everything run normally, but outputs the dumped data nicely formatte.
• Debug Bar — this gives you all kinds of information about the setup and system. Not nearly as handy as wp_pear_debug, but still handy.

Contact Forms

• cForms II — Awesome contact form plugin that allows you to build complex forms and require specific information. Very good if you’re capturing leads, taking reservation requests, that sort of thing. We use this to create a reservation request form for our vacation rental in Yosemite. Super handy and it has worked really well for us.
• Contact form from Joost de Valk — simple and it’s by Joost, which means it’s done right. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles of cForms II, this is a good option.
• Secure and Accessible Contact Form — an old workhorse. This is still in use on this site and most other places and never have had a problem.

Geek

• Syntax highlighting evolved — if you post code on your blog, this will give you great syntax highlighting. You can see it in action on this site on my pages on adding noindex and nofollow tags to Drupal category pages and my page on adding custom form labels on Drupal forms (useful if the client just dislikes the standard labels or if you want different labels on the public and admin sides).

Third—Party Integration

• Twitter — display tweets on your site… Since I never actually tweet, I can say this seems to work fine, but it doens’t exactly get a tough workout from me

Automated Backup and Maintainence

• Back up your files — uploads and your custom stuff. Essentially a backup of your wp—content folder (minus base themes I think).
• Database backups emailed to you or just archived.

Fortunately, Drupal provides you with taxonomy_node_get_terms_by_vocabulary(). In Drupal 6, this takes the $node object and a vocabulary ID. Then you just have to cycle through the terms it returns and see if your term is in there.

In my case, I have some pages that need to be publicly accessible, but must not be in Google or other indexes. So I let those get tagged with a special taxonomy term (“custom” in my case, but it could be “noindex” or anything). All you need to know is the vocabulary ID and the term ID for the term you’re testing for and you can apply the meta noindex to any node. Sometimes node_load() carries a high cost, but since we’re only testing this on nodes and we’re testing for the node in question, that data should be cached and should not result in another database query.

function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&$vars, $hook) {

// if this is a node and not being edited and it is tagged with term 41, then add a "noindex" tag
   if (arg(0) == 'node' && is_numeric(arg(1)) && is_null(arg(2))) {
	    $node = node_load(arg(1));
	    $terms = taxonomy_node_get_terms_by_vocabulary($node, 2);

		foreach($terms as $term) {
		  if ($term->tid == '41') {
			$vars['head'] = drupal_set_html_head('<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />');
		    break;
		  }
		}
	}
}

In order to get the meta tag to show, you’ll need to clear your caches.

I’ve already written about how I use Twitter and why I follow so few people. I’ve also thought about the possible ways to use Twitter. Greg’s situation got me thinking specifics of how to use Twitter as a writer. My books, being obscure scholarly tomes, I haven’t used Twitter to promote them, but I’ve been watching how people use Twitter and what works and what doesn’t and this is my best advice to Greg. If you have something to add, disagree with something, or think this is good advice and want to encourage Greg to follow this advice, please help Greg out by leaving a comment.

If you don’t need a pep talk about self-promotion, you can skip straight to the bit on how writers can use Twitter, but first I feel compelled to address something that might be the biggest obstacle for many writers…

Self-Promotion Makes You Feel Icky? Get Over It!

Best-selling author Tim Ferris gives a great interview on Mixergy.com that provides illuminating insight the new world of book publishing and promotion. Every author should listen to this. If you’re too much of an artiste to get out there and hawk your book, be prepared to see your book remaindered. Comfort with self-promotion is a major hurdle for many authors, especially those of us trained to life of scholarship and poverty. So before we even get into the specifics of Twitter, first ask yourself:

• Do you think your book is worthwhile and well-written?
• Do you think that there are people out there who would derive pleasure or useful information from your book?
• Do you think there’s something slimy about making it as easy as possible for people to learn about and purchase a useful and/or enjoyable book?
• You’re diligent enough to write a book, are you too lazy to do some work to spread the word about it?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, may you write the book of the century, so brilliant that word will spread all on its own with no help from you. Otherwise, may the Force be with you. I would say "no skin off my back," but if you have a book that I would enjoy reading, it is skin off my back. That’s the realization that changed my attitudes on the subject (though not always my practice). If you have something that could improve someone’s life, even "just" by being entertaining, and you do nothing to get the word out there, you are doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit and you are dishonoring your own labor.

