search engine terms | Bertram's Blog

Repercussions

April 2, 2020 — Pat Bertram

There is much talk about the financial fallout from the stay-at-home orders and the quarantine, but there are other possible repercussions no one is mentioning. For example, with families being forced into a closed environment, any issues or potential problems could be exacerbated. Problems like abuse. Problems like incest.

Shortly after my first two novels were published, I had a text conversation with my sister, who had just finished reading the books. I asked her if it was strange reading a $&X scene written by her sister. (Just so you know, I am not averse to using the word, I’m just trying to hide it from google.) I posted the conversation here on my blog because I was so tickled with her observations.

A couple of months later, on the list of search engine terms people use to find my blog, I noticed a lot of incestual queries. There was no mistaking the meaning of the terms. They were explicit: how to F*** my sister, tips to have $&X with my sister.

Not one to sneer at a gift from the writing gods, even such a sleezy gift as this, I wrote a blog: $&X With Sister Tips — Writing Tips, That Is. (The more views a site gets, the higher it’s ranked by search engines, and so the more views it gets.) It is by far the most viewed blog I have ever written, but in the past couple of weeks, with so many people staying at home, the views have more than quintupled. People don’t want to know how to write about it. They want to do it. The terms people used today include: how to f*** your sister; how to make $&X sister tips; how to do $&X with my sister; how can i have $&X with my sister.

Even worse, people are leaving comments such as: “I really love my sister she is so cute and gorgeous but how do i ask her to have $&X with me? I want it really bad with her like right now.”

All those poor girls. Do they know what creeps their siblings are?

I wonder how many people are huddling fearfully in their rooms now that they can’t go to school or work or the mall to get away from abuse or potential abuse. And why aren’t we hearing any of these stories? You can’t tell me the stories aren’t out there. You can’t tell me people aren’t suffering. But then, such stories are almost always kept quiet to keep from destroying the family.

I considered deleting the articles I mentioned above, and yet, there are writers who use incest as a theme. Besides, it’s not going to stop people from wanting what they can’t have, and it’s not going to stop them from trying even if they weren’t forced to stay at home. But it does give the saying, “There’s no place like home,” a different meaning.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in life, relationships, writing. Tags: abuse, blog search engine terms, fallout from quarantine, financial fallout, incest, search engine terms. 3 Comments »

On-Page SEO and Keyword Usage

December 18, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I give my blog spam folder a quick look now and again to make sure that non-spam comments don’t get relegated to spam limbo. Sometimes the spam comments are totally absurd, such as this one: Nice tips. It is actually incomprehensible opinion now, but also from general, that usefulness in addition to significance is usually overwhelming. Thanks once again and all the best.

And then there was this one:

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings. You now NEED On-Page SEO.

So what is good On-Page SEO? First your keyword must appear in the title. Then it must appear in the URL. You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1, H2, H3 tags in your article. Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword. There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….

Considering that this was posted by someone trying to get me to subscribe to their Search Engine Optimization company, and considering that the comment actually made sense (or would, once I translated the jargon) and considering that my website domain provider has been trying to get me to buy SEO Visibility to the tune of $36.00 a month, I decided to research the topic a bit.

I started with “keyword.” Obviously, it’s the key word in the post or web page, but more than that, it’s a word or phrase people use when searching the internet. There’s no doubt that using the exact search terms adds to one’s search engine visibility. I often check the terms people use to find this blog, and then use those search terms as topics for articles. I made sure to use the search term in the article and in the title, since it stood to reason that if people were looking for such topics, I should make it as easy for them to find as possible. (A few of those articles are among my all-time most viewed posts: Describing a Scene in an Interesting Way, Describing a Winter Scene, and What Do You Say to Someone Who is Grieving at Christmas?) Apparently, although I didn’t know it, this was good On-Page SEO.

Luckily, I never had to worry about the keyword being in the URL — if the keyword is in the title of the article, WordPress automatically adds it to the URL of article. I used to try to write cute titles, such as Writing to the Extremes for a post about hands and feet (the extremeties), but not surprisingly, that post didn’t get many hits. So I try to keep the cuteness to minimum. (The key word here is “try.” Sometimes I let my attempts at cleverness get the better of me.)

