Getting Linked: Authors, Titles and Dates
August 01, 2005 | 
14 Comments
I’ve got three great tips for anyone who is into Web publishing and wants people to link to them:
- Make sure you let the reader know the author is. By this I mean include a name, or some “about”-type information with every post. A clear link to the site’s about page helps as well.
- Use clear, descriptive titles. I don’t know how many times I’ve skipped an entry because I couldn’t tell what it was about from the title.
- Provide published-on and updated-on dates for everything you publish. It really bothers me that so much information out there is undated. It’s really hard to grasp relevancy when you don’t know when something was published.
Do those three things and you’ll be better off than most Web publishers out there.
Filed under: Web General
Keyword Tags: web+publishing linking web+writing
Comments
1. Adam Bramwell said:
For when the page doesn’t have a date, there’s always the Freshness bookmarklet
Posted on August 1, 2005 06:34 PM | #
2. Glen C. said:
Use clear, descriptive titles. I don’t know how many times I’ve skipped an entry because I couldn’t tell what it was about from the title.
Did Airbag jump out at anyone else? (But we know his content is going to be good a head of time, right?)
Posted on August 1, 2005 07:13 PM | #
3. Sébastien said:
Date is for me the most anoying thing to miss in an online article. You can usually make sense of the content if you read past a bad title, and the author is not always crucial, but date… Remember when Bush was president and the US was at war with Iraq? (10 points if you find where I got that)
Posted on August 1, 2005 07:33 PM | #
4. jordan said:
I unconciously met all three of your points when I redesigned my site. You can see the results by following the URL I’ve provided. Unfortunately, you can’t actually look round the site, because I designed the links for mod_rewrite and I can’t get it functioning.
I suppose I’ll just have to fix ‘em all…
Posted on August 1, 2005 08:37 PM | #
7. Design 7 said:
I think the tip about using clear, descriptive titles is especially valuable. It is also a great aid in search engine optimization.
Posted on August 2, 2005 05:34 AM | #
8. Chris said:
I have to say “clear, descriptive titles” are the number one things I look for. While it’s great for a book to have a clever title it’s not so good for a website. Save the cleverness for the article. Unless, of course, you would prefer that any Google search of your site be irrelevant or that I never find the article again after I’ve closed my browser.
Posted on August 2, 2005 05:50 AM | #
9. nomadicalloy said:
good point on web publishing. i am following all these…. :)
Posted on August 3, 2005 02:39 PM | #
10. Ted Drake said:
sign me up as another convert to the clear titles concept. I’ve turned a new leaf and ditched the concept of being cute for clear. Lord knows we can only be cute for so long.
Posted on August 3, 2005 10:30 PM | #
11. Jonathan Fenocchi said:
Funny you should say that the publisher’s name should be visible, when I had to click the link to this post on your personal blog before I figured out who posted at Lifehacker. Your name doesn’t show up in my RSS aggregator or on the Lifehacker site.
Posted on August 3, 2005 11:27 PM | #
12. Keith said:
Jonathan – Good point. A few things with that though. Lifehacker isn’t really the kind of site that people would link to, at least with most of the posts. That may change, but it’s a different kind of blogging, I’m much more an editor than an author. Also, I’m just a guest editor, and I would normally sign all my posts, but I since I’m doing them all right now that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I know they talked about adding my name, but…And I don’t control the templates. So, it’s a bit of a unique situation all around.
You’ll notice Gina’s (the regular editor) name there in the side bar. Not ideal, but again, a unique situation.
Posted on August 3, 2005 11:47 PM | #
13. NRT said:
Something of a Devil’s Advocate question, but I’d be interested to hear an elaboration of your first point.
If an article or blog entry is worth reading, on its own merits, why does additional information about the author remotely matter?
Posted on August 4, 2005 07:21 AM | #
14. Keith said:
NRT – Well, I think I can see where you’re coming from, but to me knowing who writes what I read, even if it’s just their name, makes what I read more credible.
And, for the purposes of getting linked, it’s nice to know who to attribute things to. You can use the site you found the article or post on, but a name feels better.
Posted on August 4, 2005 09:07 AM | #
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