That’s probably preaching to the choir. Most people probably agree with that already or need a lot more convincing than that. But in any case, ask yourself very honestly if self-promotion still makes you feel icky. I’ll be honest, it does me, but thinking about it like I just outlined, makes me a lot more comfortable with it.

Ideas on How to Use Twitter as an Author

Okay, so you’re convinced that you owe it to your soon-to-be adoring public to get the word out about your masterpiece. You’ll want to create a Facebook Fan Page. And you’ll want to build a presence and above all a following on Twitter.

Your goal is to connect with people who share your interests and might enjoy your book in order to create an audience who will be ready to buy when the book comes out. It’s not how many copies you sell in a year that affects your Amazon (or god willing NYT) ranking, it’s how many you’ve sold recently. So one of the keys is preparing the soil. You have all these people following you because you post on stuff they care about. They like you for it and they’re grateful, which is as it should be, because it takes actual effort on your part. Your book comes out. Your Twitter followers buy 500 copies. It’s not many, but it’s all in the same week. That makes you the #1 history book on Amazon and pushes you to the top to get noticed. Small numbers are big here.

• Remember: You’re reaching out to new people, not keeping up with your old surfing buddies. That has a big impact on what you’ll post and it’s good to be clear on your goals. I have two accounts. On my "just for friends" account, for the most part, if we’ve never had a face-to-face conversation, I’m not following you on that account and I’m posting stuff that only people who know me would find interesting (and often not even them). I’ve been playing with Twitter to help attract readers to one of my websites. For that, I tweet on personal topics, but not inside jokes for my friends, and I keep most of the posts on subjects in line with the website.
• Create a custom profile background. Your background should say something about who you are. Once you have a cover design, you need a photo of the book on your profile page.
• Link to your book’s website from your profile. You have at least a basic website for your book right? No? Why not? You can build a simple website in an hour.
• This is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re a writer, so you know all about persistence and marathons. If you have a year until your book goes to press, that’s great. You’ll need all of that because it’s important to start building that audience now.
• Content first, then networking. You can start following your real-world friends right away, but don’t follow people you don’t know until you have some posting history. I always look to see what sort of posts someone has before I follow back. If it’s just 2-3 vague posts, I don’t follow back.
• Write tweets on topics related to your book. When I say "related to your book" that doesn’t mean only self-absorbed posts about how the writing is going, but also just topically related. If you’re writing about pilots flying over the Himalaya in World War II, then you could have posts on WWII history, aviation, the Himalaya. Link to books or book reviews on something you’ve read lately that you liked. Share something cool you’ve found in your research. And yes, the occasional self-absorbed post about how the writing is going. Tweet enough about topics loosely related to your book that there is always one on your profile page.
• Don’t sell on Twitter. Your goal is to connect, have a presence and on rare occasions mention that you have a book for sale. Rare occasions. In other words, as often as you would want to get a sales pitch from every person in your stream, that’s how often they want a sales pitch from you. Save it for when you need.
• Sell on Twitter. Okay, sometimes you do need it. When your book comes out and you want to generate momentum to get higher listings in Amazon or, God willing, the New York Times. That’s when you call on the people who follow you and say, very simply, "If you’re thinking of buying my book eventually, it would be huge for me if you ordered it this week." That’s 101 characters, so there’s even enough left over for a link to where to buy it. Remember though, this it a rare event, calling in a favor from your followers in return for all the great links and thoughts you offer without asking anything in return.
• Regular updates are good, but more than a couple a day and people get tired of you. There are only two sorts of people who will put up with a regular output of 20 posts per day — people who are filtering and not actually reading you anyway, and people who are stalking you and you shouldn’t be giving them that much information. Everyone else is just getting annoyed and they will unfollow you. One marketer type I was reading said there is an optimum number of tweets per day, and that number is three. I think he meant it half tongue-in-cheek, but that correlates with my experience in terms of who I most like to follow. Also, it’s not about averages. The worst twitterers of all do no posts for a month, then do thirty in two days. Never forget that it takes only one click to unfollow you.
• No minute-by-minute updates. If coffee doesn’t play a big role in your book, nobody cares what kind of coffee you had this morning. I hate to break the bad news, but aside from your mother and a few friends, nobody cares about you. They will follow you because you have something interesting to say for them.
• Be personal, be real. The flip side of the last point is that you want to be a real person, the idea is to connect with people on a somewhat more personal level, so your Twitter stream needs some personal flavor, some updates that are not "on topic". It’s a balance, between letting people know who you are and burying them in an avalanche of personal detail. Write a fair number of posts that are specific to you (either personally or your book). If your best friend or spouse can’t guess from the content on the first page whose Twitter stream it is, you’re being way too vague and general.
• Follow the people who follow you if they don’t look like robots or spammers. If someone looks really off from my interests, I don’t follow, but generally you want to because this allows you to direct message each other which can really help get to know someone. If you’re writing non-fiction and still researching, you probably want to make it easy for people to communicate with you.
• Actively block spammers and robots. Some people disagree with this. What’s the harm in having someone you don’t like follow you and add to your follower count? The way I see it, when you follow someone, before they follow back, they’ll look at what you post, who’s following you and who you follow. You want that profile to look like "their people" (i.e. actual human beings who read books like yours). Put another way, think about how Google evaluates web pages. It’s who links to you and who you link to that helps them decide which "neighborhood" you’re in. I want my Twitter profile to show that I’m in a neighborhood of "our people". In the Twitter world, I live in a gated community. Spammer scumbags are turned away by security.
• Find people to follow with Twitter search. With some Twitter readers (Hoot Suite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc.), you can create a column for a search if you really want to follow your topic. Put in some words related to your book and find people to follow and connect with. If you follow someone, he or she will likely look at your profile. If they see a kindred spirit, they’ll follow you.
• If someone mentions you, they’ll do so with an "at reply" and you must acknowledge it. To fail to do so makes you look like a prima dona too busy to respond to the little people. If you are like Neil Gaiman with thousands of followers, all reasonable people will understand that you can’t respond to everyone (though Neil gets complaints from people who just don’t get it). For most of us, though, it is completely manageable in a few minutes per day. If you don’t have those few minutes, then just don’t be on Twitter. Simple as that. Of be on Twitter, but just for social reasons, not to spread the word about your book.

