 Hello everyone. My name is Prerna Sharma. I am from India and today I will be presenting about keywords connected between customers and content. So before I proceed with the drill, my introduction and you know about the presentation, I want to know how many of you in the room use search engines? Any search engines? Okay, very few hands though, but okay. So well, this is all about search engines. Why do or rather I should say how search engines work and why as a writer, be technical writer, be academic writer, any kind of writer or even as a blogger, why do you think search engine plays a major role in your writing? Okay. So to begin with, as I mentioned, this is map of our country. I have worked in different regions of India. I started my career as a network engineer. Then I moved as to the southern part of my country and I worked as content writer, academics writer, and currently I am working as a technical writer with Red Hat since three years now. So moving ahead, this is the agenda for the discussion. We will start as I mentioned about search engines. So first we will understand evolution of search engines. A brief though, we will move ahead with keywords, web crawling, indexing, page rank, keyword stuffing, do's and don'ts, few tools and a short demo video. So evolution of search engines, I have drafted this content from 90s till 2019 because we have just entered 2020. So I did not have much to share about it. So from the year 1990 to 2000, now we are in 90s and 2000, it's in this decade Archie, I believe a few of you must be aware about the Archie comic novel, Archie Veronica Jughead. So this was the first search engine that was developed. Later on CERN, they hosted a list of web servers, MSN search and Google search, the disk, I should say the invention of MSN and Google that happened in this decade. Let's move on to 2001 to 2010. In this decade, we saw lots of mergers and accusations, reason being because MSN and Google was, you know, they were in the market and they needed small companies, small softwares to help them grow in the field of search engines. So that happened, Yahoo search engine, one of the competitors for MSN and Google, that was in the market and Bing, which was again MSN, but it was renamed to Bing. So Microsoft, they technologically wise, feature wise, they improved, enhanced themselves and they came up with Bing and Google instance, instant also happened in this decade. From 2011 to 19, HTTPS, this was one of the major breakdown that happened in this decade because so far we were in the era of HTTP where URLs were not secure, but security of URLs happened in this decade. And of course, mobile, mobile feature because we started using smartphones. So pages that can be user friendly on mobile phones, that also happened with mobile, get in and rank break. So now keywords, anyone in the room can define me what are keywords or what do you think when I say keywords, what comes into your mind? Any word or single word, any phrase, search string, okay. Anyone else? Everyone said that they use search engines. So any idea, right? That's right. So search engines are, sorry, I'm sorry, keywords are the words or a string that we use to get our answers, right? So there are phrases or queries that people or we as users, we type in in the search engine, we Google, MSN, Bing, Yahoo and we get our results. So now there are three categories of keywords. One is head, body and the long tail keywords or the tail keyword. Now when I type a keyword, say for example, five places because I said I'm from India and this is my first visit to Burno. So this is what I was doing last night. Five places to visit in Burno. I did a Google search for this. And if you notice the first search result I get is from planetware.com, right? If I do a Bing search, I'm sorry Yahoo search, I get it from some local website, I guess. And if I do a third search, sorry, yeah. Yeah, this is from Bing. And again, there is a different website. So three different search engines, same query, but the results are different, right? So that has to do, even if I as a user or even if I as, you know, even if I'm new to a place, if I go to three different search engines, I'm getting different reason is not because that the user is typing something else, it's because how the search engine has, you know, the algorithm of search engines are designed in that way, that whatever key words the content has. So say for example, in this case, the words that this website is using, the first website is using, that is important for Bing. Maybe for Google, the algorithm is different. So that's why keywords are important for users, as well as for the website or as well as for bloggers who write their blog. The type of content, the style of content that you're writing is important so that your page ranks from one, you know, in top five list in the search results. So head, body and long-term, as I mentioned, these are three categories of keywords. Head is just, you know, a single phrase. So when you write your article, or when you write anything on your website, or if any of you are bloggers, if you write just one word of it, that is the head of your content. So if, as I mentioned, five places to visit in Berno, if you say, you know, in your article, you have written some name of a place and it's good for that, the reason that it should be visited. If you have mentioned that in one word, it's, you know, it's beautiful. So beautiful is one keyword in your article. Body, it is around two to three words so that can be beautiful to visit, beautiful to visit in month of June to July or June to September. That becomes your body. And long-tail word keywords are your phrases. It's, you know, you need to visit this place. It's beautiful with a lot of adjectives and everything. Okay. Always whenever you write any article, remember that it's important that it should be relevant to the product or services or information that you're writing about. So even in Quora or even on any other askhelp.com, any such websites wherein you mention or you're giving any feedback and you want that your feedback or your answer should rank in the search list. It's better that you talk, which is relevant to the product. You do not, you know, divert the topic by giving introduction. If the question is where, when should I visit Berno? You should be specific to the question instead of giving introduction about Berno and then, you know, because then you're diverting the topic. And when I say diverting the topic in terms of search engine, it means crawling. So web crawling is something which is a first step that recognizes your web page. It is a process wherein a web, a crawler, that means a bot. So for Google, they have a different