The Blogstress Blogs Take the STRESS out of your blog

Now that I think that Iactually have a handle on SEO and how to get articles noticed on the web, along comes this new thing, LSI article writing.  The old standard, SEO, translates to “Search Engine Optimization” — trying to use Key Words in the content (and title) of your article to bring your status up as the spiders crawl over you.

But now LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, clues in the new algorithm of search that Google (and ALL the others) use to find Themes in your writing.  This new idea, and the engineers who brought, tamed and coded it, is much more attractive to me as the word “Semantic” is one of the more romantic ones I remember from the semesters of fighting for the Master’s degree in Linguistics.  Semantic surely will win every time over the so totally less romantic “Syntax.”  Syntax, of course, means <yucky stuff coming> “Grammar” and I am definitely not the one to follow exact rules in my communication.  I have prided myself on being the “descriptive Linguist” while my mother, who studied French, Latin and Greek in high school, was the” prescriptive Grammarian.”  Ugh!

Back to our topic.  So now, repeating a few words for those old, simplistic algorithms just won’t make it.  You have to deal with words and phrases that reflect a theme, and connect to other themes across pages, sometimes across vast numbers of pages.  For instance, the word “cream” might be a color, or the richest part of the milk, a consistency of cheese or a young girl’s complexion.  How can a writer guide the spider to the right part of the web?

This could be a problem, but the intelligent writer will clearly remember the words and phrases that build the theme for the algorithm to find, and will guide the spider to the juiciest content.  I might discuss other delectable aspects referring to this maiden’s demeanor, or refer to “brie” as a creamy cheese, or using the cream in coffee, or index other colors in the same color palette — ecru, eggshell, tan, beige, etc.  This will help the spider — and the reader — find other articles about the same theme.

So now writers should be well-versed in their subjects and have a wide spread of knowledge in order to be able to bring the intelligent algorithm to their beck and call.  Spiders would like to be led around by the nose, if they had noses.

The day after Christmas was as important as Christmas day in our house.  When I was little, my mother kept us all remembering how terrible it would be to get one present marked “Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday” so we had a totally separate and extra special holiday the day after Christmas to celebrate my dad.  Our song was Good King Wenceslas, because he “looked out on the feast of Stephen, where the snow lay all about, deep and crisp and even…”  Our condiment was Birthday Cake with appropriate candlege.  Our decorations were crayon drawn Birthday Cards.  Our gifts were totally separate from the Christmas gifts of the day before.  (Like the year that Daddy was quite surprised to open his Christmas present to find one sock.  When he opened his Birthday present, finding the other sock was not such a shock.  It was all I could afford that year.)

As we got older, and strangely enough Dad did too, the parties became more rigorously catered and decorated as Seasonal Open Houses for all our friends and nearby family to drop by bringing gifts, goodwill and hunger for something other than the turkey sandwiches, hash and soup awaiting them at home.  We would have meatballs, Mom’s famous potato salad, and chips and dip or a Mexican feast of tacos and enchiladas or something different, but always followed by pies, cookies, homemade candy and a glorious (getting more and more candles) Birthday Cake.

So my Dad died just after Thanksgiving in 1988.  I talk to him daily, asking advice, pointing out how well I’m doing something, just observations, but always hoping for what I hoped for while he was here — approval.  But on his birthday, the feelings are especially etched, the memories especially sharp, and the emptiness at any table especially poignant.  Happy Birthday, Daddy.

There are still guys alive who were there.  There are still men who were boys when the bombs started to fall like rain, who became men the minutes and hours after the first bomb landed.  There are people who remember the screams, the explosions, the boiling water, the cracking ships, the fire from the sky and the terrible fear they had never felt before.  There are men who lost buddies, friends, brothers and still remember them.  There are women who have “gotten over” that tragedy by going on alone.  There are still scars on bodies, on the town, and in the ship that “lives” beneath the water in the harbor.  Yes, all of this has not faded into the distance of the last seventy years.  How can it, if there are still people alive that remember?  Remembering a thing is what keeps it living.