At year’s end it’s always interesting to look back and see which articles got the most visits. Here are the top-five QuakerRanter.org blog posts of 2013.

1. Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning

This grew out of a interesting little tweet about search engine optimization that got me thinking about how Friends Meetings can retain the curious one-time visitors.

2. Tom Heiland

My father-in-law died in January. These are few pictures I put together while Julie was still at the family home with the close relatives. Thanks to our friends for sharing a bit of our life by reading this one. He’s missed.

3. Expanding Concepts of Pacifism

A look at Friends testimonies and the difficulties of being a fair-trade pacifist in our hyper-connected world today. I think George Fox and the early Friends were faced with similar challenges and that our guide can be the same as theirs.

4. Rethinking Blogs

A number of new services are trying to update the culture of blogging. This post looked at comments; a subsequent one considered how we might reorganize our blogs into more of a structured Wiki.

5. Iraq Ten Years Later: Some of Us Weren’t Wrong

This year saw a lot of hang wringing by mainstream journalists on the anniversary of the Iraq War. I didn’t have much patience and looked at how dissenting voices were regularly locked out of debate ten years ago–and are still locked out with the talk that “all of us” were wrong then.

I should give the caveat that these are the top-five most-read articles that were written this year. Many of the classics still outperform these. The most read continues to be my post on unpopular baby names (just today I overheard an expectant mother approvingly going through a list of over-trendy names; I wondered if I should send her the link). My post on how to order men’s plain clothing from Gohn’s Brothers continues to be popular, as does a report about a trip to a legendary water hole deep in the South Jersey pines.

Word! SEO gets people to your site. Usability keeps people on your site. @brianksullivan #dfwwp #uxblog

— Rani Monson (@RaniMonson) March 23, 2013

To translate, SEO is “search engine optimization,” the often-huckersterish art of tricking Google to display your website higher than your competitors in search results. “Usability” is the catch-all term for making your website easy to navigate and inviting to visitors. Companies with deep pockets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solution to ranking high with search engines is to provide visitors with good reasons to visit your site. What if we applied these principles to our churches and meetinghouses and swapped the terms?

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse /
Hospitality keeps people returning.

A lot of Quaker meetinghouses have pretty good “natural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the middle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few historical markers of notable Quakers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meetings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is covered. Although we do get the occasional “aren’t you all Amish?” comments, we have a much wider reputation that our numbers would necessarily warrant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hospitality we could work on? Do we provide places where spiritual seekers can both grow personally and engage in the important questions of the faith in the modern world? Are we invitational, bringing people into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my freelance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of statistical reports and redesigned some underperforming pages, but then turned my attention to the client’s content. It was in this realm that my greatest quantifiable successes occurred. At the heart of the content work was asking how could the site could more fully engage with first-time visitors. The “usability considerations” on the Wikipedia page on usability could be easily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ general background? What is the users’ context for working? What must be left to the machine? Can users easily accomplish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much training do users need? What documentation or other supporting materials are available to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends consider this more. FGC’s “New Meetings Toolbox” has a section on welcoming newcomers. But I’d love to hear more stories about how we’re working on the “usability” of our spiritual communities.

The Google blog asks for user input into what makes a good SEO and reports that they’ve just rewritten their page that warns against rogue SEO artists and gives recommendations about what to look out for. It starts with their definition

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.

The blog asks “how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO?” I’ve been doing a lot more optimization for clients lately. What’s particularly fun is running across the work of the SEO scam artists their competition have brought in. I’ve seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair practice and been penalized by Google.

Google’s job and our job

I’ve always taken the approach that it’s Google’s job to give people
the most useful and relevant return for their search and our job to
make sure we have useful and relevant material and arrange it in such a
way that Google can access it.

SEO is important but only in the
context of smart web design and a coherent and well thought out
internet marketing strategy. Firms that claim to do SEO
without checking the analytics data and consulting with the client
about their business strategy will not help the site in the long run.

What your SEO expert should be doing

I would agree with most of Google’s recommendations of what to look out against. But what to look for? A quick list would include:

• A SEO consultant that looks at analytics data before making any changes. If the client doesn’t already have Google Analytics running on the site I install it and wait a month before doing anything. I do that because you want:
• Quantifiable results. You should be able to see shifting use patterns if the optimization is working. The internet gives us precise figures and it’s often very easy to demonstrate the value of the work you’ve done. Clients should have full access to the analytics and be trained enough to be able to independently verify the results.
• A consultant that frequently answers questions with “Hmmm…, I don’t know.” No one knows what Google is doing. You try something, then you try something else. Anyone who claims to know everything is scamming you.
• Someone who looks at your entire business model and asks hard questions about your internet strategy. What do you hope to accomplish with your site. Are there specific goals that we can measure?
• Think about your Inbound and Outbound strategies. Google will send people your way if you have useful material so think about what compelling content you can offer the universe. And once people come to the site you have to make it compelling for them to stay a while, subscribe, etc.
• The SEO consultant should make you sweat: anyone who says they can significantly boost your site without you having to lift a finger is fooling you. You will almost always have to add compelling content and it will take you committing staff time to the project (a good development team will look for ways to make this fit into your existing staff routines so that it’s as painless as possible!).

Any others suggestions for what to look for in potential SEO consultants?

I won’t belabor the point, but I wonder if something similar is happening within Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two people have commented on Johan Maurer’s blog post about Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s report on Friends United Meeting. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online discussion about this particular report is available. I gave a plug for it and it was the most popular link from QuakerQuaker, so I know people are seeing it. The larger issue is dealt with elsewhere (Bill Samuel has a particularly useful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be getting a big yawn.

