Monthly Archives: April 2014

1 Science as Conversation

Two Wednesdays ago I wrote about three different types of conversation.  Of these, I’ve written about conversations between people and conversations as prayer.  Today it is the turn of science.

Conversation is about paying attention and this is the heart of scientific method.  You study data and formulate a hypothesis.  (The data might be the results of an experiment, scientific papers or textbooks, or a real life problem.)  You design experiments to test the hypothesis and then pay attention to the results.  Bad science is failure to attend to the results;  a bad experiment does not necessarily lead to bad science.

This scientific method leads to theories; theory implies there is no such thing as absolute certainty in science.  This is sometimes hard to understand; after all it is not difficult to point to the many successes of science.  But all theories are to some degree tentative.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Newtonian physics answered all the questions about mechanics and gravity.  Einstein noticed anomalies in the available data and came up with his theories of relativity.  In doing so, he did not prove Newton wrong, Newtonian physics is still useful but is now a part of a wider theory, which itself someday may prove to be part of something even wider.

The Challenge to Fundamentalism

Fundamentalists deal in certainties.  For them theory proves science wrong because it is by definition tentative.  They believe their book (the book varies, depending on the type of fundamentalist), deals in eternal truths.   They do not dialogue with their book but impose their views upon it.

Fundamentalists and tyrants the world over close down conversations.  They live in fear of discovering something new.  For them truth has to be nailed down to be true.

The challenge, if you are marketing a message online, is to encourage conversation, not to impose views.  Conversation is a learning experience and if you commit to genuine sharing, your website and your real life business or project will become learning experiences.

In my next post, I shall show how conversation can become a learning experience and more!

What do you think?  Conversations with matter?  Do you find them more or less stimulating than conversations with people?

1 How to Find Good Keywords

Last Tuesday, I introduced keywords and suggested their main purpose is to tell first-time visitors what your site is about.

The chances are the name of your organisation won’t tell your visitor much about what your site offers.  Even if it does, people are unlikely to search for it because they might not have heard about it.

It may be gratifying to type your organisation’s name into a search engine and find your website ranking high on the results page.  But realistically, how many people are likely to do that?

You need to find alternative words or phrases, people might search for and through them find you.  This is a massive topic, called search engine optimisation (seo).

Let’s imagine a company, “Amphibiana Plus” wants to rank for “plague of frogs”.  First, they need to put good relevant content on their site.  In time people will find it (seo is about how to promote this) and they might add a link from their site to yours.  As more organisations recommend your site in this way, your site will climb in the search engines rankings.

Note good content is the key.  Google, the world’s main search engine, is changing the way its search engine works to encourage good content.  Only good content will rank high on the search engine results page.  So, it is really important to understand how keywords relate to good content.

So, how do you find keywords (or phrases!)?  Here are few pointers:

• Review your current website content and printed literature and note any recurring themes or issues.  They might be in your mission statement, for example.
• Brainstorm around these themes and get as many ideas as possible.  You will need to consider each idea and ask realistically whether it is something people might enter a search engine.
• Choose a good keyword and enter it into Google.  Type slowly and watch the suggestions Google supplies.  At some point they will become relevant and you’ll get some idea what other people are already entering.  Remember if there are lots of relevant options, it’s a good thing because it shows there is interest in that theme.
• If you want to explore more ideas, try using Google Adwords.  Google offers a number of useful tools under this heading.  They are free to use and you are under no obligation to purchase advertising.  (If you are just starting I would council against using paid ads until your organisation is well established online.)  Anyway, register if it is your first time and then click on the Tools menu and you’ll find the keywords tool in the menu.

So, that’s how to get started.  Next time I’ll show you what to do with them once you’ve found them.  Do you have any tips about finding keywords?