Also, the title of the post uses H1 — Heading 1, so that fulfills one of the requirements for H1, H2, H3 tags. Since I try to follow good essay styling when writing, I generally include the keyword (the topic) in the first paragraph and then bring things full circle by referencing it in the last paragraph. I’m not going to worry about H2, H3, bold or italics in the body of my posts — I don’t want to lose the stream-of-consciousness flow that so many of my posts have by kowtowing to SEO.

I have recently begun to use an internal link in all my blog posts as a hedge against content scraping and plagiarism. And now it turns out to be good on-page SEO usage. I also use an image for each post, as suggested by WordPress in their articles about how to get Freshly Pressed, so now all I have to do is add the keyword to the alt tag. (When you upload an image, there is a place for Alt Text. I never knew what it meant, but apparently, if for any reason the image can’t be displayed, the alt text will be shown.)

Which brings us to the final point — Latent Semantic Indexing. Search engines have the capability to scan articles to see what they are about. A page with both the keyword and semantically related terms has a higher search enging ranking than one using only the keywords. (In this article SEO, search enging ranking, search engine visibility, and Search Engine Optimization are semantically related terms.)

Whew! All that research because of a spam comment! I learned something tonight, and I hope you did too. (Hmm. I might have learned something, but I didn’t follow through — there was nothing about SEO in the first paragraph, and until this sentence, nothing about SEO in the last paragraph. So perhaps this article is really about spam!)

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+

Posted in blogging, How to, internet. Tags: blog spam, H1 tags, Keyword Usage, Latent Semantic Indexing, On-Page SEO, search engine optimization, search engine terms. 9 Comments »

Grief is NOT Self-Indulgent

September 30, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I was looking at search terms people used to find this blog, and someone googled “I feel self-indulgent when I think of my deceased partner and I cry a lot.” That got my ire going — not about her feeling that way, but at the way our society handles grief. Thinking about one’s partner and crying are not wrong, but there is something seriously wrong with a society that makes the bereft feel self-indulgent for grieving. What the heck is wrong with crying? With grieving? With talking about one’s grief?

Grief is not something to be shoved under the bed like a box of junk that you don’t quite know what to do with. Grief is how we learn to deal with a world suddenly gone crazy, and tears are how we relieve the tension of that grief. I don’t know how long this particular person had been dealing with her grief, but I’m at eighteen months, and though I’ve gone on with my life, I still have upsurges of grief and bouts of crying. Though these bouts have diminished significantly and I recuperate quite quickly, I’m prepared to go the distance, however long it takes. Some people say it takes a minimum of two years to get over the sadness and tears, some say four years, some say one year for every seven years of togetherness, some say never — that even after twenty years they still have times where the truth of their partner’s death hits them and the tears flow.

Since mourning is considered by the uninitiated to be unacceptable behavior after a month or two, most people quickly learn to hide their grief. Grown children especially get irritated at tears, perhaps because they can’t bear to see their once-strong parent brought low or perhaps because they think their parent is being self-indulgent. A friend of mine lost her partner six months ago, and her son berates her for being a drama queen. Such non-acceptance of a natural process adds more agony to an already agonizing time. As I said, there is something seriously wrong with a society that demonizes grief.

After my partner died, I asked the moderator of a grief support group how I should handle questions about my grief. I didn’t want to bore people with my ongoing emotional traumas, but at the same time I didn’t want to pretend everything was fine. I’d also been blogging about my grief but wasn’t sure I wanted to continue since I didn’t want to seem whiny and self-indulgent. She told me it was okay to tell people I was coping if I didn’t want to go into details, but she suggested I continue writing about grief because people needed to know the truth of it. And I’ve followed her advice even though it was hard at times. I mean, after eighteen months, shouldn’t I have gotten over it? The truth is, you never get over a significant loss — you learn to manage living without him or her.

It used to be that women hid their pregnancies, but now they flaunt their “baby bumps.” Maybe it’s time we brought grief out into the open so that the bereft do not feel as if they are self-indulgent for dealing with loss the only way possible — with remembrances and tears.