There’s more to the Internet than LOLcats and dating sites. Sometimes surfing the Internet feels like swimming in an ocean of viral videos and vitriol. I’d like to say news sites are a tropical island in the middle, but too often they promote or fuel the storms. That’s why, Upworthy, seems refreshing and, well, worthy of sharing.

It’s premise? Find the things worth sharing and make those viral. The site, which David Carr of the New York Times profiled this week (Two Guys Made a Web Site, and This Is What They Got), makes no bones that it has an agenda — so while you may not lean as left as the founders appear to — the idea of making things worth knowing as shareable and visual as an Oatmeal comic, animated GIF or LOL cat is nice.

From Carr’s piece, because he explains it better than I can:

“Upworthy, a news aggregation site that began publishing on March 26, is serious news built for a spreadable age, with super clicky headlines and a visually oriented user interface. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, and Peter Koechley, a former managing editor of The Onion who also worked at MoveOn, noticed that much of the media that gets shared online is built on cute animals and dumb humans that are good for a laugh, but not much else.”

Or from UpWorthy’s site a, what else, graphical representation of what they’re trying to do:

By applying the same sorts of visual pow, social media acrobatics and SEO-friendly tactics news sites, and every site worth its salt online, tries to employ, the site attempts to make things that matter easy and fun to share. That gives you venn diagrams like the one above and headlines that beg to be clicked through, such as What Does Congress Spend Half Of Its Time On? (an infographic look at the fundraising necessary to run for office these days); Yes, Facebook Will Be On The Final Exam (another infographic, but about a new study on how time on Facebook doesn’t necessarily cause less study time); and Smoking Does WHAT To Your Breasts? 5 More Reasons Not To Smoke (a video describing reasons beyond the whole lung cancer thing not to light up).

It will be interesting to see how the site grows and what other innovative ways they find to promote causes or need-to-know information. Already it’s gaining followers, and judging from its Facebook wall, plenty of likes/shares. As a journalist trying to produce serious work (but with a soft spot for animal memes), I appreciate the attempt to raise the profile of stories, videos and graphics that make me think, not just laugh.

If Google were high school, the top of the search results page would be the popular kids’ table. With everyone wanting to take a seat, it is essential for writers to distinguish themselves from the competition and improve their article’s SEO, which can be done in five simple steps:

1. Know Your Keywords
When it comes to optimizing your article for search, keywords are key. These are the words or phrases that best and most specifically identify the focus of your piece. Your two to three primary keywords should match the words or phrases potential readers would be plugging into a search engine to find just such an article.

But knowing your keywords is only half the battle — where and how often you place them into your article is crucial. For more tips, read 5 Ways to Improve Your Article’s SEO. [subscription required]

– Andrea Hackett

Everybody’s favorite cubicle dweller, Dilbert, often contains what-not-to-do life lessons, but this comic is especially relevant for those working in digital media who must interact and explain their job and work to people who see Facebook or Twitter at work as slacking off not working hard. It’s hard to get others on board with your plans when you speak in acronyms or jargon even you barely understand.

A few short (and ideally, unnecessary) tips to avoid being the drone in this strip:

• Don’t say it if you can’t explain it. And if you can’t explain it, why are you doing it?

• Don’t explain it with more jargon. There are correct terms for practices and there are useful terms. The useful ones describe what you do in layman’s terms without resorting to phrases only SEO expert wannabes use.
• If you must use jargon or unfamiliar acronyms, acknowledge that without making your audience feel stupid. It’s not nice, and it’s not necessary.

This comic is funny because it’s true. Most people have been on the “huh” end of a similar conversation. Don’t do that.

Last week, the online department at the magazine where I work brought in the SEO consultants the company is working with to talk to the writers and editors about how our content fits in with the company’s overall success. It was fairly insightful to hear how important good, deep content — the type my co-workers and I produce each month — is to that success.

However, one line that one of the consultants said during the presentation has been rattling around my head for a week now because it so perfectly sums up how important your online work is to any company or news organization’s bottom line:

“If you’re not relevant online, you’re not relevant.”

It’s as simple as that. Period. In today’s culture, this pretty much is the bottom line. Either people can find you online and find your information relevant, or you don’t exist and don’t count.

Think about your habits: I can’t think of a single thing I don’t go online to look up. Whether it’s the weather, the news in my community or my social circle, the directions, how-to articles, trends in homes, realtors and real estate, reviews on companies or DIY instructions, etc. I have a copy of the Yellow Pages at home, and I even subscribe to the local newspaper. But I’d never think to look something up in the Yellow Pages before going online and checking reviews. In fact, for every one of those topics there are multiple sources of information. But some are more relevant than others. I filter the rest out.

Sadly, if I start to search for a topic/place, and your site isn’t near the top — rated relevant by other users with their clicks and their links — then I’m probably never going to see that story or that site. Users will never find you unless your content is both good quality and easy to access. That means not only do you need strongly researched, written and edited stories, but you also need to make it readable — which pay walls and 20 jump pages to inflate page view counts do not achieve, as they make it hard for both the human users and the spiders crawling to index it. To achieve relevancy, you should be connecting with people both metaphorically (they connect with your stories) and physically (you have people reaching out under your brand to talk to people and answer questions that add value to your organizations). The best news people I follow on Twitter, for example, are constantly answering questions or adding asides or extra information I couldn’t read in that morning’s paper (or whatever your news venue of choice is). That’s what makes them interesting to follow! I also know when I have a question about that topic, I can start with them. They — and by extension their news organizations — are relevant sources for information on that topic.

So where this whole spiel is leading is simply to suggest that anyone who produces content for the web (or as the quote points out, content for anywhere these days) ask themselves every time they post a story, share a link, produce a video, or do whatever it is they do: “Is this relevant? How? To whom?” If the answer is no or you can’t answer the second few, find a way to make it so. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

(BTW, to give credit where it’s due, that quote came from Paul Davison of Slingshot SEO.)

Yesterday on their search blog, Google announced the release of Authorship Markup, an attribute which publishers can tack onto link tags to help Google’s algorithm better connect authors and their content in search results. It’s a seemingly tiny tweak, but one that is actually key to helping better organize and join authors and their content on the web.

Many news sites have already instituted Author Pages, which aggregate articles written by an author onto one specific platform, making it easier for fans of those authors to find their work. The New York Times collects information about everything from events to businesses to its own reporters on their Topic Pages. Google’s Authorship Markup won’t change this process, but instead will help to better surface more relevant information about that author and their work in Google searches.

“We know that great content comes from great authors,” reads yesterday’s announcement, “and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.”

Read more