I know there are many things I’ve left out and maybe some things that you disagree with. If so, please leave a comment to make this post better for other writers!

How I Use Twitter

First off, don’t follow me. If you don’t already have my phone number and email address, you’ll probably be disappointed by my Twitter stream, and even if you do know me well enough to have those things, you still might be disappointed. If you’re thinking of unfollowing me, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t stay on topic unless the topic is "random thoughts that cross Tom’s mind". I see my audience as my wife, some friends, and strangely, myself. My Twitter stream is a bit of a diary — a cool link, a random thought, a quote I like, a local event. I don’t expect to have an army followers and I’m not trying to build up a Twitter empire that I can leverage to get you to buy my açai berry treatment for flatulence. Just recently, I found out that a local non-profit that I think does great stuff is in rough financial shape (Yosemite Assocation). I tweeted in hopes that my few followers would retweet my donation reminder to their many followers and get some money rolling in. Other than that one time, I’ve never wanted anyone other than a handful for friends to follow me and I only follow a few people who are not friends.

Who I follow is another matter. If you’re trying to use Twitter to connect, here’s how I do things. I’m just one guy, perhaps completely atypical of the average Twitter user, but if you are looking to create a Twitter empire that includes me, you might want to read this.

Why I Might Just Block You

In a word: spam. At first it was a complete mystery why people who don’t know me would follow me. How were they finding me? As near as I can tell, most of them have alerts for some keyword and they habitually follow anyone who triggers their alerts. Some of these people trigger on words relating to Yosemite. That’s fine. I expect they’ll be fundamentally disappointed and unfollow me eventually because, as noted above, I do not stay on topic, but that’s their decision. I certainly don’t hold it against them and some people don’t mind a low signal to noise ratio. If that’s you, welcome aboard.

When I do hold it against them is when they clearly don’t even read the update that triggers the alert. For example, after Ben Bernanke said the economy could recover in late 2009, I said that a pterodactyl could attack New York. A spammer who triggers on New York started following me. At the height of it’s absurdity, I mentioned "browns" as in non-native brown trout that are eating native frogs in Sierra lakes and I immediately got followed by someone who Twitters about the Cleveland Browns. Of course, this didn’t help his brand because I thought "What a [expletive deleted] idiot". I block these people and can see that eventually Twitter will need real spam filters.

