Forums » Smalltalk » AMA: Father, Husband, Professional Editor

Hello friends

I've been married to my wife for six years. We met online and I had to immigrate to be with her, so I'm also open to questions about immigration (I've done it twice) and long distance relationships

We have a daughter who will be 3 in December and another daughter on the way, due in April.

I work as a senior editor for a digital marketing business publication. I run their ebooks and special projects program, which is a high revenue driver.

I'm open to any questions about parenting, relationships, careers, digital marketing, leveraging your creativity in your career, etc.

There's no way the tatertot has become the tatertoddler.

Can you give a laymen's explanation of what SEO is and why it matters on the modern web?

Hiya Ben!!

I'm currently working on a large-scale solo creative project which requires quite a thorough editing process. Do you have a top tip of things to look for and consider?

O M G I also cannot believe it. Technically she shot through toddler as well apparently??? when did that happen???

I LOVE your question! Modern marketing is kind of a hellhole of acronyms and corpospeak but I actually think it's super important for non-industry folks to understand SEO.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization

Whenever a human searches for something online, the information that you input is fed through an algorithm. Then responses to your input are generated based on those rules. (the process is more complicated with more stages, but this is the basic premise).

Why is this important?

PEOPLE make those algorithms and determine how information is fed back to you.

This basic function impacts the majority of what everyone does on the web every day.

Every time you input text into a search bar, use voice search, let a search bar auto-complete a query for you, you're interacting with SEO algorithms.

Businesses and websites want to be at the top of the results that you see. The competition is INTENSE -- if you're not in the first three top positions, you're practically invisible, from a statistical point of view. The lion's share of all web traffic goes to the first things people see.

There are two ways businesses compete for you click:

• Ads
• "Organic" SEO

Organic SEO is the practice of trying to get an algorithm to prioritize one of your pages as a top result. It requires a lot of work and money. It's a huge business. Companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars, or more, per MONTH, to stay in the top organic results.

So there are a few fundamental things about searching for information online that I think everyone should know:

1. Platforms and advertisers invest a lot of money in trying to understand you and your preferences in order to deliver better experiences. This isn't noble, it's because better experiences make you more likely to interact positively in ways that advertisers like, to spend money, and spend more time on a search platform. This sort of tracking does benefit you if you value convenient experiences online. But it can compromise privacy and security, and this is why European legislators are going hard at companies like Google on privacy.
2. No matter what you're doing online, someone has probably paid for you to be in that place doing that thing. You are constantly being tracked and pushed into "sales funnels" even if you're not directly interacting with a sales process. Welcome to big tech capitalism.
3. Search algorithms work by trying to understand what you WANT TO SEE. This makes them SHOCKING POOR RESEARCH TOOLS. Studies have found that when you research a topic online, you are very likely to interact with content that reinforces your existing biases and confirms your beliefs, even (and especially) if those beliefs are wrong. I refer you to the point above: if you're doing research and Google and skip the ads, someone is still very likely paying for the content you read to reach you. This makes life difficult for progressive political activists. When confronted with someone asking basic political questions, progressives will often ask them to Google basic answers ("Google is free"). This is a reaction to sealioning/concern trolling and other tactics designed to waste the time of progressive activists. Unfortunately, if you say this to someone who genuinely does have basic questions but they have somewhat right-leaning views, sending them to Google will probably reinforce the existing biases that you're trying to break down. Search algorithms like YouTube and Facebook are the primary ways in which harmful conspiracy theories are spread today.
4. Algorithms are designed and trained by people. We tend to think of algorithms as neutral arbiters of information, but they very easily acquire the biases and blindspots of the people who program them. If someone who trains an algorithm holds sexist or racist assumptions, then the algorithm will likely have them too.
5. I wouldn't work in this field if everything about it was bad and terrible. Businesses need ways to reach customers, customers need ways to search for products that fit their needs. The ultimate goals of Google and other search engines are to keep you using the platform and so they have an interest in providing you with a good, helpful experience. Google has spent a lot of time lately focusing on accessibility, for example, and if you ignore certain accessibility standards it's bad for your SEO efforts. By creating accessibility standards, it is effectively forcing businesses who want to appear in relevant search results to adopt them as well. Being informed about how politics and the internet interacts can make the internet better for everyone.

