Posts About ‘learning’

Building The Case for Long-Form Content

Shelf with books

The resurgence of long-form content on the internet is a hot topic at the moment. Last year Jonathan Colman wrote his powerful call to arms for the SEO industry to up their game and create more value with the content it publishes, and I joined the chorus with my own thoughts on how SEO could come to embrace long-form as a legitimate approach to content.

Long-form content, and whether or not it works on the internet, has been an ongoing debate for many years. Nicholas Carr’s alarmist book The Shallows suggests the internet ‘trains’ us to prefer short snippets of content, but the evidence is mounting that long-form is a legitimate publishing approach online resulting in a positive impact on many different fronts.

Last week Co.Labs published the results of their own long-form content experiment, in which they changed their usual quick & dirty tactic of getting stories out there quickly to a different approach, where they revisited and expanded existing articles and turned them in to growing stories. (more…)

Can The SEO Industry Embrace Long-Form Content?

bigstock-Old-Books-featured

A recent spate of blog posts have been published ridiculing the pervasive “What X Taught Me About Y” genre. Richard Falconer published a long list of them, I wrote my own parody here on State of Search, and Michael Kovis effectively demolished the genre. But there are also fans of these types of posts, and some have flocked to the relevant comment sections to proclaim their favour, sparking interesting debates in the process.

Do these type of posts add value? Are they worthwhile to write – let alone to read? Is this a type of blog fluff that we should embrace – like top 10 lists – and strive to do as well as possible, or is it better to mock and shun these metaphor-driven blogs? (more…)