Why I Will Follow You

A lot of people are marketing via Twitter and some outright are spamming. I suppose that’s their right, but you have to know how to do it.

Personally, I like to only follow as many people as I can read, so at a certain point, if I follow more people, I have to get rid of some. Second, if I follow you, it’s because I want to follow you and not because I care, at least initially, whether you follow me back. I’m not interesting to 99.9999% of the planet and I’m certainly not interesting to everyone that I find interesting. I don’t expect you to reciprocate just because I follow you and, frankly, I probably won’t reciprocate just because you follow me. You have to be interesting in some way and here’s what makes you interesting to me:

• You are a friend of mine or perhaps my wife. If you were in town and didn’t call me would I be bummed? If yes, then I probably do want to know that you’re enjoying your morning tea or are frustrated at work and all the little details of your life that I’m otherwise missing. Thanks for being better about keeping your friends in the loop than I am. If you’re not my friend and you tweet about everything that passes between your lips, I won’t follow you.
• You are inherently interesting even to strangers. Maybe I don’t know you, but you’re just plain funny like Tim Siedel, aka @badbanana or you have a high percentage of your tweets on topics I care about. I’m interested in hiking and wildflowers in Yosemite, so I follow several Yosemite Twitterers I don’t know.
• You engage. If you have no @replies, you had better stay on topic (like SkiingExaminer, who does engage a lot, but I would follow him either way because he sticks to skiing. No posts about his morning cup of Joe there). The importance of engagement surprised me. I didn’t really see it until I started thinking more carefully about my behavior. I enjoyed Mike Linder‘s presence on Twitter, so we started trading @replies. Then I finally hunted him down and cornered him at his workplace. I’m glad I did. Nice guy. And he said he was glad I did too, but would I please lower my weapon.
• You update occasionally rather than constantly. I’m not sure what my limit is, but if you update more than 10 times per day over the long term, I’m probably going to unfollow you unless you’re fricken brilliant. If you’re updating every fifteen minutes, you must be bringing me closer to enlightenment, riches or ice cream with every update.

One last comment on auto-responders. Somehow, you may have decided that you should send a welcome message to everyone who follows you. I find that getting an automatic message from a computer is a sweet and wonderful experience.

• Matt Cutts, the head of search quality at Google, has a nice overview on how to make the most of WordPress.
• Tubetorial series on WordPress SEO.

I know, I know. Some people say it’s foolish to give Google all that data for free. All my sites are (at least in my opinion), content-rich, above-board sites, so I’m not really afraid of Google seeing who comes and goes. I do understand that this is not a free service provided by Google, though, it’s a data exchange: I let them see my data and they keep track of it for me. Fine.

So now that I’m paying them so richly with my data, I wish they would make their service a bit less annoying. What’s annoying? Two things principally:

• No full referrer data. When someone visits from a forum, the URL is often something like http://someforum.com/index.php?page=123456. Unfortunately GA does not bother to record the part after the ?, which means that you can’t possibly find out where people are coming from. I’m not exactly running the most high-profile, highest traffic sites on the net, so I try to stop in and say hello is a forum is having a substantive discussion of what I’m saying. Unfortunately, GA doesn’t capture that data unless you put some extra work in.
• Tabbed-browser unfriendly. What’s wrong with Google? Don’t they use Firefox? They must, because if you click on THIS LINK and download and start using Firefox (that is, you switch from another brand of browser), they’ll pay me $1. So obviously they’ve heard of Firefox. Now when I surf in Firefox, I don’t click a link, read a page, click a link, read a page. I get to a page, click every interesting link to open in a new tab, and then go through them and close the tab as needed. GA doesn’t let me do that. Let’s say that I do this:
  • Open a page that lists all the sites that sent traffic to my site. I want to drill down and see which pages from some of those sites actually sent the traffic.
  • I CTRL-click on each link that interests me and it opens the page in a new tab, but it opens the root page, not the one I’m drilling down to! Come on!

  So why is that a problem? Simple. If it worked my way, I would go to the root page, open five links in new tabs and then work from there. Total pages viewed: 6. Total clicks: 6. If I do it the GA way, on the other hand, it’s down to the subpage, back to the root page, down to the sub page, back to the root page. And here’s the really bad part: if the root page lists sites ten at a time and has 200 sites, I need to keep navigating back to where I was. So to see those five pages, I might need to view 15 pages or more. What a hassle.