If you're interested in politics, knowledge, and how politics and knowledge intersect, then understanding SEO is very important.

This is fascinating!!

Part two: how does SEO factor into a search engine like duckduckgo, which touts itself as respecting privacy?

(Anecdotally, the results I get on DDG tend to be more accurate and helpful than the ones I used to get on Google even before I started obfuscating my data.)

HI CLAINE!

Okay, this could be a big one, I'll try not to get too far into the weeds, especially since I don't know the exact nature of your project.

My number one rule of editing is:

Never be the primary editor of your own work.

Annnnndddd this is impossible in many circumstances. SO failing that, make sure that you approach editing your wotk with a fresh mind.

Before you start each stage of editing, do something else for a while. Fill your brain with something compoletely different. Separate writing and editing by at least one sleep.

Here are a few other good rules:

Edit In Stages

Editing something "all at once" is overwhelming, and you're going to miss things. It's important to compartmentalize your editing process. At my company, we actually have a different person do each stage of the editing process. It's that important to separate them. Failing that, just make sure you're sticking to a good process.

1. Substantive edits (also known as developmental edits): This is the first editing stage, focused on "big picture" stuff. Flow, organization, completeness. This is where you cut, rearrange, flag additions that need to be made, etc. You should not attempt to do this stage in combination with any kind of copyediting, because when you move things around, cut things, add things, etc, you will add new mistakes into your text.
2. Copyediting (also known as line editing): In this stage you're focused on things like sentence structure, removing redundancy, improving paragraph flow, and applying a consistent style throughout. It's more granular than substantive edits but not as deep as proofreading.
3. Mechanical edits (also known as proofreading): This is your error check. Load up Grammarly, and go through the text with a fine-toothed comb looking for spelling mistakes, grammar inconsistencies, etc.

My next piece of advice is:

Make Lists.

Build lists of the most common errors and oversights you make. Record areas of writing that you're particularly uncomfortable with. Note any specifics of style that are important to the project.

Important: record the ERROR in your list.

Then, during your final pass, make heavy use of the "find" function in your chosen software. You've recorded all the errors you make. So search directly for those errors. You've recorded that, for some reason, you don't want to use Oxford commas. So hit ctrl+f and type in ", and" and ", or" it will flag every Oxford comma in your doc for you to remove. If you misspell a word a lot, include the misspelling in your list and search for it. Your search function will flag every instance of that error.

I'm serious about using Grammarly. I'm a professional editor and I'm not ashamed to admit I use it.

Not every recommendation Grammarly makes is correct. Evaluate each one.

If you find yourself mixing up the process (let's say you're doing a line edit and you start adding entire sentences/paragraphs): STOP. The previous step isn't done. Go back to it.

I hope some of this helps :>

It sure does! Thank you for your help!

So duckduckgo is an interesting beast. I don't know a whole ton about it, I'm focused on Google and use Google services for that reason.

The main thing that duckduckgo seems to do is ignore cookies. Cookies are little signatures that you leave on websites that you visit. This is how search engines and advertisers know where you've been and what you've been looking at/searching. It doesn't store any of your personally identifiable information or your search history.

So the main things that will be less accurate are ads and local searches, though they draw data from other apps (apple maps for ex) to make their location tagging better, since they don't track your location directly. Though it also can draw location signals from your IP, and if you've opted in (if you've opted in to data on apple maps, for the above example.)

Duckduckgo draws information from a combination of their own algorithms as well as from partners such as Bing (but not Google.)

It actually doesn't require a whole lot of personal information to deliver an accurate search result. The main things that you're missing are:

• Predictive text based on your previous searches.
• Autocomplete functions based on sites you visited.
• Hyper-specific ads.
• Pinpoint location accuracy.
• Ai-generated search features, snippets, etc that Google generates to answer your questions faster without having to click.

