DEV Community: Avyaa

Writing an Engaging, SEO-Friendly Technical Content: Tips from Fellow Creators

Avyaa — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 09:08:59 +0000

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The role of writers in building brands is indispensable today. From global tech giants like Facebook to budding startups, carefully articulated content is essential in attracting consumers, building user base, and maximising user retention rate. Aviyel works with creators around the globe and features informative content around open source projects.
Here’s a quick guide to the basics of technical writing that certainly answers- how to begin with technical writing from a scratch with Aviyel.

Who are we?

Aviyel works with open source creators to build and incentivise active communities, achieve financial independence and increase adoption of their projects. At Aviyel, we are building a knowledge repository to share their contents, experiences, and support for open source projects. We are the bridge connecting open source communities, businesses, and developers who build great products.

Role of freelancers in building a platform like Aviyel

Great open source projects deserve great content. Open source has always had a content problem creating difficulties connecting with the audience. Here’s where writers come into the picture. Creators are a building block of any organisation, regardless of the size. The content developers through their product allow companies like Aviyel to kickstart the conversations around open source and help OSS projects to climb the desired mark. We want you to help build OSS communities for our partners through your content.

What do enterprises expect from creators?

To create well-planned, well-researched, and well-crafted articles. Inform the developer ecosystem, stimulate a new and critical discourse around Open Source creators, projects, and community. The blog post should sound human and curated in a way that all reader questions are answered. While preparing a draft of your blog, please ask yourself if this is what I want to read as a reader? This is how you will polish your writing style by quick elimination and bringing rigor to your content. If you encounter any difficulty while writing/formulating your thoughts on a write-up, reach out to our content community and Aviyel’s content management team on our Discord channel. Above all, we will assist each other to learn, grow and accomplish their missions in life.

Voice and Tone

Generally, most articles follow this standard:

Voice

Informative
Technical
Confident
Human

Tone

Q&A: Conversational
Blog: Opinionated
How-to’s and Tutorials: Informative
Cheat Sheets, Checklists, and To-do’s: Report
Reviews: Analyst
Thought pieces: Storyteller

Word Count

The article should contain around 1500 words. Although, editors do appreciate you going the extra mile, please make sure the extra content adds rigor and value to your content, rather than make it dormant.

Structure of Blog

Introduction- First line should have the primary keyword. Please use a stat or recent example to supplement your introduction. Must contain at least one external linking (mostly to your stat).
Body- The body should have a minimum of two headings. Both internal and external linking is required. The headings must include your keywords.
Conclusion- Can be quoted as “Way Forward/ Parting Note.” Please connect your article with Aviyel’s vision and add Aviyel’s relevant social media/blog links. Sample- Aviyel is partnering with MobSF to deliver a one-of-a-kind mobile security infrastructure available in the electronics industry. We are embarking on a journey to monetise open source software and build a developers-driven community with constant flow of knowledge, ideas, and goals. To know more about Aviyel's recent endeavors, follow our discussions here. Join Aviyel’s Twitter space at AviyelHQ.

Moreover, the structure of your blog primarily depends on the niche of your post. For instance, if you are curating a step by step tutorial or contribution guide, try to include some generalised pointers like prerequisites, attributions and a summary of your writeup in conclusion. Similarly, if you are attempting a benchmarking article, make sure to enlist pros, cons, and difference between the two technologies you are writing about.

Keyword Optimisation

This is the heart and soul of your write-up. A blog mainly consists of 5-7 main keywords out of which primary keyword will lift your blog ranking. To rank your blog on search engines, please ensure your keyword is stuffed at the right places. Do not overuse your keywords. An ideal keyword density means using your primary keyword once in every three lines. Please follow the ritual the next time you draft an article.
Other pointers:

At least two of your headings must have the primary keyword. The first paragraph of your blog must contain the primary keyword. It’s better if you use it in the first two lines themselves.
There is no right answer to how many times your keywords should appear in your blog. However, please make sure your secondary keywords are stuffed at least 5-7 times in the entire blog.
Frame your content around your keywords, not vice versa.
The title should not be more than 12-word long. The keyword must come in the first 4 words.

Plagiarism

Aviyel, or any other company per se is strictly against * plag. Please use any plag detection tool before submitting your article to the content team at Aviyel. At times, plag is a result of adding repeated quotations or stats. Try to modify their language without changing the essence.

Important Pointers

Use minimum passive voice. It decreases the readability score of your blog.
Try not to use big words with more than two syllables.
Use Headings as much as you can. It decreases the complexity meter.
Image caption and title- should involve keywords in a robust manner. Download your images with the title of your blog.
Complex sentences reduce readability scores and may not pacify the reader’s imagination. Short and crisp sentences enrich the content. Try to wrap most of your sentences in 10 words.
Use Social media links. Embed them in your articles. Internal and external linking
Do not end your headings with a period, semicolon.
Make sure your content is fresh. Freshness enhances the SEO of your content.
Conclude your blog with Aviyel’s vision, social media links.