bot. Bing has a different bot. Yahoo might have a different bot. So when these bots, they are in the internet world, they look for keywords. And if they find the keyword that fits into their algorithm, the ranking, your, you know, your website ranking or your article ranking will enhance. So this completely depends how you have written the data or how you have written your article. Initially, a web crawler, it will collect all the unorganized data and then it will go ahead and crawl, you know, provide the indexing and further algorithms happen. That is something that happens in back end. It's not necessary that everything that is getting crawled will be indexed. That means if you are on a web page, say, for example, how, you know, how should I visit this university? And you are on that page, you get the directions, but somewhere beneath over there, you have this an advertisement link, famous something in Berno in a famous coffee house, which is irrelevant to the direction of the university, right? So that page will not be indexed. Anything that is not relevant, web crawler or algorithm will negate that and only the page that is relevant will get the higher ranking. I'm talking a lot about indexing. So what is indexing? Keywords are assigned to websites searched during crawling. So in the process of indexing, if there are keywords, as I mentioned, say, for example, keywords like beautiful, or keywords which are very unique or which users use in their routine life, anything, you know, be it related to weather, be it related to your laptops, coffee house, beer, anything that are famous keywords that will get indexed easily by web crawlers. And whenever you give any information on website or whenever you write any article or whenever you're doing any kind of documentation, if you're using such keywords, it will be easy to get indexed. And it will be easy for web crawlers that your product documentation or be your article, it can rank in top five. Because at the end of the day, all we need is that our user or, you know, whoever we are, you know, the customers, they should be, they should read our article and not of our competitors or anyone else. Right? So every site that is indexed is index is not crawled. I missed the crawl, not part here. So it's not necessary that every website that the bot is crawling, that will be indexed. As I mentioned before, there can be spam websites as well. They will direct the users to a different website altogether, which is irrelevant to the main website. So such websites are not crawled by bots. Initially they would. But now, since Google has started with the pigeon update that happened, I believe in your 1995 or so, post that these things don't happen now. Indexing enhances page rank. Now, I discussed a lot about your page should be in top five search results or, you know, in top 10 search results. So what is page rank all about? Page rank is nothing but yes, of course, it was given by or rather invented by Larry Page, but page rank is equal to voting. Higher the number of votes, higher will be the page rank. Same. So in case if lot many users are going through the same page every time the page ranking will be enhanced, because the number of clicks depends on how relevant the website is or how relevant that particular documentation is. If a user is going only one saying millions of users only few people are going through are clicking on that particular documentation. That means the page rank will somehow or, you know, after 15 days or after 20 days, the page rank will go down. And that again happens on basis of algorithm. See, so we always need to take care of the words that we are using in an article or in a documentation, because that does matter. Right? Now, keyword stuffing, although I did say that keywords are important, but that also does not mean that you just go on and add keyword stuff which are two, you know, which users are using frequently or which users are demanding too much. So if your article is all about your stuffing your content with too much of keywords, even that is not good. Because it's repetitive and user and then you are annoying your user. And that is not what we are expecting. We want that the user should come to our website, gather the information and you know, probably provide that our website link to as a reference to some other user. So that is good. But if you're stuffing your keywords, if you're stuffing the keywords with your in your website or in the article, that's not going to help. Probably you will be penalized. And when I say penalized, that means the rank of your website will go down. And of course, you will be coming on the page two of your of the Google search or of Yahoo search. So this is a small activity about keywords stuffing. So this is a brief article I found it on internet. Are you looking for cheap running shoes website offers cheap running shoes, cheap running shoes, cheap running shoes, cheap running shoes. So I guess you might have guess what is the stuffing here. Anyone? Yeah, right. So it's you know, if you go through it, it's okay. Yeah, the content is fine. But it's kind of annoying. Are you looking for cheap running shoes? It's we offer cheap running shoes, cheap running shoes, right? So cheap running shoes is one year. Probably the writer would have written it in a much better way. Of course, there are different ways. But maybe once or twice, you of course, you need to provide the information what you're giving on your website. But if you continuously talk about it cheap running shoes, cheap running shoes, that's going to penalize. That's, that's not what we do. Same as here. Yellow rubber ducky again, again. So, you know, the idea here is that you market your product, you talk about your product. But but that does not mean that you keep on talking about the product so much that it annoys your user, and also somewhere, the board that will negate the ranking of your page, I'm sorry, of your website, or maybe of your documentation, and you will not even stand in the ranking of the search results. So this is one of the content that I found on Lenovo website. It's straight and simple. They're talking about one of their laptop series, what it does and all the technical aspects. And that's it. No here, no there, as simple as that. This is what the user need. This is what the user will get. And that's it to the point. This is from one of our read documentation. We were talking about kickstart files. And we mentioned about the start files, what it does. And that's it. So even in product documentation in red had we take care of keywords as well. Because we understand that if we do not take care of keywords, even in product documentation, it will impact, even though