Finding information on your favorite blog (hopefully it’s this one)

This post is the third in a three-part series that covers how to subscribe to this site, share posts on it, and navigate it. Recently I have been working with some clients to attract readers to and retain them on the clients’ websites; these articles reflect some strategies we’ve implemented. This series isn’t just to encourage the use of those features here, but also to help other bloggers add them to their sites.

The two best ways of encouraging visitors to stay on your website are by having engaging content and making that content easy to find. This post covers the latter.

Tags and tag clouds

The list of keywords that appear after each entry on this blog and many other ones are called “tags.” From Wikipedia:

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information.

Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator or the consumer of the item—i.e. not usually as part of some formally defined classification scheme. Tags are typically used in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated internet taxonomies for online resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks.

By selecting a tag on this site, and most other ones that use them, you’ll get a list of all of the posts on the site that have been tagged with that keyword. If only the current post appears, it means it probably is the first time that keyword has been used on that site.

Many sites have tag clouds to help visitors browse the topics on the site and see which ones are the most common ones. Again, from Wikipedia:

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

On this site, the 10 most-popular tags appear in the right sidebar under the Common Topics header.

(Using tags also can improve a site’s ranking in search engine results; they usually generate pages for each keyword. And, if nothing else, they lead to an additional instance of the word appearing on a page.)

I used the Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 plugin for WordPress to add tags to this site. That plugin also has the option to repeat the tags as meta keywords, which can help a website’s ranking in some search engines too.

Search box

Most sites have a search box in the sidebar (as this one does on the right) or in the header. Search boxes are built into many templates (as is the case with this site), but they are easy to add via widgets or text boxes too. Sometimes the box will give users the option of searching that site or the entire web (typically via Google).

Search boxes on blogs and other websites typically work in a similar fashion to search engines. The biggest difference, however, is that the returned results usually are in order of the entry’s post date (from newest to oldest), whereas search engines return rank results based on many factors.

Popular posts

This site and many other blogs highlight the most popular posts (mine are in the sidebar to the right). That lists isn’t an exercise in vanity, or at least it’s not meant to be here, but rather as a place for users new to the site to determine the best starting point.

I’m sure there’s some widget or plugin that can determine that the most-popular pages automatically. As for this blog, I just list the pages that get the most traffic and comments.

Use serial commas

In a series of three or more items, a comma separates each item in the list. If the last two entries are connected by a conjunction—usually “and” or “o”—a comma usually comes before the conjunction as well. That comma is known as the serial comma.

Associated Press style, however, mostly used by newspapers and magazines, omits the comma before the conjunction, probably to save space. (Obviously, when I write or edit for a publication that uses AP style, I don’t use the serial comma.)

As I’ve written about previously, the serial comma is one of the most contentious pieces of punctuation. Yes, people do argue about such matters, and not just when they are drunk and have finished bickering about Iraq, the Tuck Rule, and whether the American Idol judges are too nasty this year. (Note the use of the serial comma in that last sentence.)

I am in favor of using the serial comma for the simple reason that it reduces ambiguity. Take this example that I heard in an editing class at EEI Communications:

A man died. His will said that his estate “should be split between his sons: Gordon, Andy and Stewart.” The executrix divided the man’s estate evenly between the three men. Gordon, however, sued. He argued that the lack of a comma before “and” meant that the estate should be divided so he got one half of it and his brothers split the other half.

The judge agreed with Gordon; his share went from one-third of the estate to one-half of it. Andy and Stewart went from getting one-third each to one-quarter each.

If the father wanted his estate to be split evenly between his three sons, a serial comma would have ensured that happened. And if he wanted Gordon to have a larger share, specifying that disbursement (“Gordon gets half of my estate; Andy and Stewart each get a quarter of it”) would have made his intentions clearer. (The instructor claimed the story was true.)

If you want more details about arguments for and against using serial commas, read Wikipedia’s entry on the subject.

The differences between em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens

One of the most common problems I encounter is the improper use of dashes and hyphens. Here’s a quick reference adapted from a presentation on grammar I gave at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu when I was an editor there on the Commercial Market Strategies (CMS) project:

• Em dash — (hold ALT and type 0, 1, 5, 1 in Microsoft Word on a PC, also accessible from the Insert > Symbol > font (normal text) menu). Denotes a sudden break in thought or emphasis.
• En dash — (hold ALT and type 0, 1, 5, 0 in Microsoft Word on a PC, also accessible from the Insert > Symbol > font (normal text) menu). Denotes a range, often replacing the word “to.”
• Hyphen – (the key next to “0″ on most keyboards). Connects compound words. (Yes, I realize there’s no difference between the symbol for the en dash and hyphen in this entry; it’s a quirk in HTML.)

(Because of a glitch in the Safari and Firefox browsers, the sizes of the en dash and hyphen may appear incorrectly on your screen; the em dash is the larger of the two.)

Example: Tax-preparation services will be held March 10–19—what a thrill that will be!

Also, these rules are per The Chicago Manual of Style. For more information, check out its Q&A on hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes or Wikipedia’s entry on dashes.