It’s been superseded as the most popular QuakerQuaker link by a lighthearted call for an International Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Livejournal blogger. It’s fun but it’s about as serious as you might expect. It’s getting picked up on a number of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at current count has thirteen commenters. I think it’s a great way to poke a little fun of ourselves and think about outreach and I’m happy to link to it but I have to think there’s a lesson in its popularity vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable question: do most Quakers just not care about Friends United Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting, about a modern day culture clash that is but a few degrees from boiling over into full-scale institutional schism? For all my bravado I’m as much an institutional Quaker as anyone else. I care about our denominational politics but do others, and do they really?

Yearly meeting sessions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gatherings are lucky if they get three to five percent attendance. The governing body of my yearly meeting is made up of about one percent of its membership; add a percent or two or three and you have how many people actually pay any kind of attention to it or to yearly meeting politics. A few years ago a Quaker publisher commissioned a prominent Friend to write an update to liberal Friends’ most widely read introductory book and she mangled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication–even insiders don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most contemporary Friends post-institutional? The percentage of Friends involved in the work of our religious bodies has perhaps always been small, but the divide seems more striking now that the internet is providing competition. The big Quaker institutions skate on being recognized as official bodies but if their participation rate is low, their recognition factor small, and their ability to influence the Quaker culture therefore minimal, then are they really so important? After six years of marriage I can hear my wife’s question as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the religious authority of these bodies come from? As someone who sees the world through a sociological/historical perspective, my question is complementary but somewhat different: if so few people care, then is there authority? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of control over a beloved school or campground–factor out
the sentimental factor and what’s left?

I don’t think a diminishing influence is a positive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in committees). How are today’s generation of Friends going to deal with changing cultural forces that are threatening to undermine our current practices? And how might we use the new opportunities to advance the Quaker message and Christ’s agenda?

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site
they’ll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting
together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write.

I’m looking to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many
of the same results–blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug–your
company’s life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer
service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching
an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and
searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get
answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the volume coming from these
obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could
have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper
that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates
gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour
trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area–to find my
workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We’re always blogging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it verbally around the water cooler with
three other people. Learn to type it in and you’ve got yourself a
high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways
to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was
tagifying my personal blog over at “QuakerRanter.org.” Every time I
post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the
article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk
about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we
automate them). We don’t necessarily know the categories that our
potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites
increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages according to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of
this extra volume. This doesn’t increase traffic by that nearly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag
indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

A few days ago a Friend forwarded a email from a Quaker discussion list from someone who had typed “plain dress Quaker” into Google. This searcher reported to the list that there was nothing good in the results and wondered aloud whether he should contact the authors of the listings to tell them the truth that plain dress still exists. Of course my pages are at the top of that search and clearly reflect the opinion that plain dress exists and is relevant to our age. Most of the top-ten Google results point to more-or-less “Conservative” Quakers, all of whom are sympathetic to plain dress. Google’s results were actually quite good.
A few months ago I attended a “listening session” on a controversial modern Quaker ritual and heard an advocate for the practice make an argument based on the positive Google search results for the term (“I looked up ‘xyz’ on Google and found…”) Here too my site tops the results but I’m not sympathetic and neither are most of the dozen people who comment on the post. Like the plain dress curmudgeon, their description of the results bore little resemblance to what I found on Google.
h3. Has Google become our new proof text?
Looking up your pet project or cause is a variation on “vanity googling,” in which you look up yourself. But the interesting thing is that these “cause googlers” don’t actually seem curious about the results. The fellow who searched for “plain dress Quaker” came to my site, according to the tracking logs, but he looked at one page and left. He didn’t follow any links and he has yet to do anything more than complain to a sympathetic list. This kind of “proof text” searcher isn’t looking to learn anything or find anything transformative; instead they just want to confirm their cause exists in the world. They (mis)use the results to confirm their worldview: whether they think of themselves as the last holdout of a dying tradition or the vanguard of some brave new synthesis, they’ll find something in the Google results to back them up.
Sincere searchers who come wanting to learn something about the issues I write about will come in via search engine and start maniacally clicking on links, looking through dozens of pages. Many of them follow this reading by sending me an excited email, leaving a comment, and/or signing up on our related discussion list. Using Google to tally our place in the world can be fun, but it’s only a parlour game and debate tactic.
h3. Tweaking the Results
As I was writing this post I got a Google-referred visit from someone searching for the “best spiritual websites.” Well if Google is the all-knowing authority, you’ve found the sixth best spiritual website on the whole entire world wide web right here (who wouldda thought?) But wait: ask Google for the “best Quaker websites” and you’ll find me listed for the top four results.
There’s such awe-worship for search engines these days that we could make up claims for ourselves, post the claims on a blog and then advertise our invented claims. For example,
“Google has declared Martin Kelley as the spiritual heir to George Fox.”
Just by writing that phrase here, we should be able to hit the search engine in a week’s time for “spiritual heir to George Fox”:google and get this page, hence making the claim legit. With Google as judge, the possibilities are endless!
h3. See also:
* “How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000333.php
* “It’s light that makes me uncomfortable” and other Googlisms
* At least one theologian has argued that Google results for “god” constitutes “proof of His existence”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6144581/site/newsweek/ (found on “The Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_000940.php)
* In “Nonprofit Website Design and Measurement”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000457.php I reproduce my websites report for my employer, Friends General Conference. I talk a lot in there about how Google is used.