I’ve given up filling out the GA feedback form since they seem to be all about tab-unfriendly AJAX. Well, I only pay with my data and everyone else with anywhere near the same capabilities require me to pay with my data and my money, so I put up with the hassle, but if I had a site that was making me a living, I would rather spend my time building the site, not wrestling with analytics. So I suspect that GA is a bottom-feeder service that targets people like me with little traffic and no commerce, which is giving Google a somewhat skewed view of traffic on the net. I guess they’re getting data for the big-guy sites by using the ad revenue.

The Touchgraph search utility is a Java app that loads from their website and shows related pages and their degree of relatedness. This is not a link map, but more or less like the Google related pages concept. It’s pretty cool to give a visual sense of the weight of a given site and how Touchgraph thinks it fits in with the term or site you search on. The screenshot (click to enlarge) is a search on Yosemite National Park, because I’m an avid Yosemite Explorer as it were. What the screenshot doesn’t show is that there is also a sort of sidebar that lists all the related sites and gives you some info on those sites.

Quintura is a different deal. It shows the relationships between words. It is a fun idle pastime for linguists and perhaps for people who want to buy pay per click ads (i.e. Google AdWords and the like). Unlike Touchgraph, it’s a tool you download and run on your desktop.

Both of these are excellent time sponges for procrastinators and thus highly recommended. Actually, they’re more like novelties that you’ll play with for a while and discard. If you know of anything similar, please make a mention in the comments.

This means that you effectively have duplicate content, that is identical content that appears on multiple URLs. In a bad case, this will get some semi-random URL listed in the search engine instead of the one canonical (that is “authoritative, recognized, accepted”) URL that you want the search engines to use to get to that specific page on your site. It might also list both your preferred canonical URL and one or more of the others. That sounds good, because you could just take over the Google listings with your ten different URLs for your page of elephant jokes, but the problem is that it will split the power of those pages (call this Page Rank if you want). This might be even worse than listing the wrong page, because rather than one page in the top-10 in Google, you’ll have a page back at number 50 and another back at number 75 and so on. Nobody reads those pages. Why? Because you’ve ended up dividing up your inbound links and confusing the search engine robot. It’s just a robot—don’t make it think too hard!

For example, let’s say you just wrote a post on The Big Bad List of Elephant Jokes and you assign it a post slug of “elephant-jokes” and you put it in the categories “elephants” and “jokes” and you tag it as “humor”. You write it in June of 2020. This means that Goohoo! finds it at

• http://raisedbyturtles.org/ (b/c it shows up on the home page as the most recent post)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/elephants (b/c it’s the most recent post in that category)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/jokes (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/tag/funny (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/archives/2020/06/ (because it’s at the top of your June 2020 archives)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes (because this is the actual URL).

You don’t really want to do this. You want one canonical URL that reaches any given chunk of content. It’s better for you, your visitors and the search engines. So basically, you want to only index the “real”, that is canonical, URL.

Sorting the Canonical URL and Duplicate Content Issues

How do you do that? You could disallow the search engines from your archive and category pages using a robots.txt file. This will work, but the problem is that if you don’t get crawled before a post gets pushed off your home page, you might never get that post indexed (unless you generate a sitemap perhaps).

So what do you do? Simple, you install the incredible Headspace2 plugin. I used to use and recommend a hacked combination of the SEO Title Tag plugin and the All-in-one SEO Pack. That’s a powerful combo too, but not as powerful as Headspace2 and they need a minor hack (actually just a manual database change) to work together. I don’t say Headspace2 is incredible lightly, but this is just a great idea that is well-executed.

I got a fatal error when I installed H2, version 3.3.16, but that’s because the headpsace/plugins.php file needed to be executable by “owner” and I had the wrong file permissions on it. You can change that simply from your FTP client (try Filezilla if you don’t have an FTP client). If you’ve been using AIOSP, by the way, you can import all your data via the Headspace2 options.

Once you install this plugin (installs like any WP plugin; instructions in the readme file that comes with the download), you need to go in and enable some modules. This is a complex and powerful plugin and not all of it is enabled by default.

