Cesar Ruiz (ENGL 3360)

  This week Taylor and I began working on our iFixit page. Although we had many questions regarding the content and accuracy of the information, we were able to have our questions answered and found incredible sources of information. Some of those sources of information are the Lowe’s and Craftsman websites–both well-respected firms within the construction industry in the United States. So far, Taylor and I have completed the device page’s summary, tags, and background information. We look forward to finishing this project early next week and having it reviewed and edited one last time before submitting it on Nov. 6. Another thing we did in our course this week was read “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” by Tarleton Gilespie. One of the author's main points was that YouTube strives to be a platform that equally presents all information on its site. However, I beg to differ, as I have stated in class. Like many other social media sites, Youtube does what it can to customize its consum...

This week, we have been working on our SEO projects for iFixit. As I decided on the product, I wanted to choose to create a landing page for Taylor Lindell, and I decided to work on our project together. I decided to collaborate with her on this assignment because of the friendly relationship and timely approach we both have to our coursework. Furthermore, we have worked together numerous times and have completed exceptional work.  The product Taylor and I decided to create our SEO landing page on is the Craftsman Nailer. We decided to create content for this product because of the high volume of people that this product is used by. From massive construction sites to a typical home renovation, nail guns are helpful in a wide range of projects. So far, we have completed our product's table of Contents and summary. Although we have quite a bit to work on, I’m excited to see all we can contribute to this product and the lives it’ll improve.  The ability to access manuals to fix e...

This week in class, we had a guest speaker from Zonos, a company on tech ridge. He walked us through his process in writing for Zonos’ online consumers. I appreciated this emphasis on the fact that even if we study and have SEO in mind when writing, many factors affect an individual's search results beyond our control. To go along with this, I loved his encouragement to the class to continue one’s search beyond the first page of search results. A lot of the time, many excellent sources of information simply don’t fit a search engine’s preferred algorithm formula to make it to the first page. As an English student researching, this advice brought me much-needed hope and relief!  Amongst other insightful things we did in class this week, we read an article by Moz.com about SE Research. There were many fascinating points in this article, but one that stood out to me was when the author talked about putting ourselves in place of individuals that would be consuming the text we’re writin...

For this week’s reading, we read “User Context Signals & Search Engine Rankings.” In this text, George Nguyen, the author, discusses SEO with an analogy to the periodic table of elements. He uses two-letter terms such as “Hs” to talk about Google’s use of recent searches to customize our search results. He does this with other terms such as User Experience (Ux), Country (Co), Locality (Lo), and Intent (In). The most insightful thing I found in this text was when Nguyen discussed the different intents throughout a user’s journey on the internet. The different intents include Navigational (users looking for an item or brand), Informational (users looking up more in-depth information), Commercial (users looking into more in-depth info as they are near to buying), and transactional (users are ready to buy).  One example I’d like to share is my search results when searching “Bars.” I live in a small town with no nightlife scene. However, Google was able to bring up one little bar th...