Digital Minds Forum

I was reading the following article with interest this morning “There is a strong link between heavy internet use and depression, UK psychologists have said.”

Now internet usage is a major part of ‘modern life’, we pretty much all use it for one reason or another – I’m guilty of quite heavy usage – checking on my generic smartphone for emails , status updates and news numerous times during the day, using my PC at work and laptop at home.

It worried me a little at first, what’s going to happen to my mental faculties if I use th internet (?), but then you read deeper and come across statements like “The study, reported in the journal Psychopathology, found 1.2% of people surveyed were “internet addicts”, and many of these were depressed.” – OK, so I thought to myself what does this actually mean?

So, being cynical as always, I checked the sample size – 1,319 people – not a massively representative sample of internet users. Using simple maths we can work out that 16 people from the sample of 1,319 (this represents 1.2% – not 18 as reported – I know I’m being picky but 18 people from a sample of 1,319 is 1.4%!) are ‘internet addicts’ – and “many” of these were depressed.

Taking ‘many’ to be a majority that would mean 9 people from a sample of 1,319 are internet addicts and also suffer from depression – is this really a strong link between the two factors that warrants such huge media coverage as we have today – BBC, Reuters, Sky News (112 articles on the ‘net as we speak!)?

Ah statistics, the quote oft attributed to Benjamin Disraeli “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” rings true here. Scaremongering seems to be the order of the day… control your internet usage – or you’ll become depressed or maybe I’m just reading too much into things… which often happens!

Link building doesn’t have to involve lots of emails to webmasters. With the right content on your website people will want to link to you.

some obvious examples include:

• FAQ pages
• Technical tips
• User guides
• How to articles
• Expert advice
• Free downloads
• Competitions

One of the first things you need to know about search engine optimisation is that it can be separated into two distinct areas, on page and off page. The on page SEO covers the content of the site, eg your page titles, descriptions, meta tags, text, link titles, alt image text, navigation structure etc. The off page SEO covers everything else you do to promote the site that doesn’t happen on the site itself. For example google adwords, back links, banner ads, article submissions, PR, press advertising etc.

An important note to remember is that the content of your site (on page) can strongly influence the number of links your sites acquires (off page). This is commonly known as link baiting. If your site has useful unique content people will find it via the search engines and will link to it so they can return. The key is to keep generating good ideas for content, don’t stick to tired formats such as about me, services etc try and add a bit of creativity!