• From your WordPress admin area, go to Options » Headspace2 » Modules
• Look over at the “Disabled” list. Drag and drop any of these modules into the “Simple” section. I have the following activated currently:
  • No Index/No Follow — essential for sorting the duplicate content issue
  • Page Title — essential for the second part of this how-to.
  • Page Description — Let’s you create a custom meta description, which will get to in a second.
  • More Text — Instead of a generic “Read more” for a continued article, you can customize the text so it’s something like “Read more about sorting out duplicate content…”
  • Tags — lets you tag your pages and puts these tags in your meta keywords.
• Now that you have the modules enabled, you’ll be able to control the indexing of all your pages. At edit or creation time, you can keep a single page out of the search indexes, which is useful for things like Contact pages and things like that. More importantly, though, we’ll get rid of all those category and archive pages and make them more or less invisible to the search engines.
  • Go back to the Headspace2 “Page Settings”. You should see a list that includes:
    • Archives
    • Categories
    • Search Pages
    • Tag Pages
  • For each of those listed above (not all the ones listed by Headspace2), click on it and, at the bottom of the options, you can see two check boxes. Check the No Index box, but not the No Follow box. Save. This tells the search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc) that it shouldn’t even bother to keep a record of the content of that page, but that it should follow those links on through to the actual pages you want indexed. If you check the No Follow box, you would prevent the search engine from even finding those pages that you really want indexed.
  • Note that you can also edit the page title and other information for those pages. We won’t bother right now, but it’s something to keep in mind in case you want to customize any of this.

Sorting out Meta Titles

H2 has another great utility: it lets you set unique meta titles (that’s the one that appears in the upper browser title bar, not the one the reader sees on the page) that are different from your H1 heading title. You can also craft meta descriptions and meta keywords and, in fact, any meta information. It will add additional text entry boxes that let you set your keywords, description and title on the post edit/creation screen.

The meta title is really key and the only one that really really really matters. This is what appears in the big bold text in the search results. This is the first thing about your page that most people will see. You want to make it count and you don’t want to simply duplicate what you have for the post heading. Above all, under no circumstances should the average blogger have a site where the meta title looks like this: My Site Name | Name of My Post. Nobody cares about the name of your stupid site and it’s also not descriptive in the least if you have a name like mine. It makes your titles look less unique and harder to tell apart if your visitor has several pages of your site open in different browser tabs or windows.

Why would you want your meta title to be different from your post title? Well, Google’s top search quality engineer, Matt Cutts, pointed out in his WordPress SEO video that varying these two gives you two chances to match terms. You can use subtly different wording, looking to use alternate spelling (changes and changing in Matt’s example) or related terms (photos and pictures and images for example).

This is actually not why I do it, though.The meta title appears in the search results, so it needs to give the user some information scent. There’s only so much room to be clever. However, in your RSS feed or on page, where you’ve already got the users there, you might want to just give them something funny or clever, but perhaps that does not make the general idea of the article immediately obvious. In many cases, such as a how-to article like this, my two titles might be similar. But when I write some humor or political commentary, I might want to have an H1 heading that is engaging, but not necessarily descriptive in the same way the meta title is.

Meta Title

Longer, more descriptive title that should say: “I answer your question. I am the page that you’re looking for. Come look at me.”

H1 Heading Title

Might be even longer (on this page I’ve added the “WordPress Setup Part 2″) or very short. It might be pithy, ironic or a mystery whose real meaning is only revealed as the reader goes down the page. The user is on the page already and has a view of the text that follows. The H1 text should say “Read on! I’m funny. I’m interesting. I’m good for a laugh or a solution.” It’s not necessarily a summary.

What if I already have pages without unique titles?

So now if you’ve never written a post and you don’t want to set titles for categories, you’re all set, but what if you are trying to fix up an old site, or you want to attach titles to category pages? Simple. Just leave the Options panel and head on over to Manage » Meta-data. You’ll see that H2 gives you a list with the Post Title (what appears on the page) fixed and the Page Title (what appears in the browser bar) editable. Now, look at the upper right corner of the screen. Headspace lets you mass edit almost everything—page title, post-slug, custom “more” text and everything. This is an amazing management tool.

