C’mon New York City Department of Transportation!
I love that you have a newsletter, but the April one should come out on April 2, not on April 29.
People can find it here.
It’s great that you’re linking to the 2021 bike map, but here, too, it would be great to have the paper version available at the start of April, not two days before New York City Bike Month. National, too.
Peoples, if you’re looking for events to inspire you to ride in May, Transportation Alternatives has created a bunch. Bike New York has a thing, too.
New York City Bike Month.
There’s this crazy thing. Search Engine Optimization. SEO. If you got here by Search Engine, then it was the Optimization which ranked this page high enough to be seen. Allegedly, most people rarely go beyond the third-ranked result spit out by a search engine. So everyone wants to know how to game the system so that their page ranks in the top three. Of course, only three can be there at any time. So everyone wants to know what Google (mainly) favors with their algorithm. Google wants to know as well. I’ve been told think of the algorithm as a black box in a black box, in the secure hold of a ship at the bottom of the ocean. Thing is, everyone’s trying to figure out how to master it.
The tyranny of SEO programs.
Because that’s a job for teams of experts, I’ve outsourced it to Yoast, and because this is a small, entrepreneurial venture, I’m using the free version, so it’s probably not nearly as effective as the paid version. I bring this up because Yoast recommends a certain range of words per page, usually a minimum of 300. My goal is to turn their SEO face graphic green. With this text, and the “New York City Bike Month” focus keyphrase several times, I have typed in this paragraph to let you know why this is here and why you see that phrase multiple times. Feels a bit cynical–don’t hate the playas, hate the game–but we’re all accomplices here, which makes it more frustrating.
They also have a “readability” score. And it turns out paragraphs over 150 words they have analyzed to be too long for readers. Which is why you see two paragraphs above this one. Kind of feels like a terrible tautology; it works because it works. And will continue working because what else do people know? same goes for the headers I put in above. Yoast drops your score if you have more than a certain number of words between headers.
I also need to put in an internal link to make Yoast happy.
So here’s a reminder of how to DOWNLOAD RIDES.