Google does a lot of extra "helpful" stuff. But your fundamental search experience could well be better without the interference of cookie tracking and hyper-specific advertising.

You're super welcome!! I'm always happy to talk process.

I am living for learning all of this and getting more perspective on the things I already know. Here's another question for you:

How inconvenient are privacy add-ons and data obfuscation ones, such as privacy possum, trackmenot, or adnauseum, which delivers false clicks to ads without actually visiting the site and thusly costs advertisers money? These have been more popular in recent years, and Mozilla recently implemented the "cookie jar" to stop tracking across websites on the Firefox browser. Have you in the industry noticed any kind of difference or shift in your ability to gather accurate data? I know Apple enabling the opt out of ad tracking really struck a blow with the industry on top of the cut it plans to take from ad revenue on apps. (Meta stocks lookin' real rough here and there lately...)

(I do know that retailers are basically leading in the data market because of all the people who signed up for loyalty programs during the pandemic. It's been hugely profitable for them.)

I am definitely not judging the need for advertising, as I also have to promote myself as a freelancer. Unfortunately, we all need money to live. :')

I'm just extremely curious to see how the war for privacy is faring against the industry's need for priceless personal data.

Eeee I'm loving the opportunity to nerd out!

So PPC (pay-per-click) is not my area of expertise, however I can speak to some of this.

I recently spoke to 22 PPC industry experts for an ebook about PPC advertising trends going into 2023. None of them mentioned specific privacy or data-obfustication apps. I don't think those have been adopted in large enough numbers to present significant challenges to platforms and advertisers.

Almost all of them mentioned the phase-out of third-party cookies due to European legislation. That's pretty much the same thing as what Mozilla did, except Europe is forcing Google to do it.

A bunch of Google's primary platforms that advertisers and SEOs use are changing. Digital marketers have been wrestling with the issue of losing control and losing access to certain types of information for a while, actually.

Several of the experts I spoke to spun it as a positive. In the digital marketing industry, there is no shortage of data. There are all sorts of different data sets and performance metrics. And many of them are not useful. We call them "vanity metrics" -- numbers that go up but that don't actually tell you the business value of an activity. So there's a sense in which losing some of this information will be GOOD for the industry, help marketers prove their real-world dollar value, and prevent businesses from spending money on vanity.

There are a few things that PPC advertisers are worried about, and "inflation" is one of them. I put it in quotes because I'm not talking about real world inflation, I'm talking about the inflation of per-click costs inside advertising platforms. The cost of a click is getting bigger. This COULD be due to bad data from privacy apps and the like. It could also be due to the massive increase in competition in online advertising brought on by the pandemic. Could be lots of things.

Loaylty programs and subscriber lists are actually a great way for advertisers to tackle enhanced online privacy. Once a user has opted in to receive communication from you, that's a huge win. It's MUCH harder to acquire permission, but many, many advertisers are wrestling with the reality that they need to generate first-party data by getting additional buy-in from their audience.

Ultimately, I think this will be good for advertisers who can adapt. The first-party information they need is harder to get and less available, but it's BETTER. It's more accurate and more focused on their core audiences.

First off, congratulations on your second pregnancy!

You said you moved to be with your wife? Was it a hard decision? How did you come to terms with deciding you would be the one who moved to be with her?

Thank you so much!! We are so excited!

It was honestly a very difficult decision. We knew we wanted to be together, but both of us had a lot of concerns and fears. It's taking quite a risk, basically taking my whole life and uprooting it based on faith.

There are a few reasons that we made the choice for me to be the one to move:

• I was working as a freelancer and she had a full-time job, so it was easier for me to move, and she had a more stable way to support me than I did her during the immigration process (during which one person can't work).
• American immigration heavily prioritizes family unification and marriage. Fiance/marriage visas are comparatively easy to other countries.
• She has a bigger family than I do, and so if she moved to me she would lose a significant family support system, whereas I gained a larger support system by moving.

It was one of the scariest things I've ever done, tbh. I packed my whole life up into as few suitcases as possible and took a plunge. It was more than worth it