Other Meta Tags

Meta Keywords

Who cares about these? The search enignes don’t pay attention anymore, so it’s just a waste of bandwidth, right? Perhaps, but things change and you may someday find these useful for your own internal search algorithms or what have you. I do this for my benefit, not the search engines. I write my title first, which keeps me on topic. I write keywords last, to see how I did. But of course you can ignore it. Since you’re using Headspace, you just generate your tags, which have uses for helping your visitors find related posts and so forth, and these will become meta keywords, so why not (if it’s not worth being a tag, I don’t bother to add extras).

Meta Description

Search engines don’t use this either, right? Probably not for ranking (how high you are in the results), but they might use it for relevance (trying to figure out the actual content of your post, assuming the description matches the rest of the page). More importantly, the will use it for the snippet that appears in the search results in some cases. An example would be where the algorithm tells the engine that your page is on elephant jokes, but it doesn’t find the word on the page so it can’t find a relevant snippet. What does it use? If you have no meta description, it might use nothing or it might just start grabbing your navigation text (I’ve had that happen on image pages). If you have the description, you control what appears in these cases instead of depending on SE magic.

Recap

By using Headspace2, you save yourself tons of headaches, lots of theme-hacking, and make your site more usable for visitors and search engines alike. If done right, your duplicate content issues and duplicate title issues will be totally resolved.

The Problem with the default WordPress URLs

By default, every page in WordPress will have a URL like http://site.com/?pid=31. What you want is a URL like http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes for your collection of Elephant Jokes because of course there is nothing funnier than elephant jokes and nobody who sees that URL will be able to resist the urge to click it. Nobody. Some WordPress user add additional parameters (and I did so in the past), so that it looks like http://site.com/2020/06/07/elephant-jokes if it’s posted on June 7, 2020 (I predict a resurgence in the popularity of elephant jokes in the 2020s). That’s fine, but there is a drawback in that you probably don’t want people navigating back up to http://site.com/2020/06 by editing your URL because that URL may be a dead end or, at best, list the articles published on that date. So Google’s top “search quality” engineer, Matt Cutts, suggests simply using the post name. If you will have a carefully categorized, hierarchical site, where posts will typically belong to just one category, it may make sense to have the category in the URL (again, more information for your visitors and in your search results). Otherwise, probably not.

Why Change Your URL Schema?

Some people call these type of URLs “search-engine friendly” but in reality, the search engines can handle a URL in the default form just fine. However, this method lets you achieve a few things:

• You give keywords and context to the search engines (SEs). This isn’t going to automatically rocket you to the top, but it will help the SEs a lot in determining what the main point of the page is. I’m not smart enough to game the search engines and I also believe that long-term, it will just become harder and harder anyway. That said, like any writing, you don’t want to make it purposely difficult for the reader. So you use this to give one of your “readers”, aka Googlebot or the Yahoo! Slurp or the MSN engine, a little help in understanding your message.
• You give keywords and context to your users. I often look at a URL before I click on a link. I use this information all the time and appreciate a well-chosen URL, whether displayed at the bottom of my browser or in search results. However, where this really helps your potiential audience is in the case where someone does something like paste a URL into an email or forum. Which of the following is more useful to you as a reader:
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this – http://example.com/?p=34″
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this – http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes“

  Definitely the second one. It saves you time—if you don’t want to read elephant jokes (and why would you so hate elephants?), you don’t waste your time clicking.

• Easier to remember and to give out verbally.

How do your Change Your Default URL Schema in WordPress?

This is very simple. In your WP admin area, go to Options » Permalinks and choose Custom. Now for your custom structure, you can enter in the text box:

• /%postname%/ — This is the Matt Cutts style.
• /%category%/%postname%/ — This is my preferred style for a site that is meaningfully hierarchical and categorized (i.e. if you expect people to use drill-down navigation).
• /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ — use this if you really don’t want any duplicate paths, but realistically all you need to do is add a number at the end of the post slug and you’ll get the same effect.

By default, WordPress will just use your-very-long-post-title-with-little-words-included. Sometimes that’s okay, depending on the title, but as a general rule, write custom post-slug on every post. The other important thing to remember here is to write a custom post-slug on every post. In the post edit/creation area, there’s a box on the right called post-slug that determines the last element of your URL. By the way, if you don’t already, write a custom post-slug on every post. Did I mention that already?

Recap

WordPress gives you a nice facility for creating intelligent and readable URLs for your site. Taking a bit of time to restructure the default URL and to write useful post-slugs on every post will be beneficial to your readers, will attract more readers and will help the search engines determine the focus of your page.