it's red had be Google beat Microsoft. But of course, we all are competitors. It has to we have to maintain that part. Now tools and tones. Differentiate keywords responsibly, we should know what exactly is the keyword and what is not the keyword. There are many tools available online, wherein you can differentiate, wherein you can identify which other keywords that these days users are looking for. Or you know, I'll show the demo as well. So these tools help you to understand. And with the help of those tools, you can write it, write your document or write your article in that way. Remember audience, as I mentioned before, do not forget who your audience is. If you're writing a technical documentation, or if it's a product documentation, remember, the audience might be a system administrator or might be a college going student. So keeping the balance, differentiate that, differentiate that keyword. And remember the audience and, you know, write the content. Of course, the information should be the content should be information based. Once you have identified your audience, provide the required amount of information and then proceed with the content. Do not directly jump to the conclusion that this is how if you have installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this is what you need to do next. Of course, you need to brief them how to install RHEL as well. Synonyms, same meanings. If you think that you are repetitively using one word, probably you can use another word for the same, with the same meaning. Now those, adding keywords unnecessarily. If you think that your documentation can do well without adding any keyword, you're good to go. But then the question comes that how will web crawler or how the indexing part and page ranking part will happen? It will still happen. Even if you're not in the, you know, even if you're not following the trendy keywords, it's okay because you're providing the required and relevant information that the user is looking for. So it's okay if you do not add keywords. There will be few keywords that the bot itself will identify and you never know the keyword that you have added. It will be the keyword that will trend ultimately. Adding irrelevant words. As I said that, you know, if the don't, if the do says that you need to add keywords responsibly, you also should remember that you do not add irrelevant words that has nothing to do with your article or, you know, do not add any links that has nothing to do with your article. Say for example, if you're writing anything about installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and at the end of your article, you mentioned some, you know, a top five beer, probably beer places to visit. That is irrelevant. It doesn't make any sense. So avoid those things as well. Again, linking irrelevant websites. That's what I mentioned of you. Content is not just text. So when we say content, it's not just about text. It's about images. It's about videos. It's about pictures. It's about everything. So if you think that your content can add up to the page rank, if you add a certain kind of image or a certain kind of diagram, do that. That will help to enhance your page rank, because probably a user might be looking for a diagram for certain thing. So if right now I was struggling to, you know, to plug in the HDMI cable or something. So if you have a video for that, in that article, you can, you can add a video to it. That will help the user again. These are few tools that I can cross. A few of them are from Google and Adobe Analytics is, of course, a paid version. And this is a demo of Google Trends. So over here, I have mentioned about Google Trends. Google Trends is a tool that helps you to discover what kind of keywords are working on, I should say, are ranking right now, or what type of keywords are people using across globe. You can differentiate or you can customize this search result using Google Trends. If I have given a demo here about technical writing versus food blogging. So let's see what the demo shows. Now you have country. So I've selected not United States, but worldwide. What worldwide or, you know, how people are searching technical writing. And the trend is there for past 12 months, for past 30 days, you can see the trend, how much people have searched worldwide about Google Trends. And you'll also see top five regions that Google shows. Now technical writing is kind of, you know, people look for jobs as well. So I gave it a search. I gave another search, a web search. Of course, you will not find anything in new search. Now if I have to compare two keywords. So just for the demo's sake, I gave food blogging. So technical writing versus food blogging. If I'm a new blogger and you know, I want to follow the trend, I want to be a blogger and I want to write a blog about anything. So I'll initially go and see what people are people inclined more towards technical writing or are they inclined more towards food blogging. And as for this, probably I can think about it and write a blog. It's very few that people are looking for food blogging. You see the trend as well, the past 30 days. So this entire tool can be customized. You can, you just have to type Google Trends and you can work on it. It will give you the entire search result not only with respect to a single keyword, but if there are major two to three keywords, you can the tool will provide you with that as well, including the YouTube blog search. So not many videos for technical writing and food blogging. So even that can help me. So should I write an article or should I create a video? That will help as well. Pretty much it. Any questions? So it depends on what you are writing about. If your article is about installation of a software or maybe installation of an operating system, it is recommended that you provide a video, a short video of certain steps that you think a user may not be connected to. A user may not get connected easily. So if there's a bio setup and if you think that a user can get confused, which, you know, which option to go for, then you can create a video for that. Or else even a screenshot can help. Because if you insert a video and you have got a documentation, it will take time for your site to go. If you say like it's not so popular to do the videos, will you increase my page rank before I will put a video there? If your content is relevant, then of course it will. Because it completely not depends on one particular aspect, right? If you will be writing something, you will be using certain keywords that will enhance the page rank. Just because you've inserted the video and if you see a Google trend that it's not trending, but your keywords will help you with that.