I’ve had to employ the ‘mad lib‘ technique myself a time or two. For certain projects it can be pretty effective. Mad Libbing/Shingling/Shuffling, whatever you call it, is an especially quick & inexpensive way to provide unique titles & meta descriptions to a large section(s) of a site. Arguably not quite as effective as fully custom written content, but certainly quicker and by extension cheaper.

Thanks for sharing your own method!

After spending the last few years doing higher level strategic direction & corporate ‘deliverable’ based SEO I’m rediscovering my ‘roots’ as a jack-of-all-SEO-trades freelancer. As part of this rediscovery process I’m learning that unused skills, like neglected tools, get rusty.

Timing couldn’t have been better :) I’m glad I ran across this blog!

This whole ’shuffle’ thing is about saving time for me while still being absolutely sure that my criteria (the 10 rules ;)) are met.

I guess there are several ways to write texts, and mine (this) one you could call ‘deductive’: first fill in the general criteria, words, default sentences etc and then in the last phase do the actual writing. This structured way works best for me, because well, I’m quite disorganized myself by nature. I do know of people who can just start writing and deliver fast and good results too (Erik-Jan Bulthuis is quite good at that, for example).

I think if you just write 10 rules for yourself and hang it next to your monitor, you’re fine too. Then you can jsut write freely and look at your rules every now and then without creating templates with variables for yourself ;)

Jason

Please do not make any replys too technical to understand, my brain isnt what it used to be..