Formatting

Headlines/Titles

Write in title case
Make sure you use your primary keyword within the first five words.
Primary Section Headers: Use Heading 1
Key Subheads That Should Show Up in Contents: Use Heading 2
Third-Tier Subheads: Use Subtitle
Body: Normal Text
Examples: Indent Normal Text; use bullets as necessary

Subheads

Include and follow the H2 > H3 > H4 hierarchy strictly. Your headings should start with H2 then followed by H3.
Do not forget to use your primary keyword in headings and subheadings.

Body

Bullets: default CMS bullet, aligned left
Numbering: default CMS, aligned left
Font, bold, italics
- Leave font as “paragraph” style unless using a subhead. Bold subheads. No need to italicize.
Hyperlinks
- Embed link for SEO, set to open in a new tab.

Images

Whenever you download images from Google Images, make sure the title of the blog is the title of your images. When inserting the image in the doc/CMS platform, please caption the image with the primary keyword.
If project title- MobSF: Best practices and Tips
Image captions can be Features of MobSF/Analysis of Mobile Security Framework

You can find more tips, templates and suggestions here. Tap to read the full post.

Happy learning!

Role of Community in Scaling Open Source Projects

Avyaa — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 12:32:16 +0000

Open source software is an emerging business today. The Firefox browser we frequently switch for faster speed or the corporate life savior, OpenOffice- all have been the outcome of global open source community collaboration. By the time you read this article, open source developers will reach a fascinating 20 million mark. But what drives the core of an open-source movement? Is it just the code generated after days of deliberations and permutations or something colossal, inclusive, and yet diverse?

Talent may win games, but it's intelligent teamwork that wins championships. It is none other than a community of developers, creators or maintainers that sustain and grow an open source project. It might take an individual to envision a software and commit the first batch of codes, but it's an effort of a whole community that chauffeurs bugs and makes the project indispensable.

How do communities impact open source software growth?

An open source community is a foster school for developers who intend to break records in winning championships. Defined as a semi-organized collection of developers, an open source community encompasses like-minded contributors from different backgrounds to work on a software project. Every individual member has a role to play- to nurture software building and serve billions of consumers.

I remember an ancient English quote on occasion- It takes a village to raise a child; likewise, it takes a motivated, self-driven community to build a sustainable open source project. A community ensures constant flow of ideas and combinations of codes to design revolutionary software. A code may assist an organization in making millions in profit. However, a community ensures those profits aren't eroded any time soon by bringing dynamic changes in a static code. Without constant watch on code performance, the programs may get dormant and the technologies redundant. A community acts as an internal watchdog for software administration and ticks all boxes on the list for higher customer approval and acceptance.

Taking the example of Linux, what would have been your go-to OS if not Linux for secured communications? Only after due collaborations and creative innovations of an open source community, we got Linux, Apache, and Firefox that remodeled how we understand and use technology.

An open source community is not a physical or social construct; rather it is defined by the diversity of interests, goals, and pursuits that helped democratize open source innovations. The idea of using community building for transformative innovations isn't new and dates back to the eighteenth century. Even the first industrial revolution was driven by a community of individuals way ahead of their time. They formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham; it helped the great minds explore, share ideas, and convert intellectual thoughts into solid prototypes. We got the first steam engine and Arkwright's wheel through the Lunar Society's community innovation. Three hundred years later, another community innovated Python and Apache, which paddled us towards the fourth industrial revolution.
An open source community ensures no developer is left alone in optimizing pretty scathing codes. By harnessing the open source community component, an organization can save hundreds of work hours and millions of dollars that in turn would have wasted.

Bottlenecks in leveraging potential of community-based open source model

Today, open-source society needs serious nurturing. While most communities are at a nascent stage, it is necessary to ensure dynamism in every member for a thriving, global community. Moreover, the open source industry has faced a vacuum of community development and ongoing innovation in recent years. With irregular and untimely donations, the developer communities are on the brink of facing a severe resource crunch. Global protectionist laws have gone from liberal to stagnated in a year with Covid-19, extending leverage to propriety software. One could argue that with the influx of developers, the communities become complacent and might show drastic cuts in efficiency. Furthermore, with growth in size, communities may face recurring security hazards and possibilities of secret agendas by developers, which is impossible in closed source software.

That's where Aviyel comes into the picture. With up to date code bases having the highest quality and security compliances, Aviyel is building a one-stop hub for developers, creators, and project maintainers to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and build prototypes. It prides itself as a community-driven monetisation platform that connects creators with developers and contributors. Aviyel makes sure that no aspiring developer, maintainer, or open source project is left behind.

We are transitioning to a fully automated world marked by the fourth industrial revolution. To maintain the legacy of an open-source movement, an OS community must encourage code exchanges and constant learning.
A community-based governance model shelters several like-minded geniuses that not only upscale the company's profits but satisfy customer needs. It is the community of millions of software developers that helped mature the open-source movement and build steady revenue streams.

Quoting Helen Keller, alone we can do so little; together we can do much. The line clearly defines the power of a community in bringing extraordinary outcomes. It is vital that open source communities now receive the deserved attention from the global software industry. Open source communities need to transform their commitments from subsistence to commercialisation. The bottom line of sustaining an open source society is collective freedom, transparency, and constant circulation of ideas.

Working together is a success in itself, and when a contributor is backed by a community of 20M geniuses, the results seem promising.