Web Write 101

My private obsession: data visualisations.

read more »

Google instant search was rolled out to all users of the Google search engine on 9 September 2010.

As soon as you start typing your query, search results are shown to you right away (even before you press the ‘Enter’ or ‘Search’ button). As you type, the search results change based on whatever you have typed so far. Google tries to be smart and presents you search results based on your search string, location, previous searches and many other parameters.

read more »

So, you’ve done your research: asked potential readers how they would search for the things you are writing about, consulted a thesaurus for synonyms, looked at competitors’ websites, checked out your hunches with Google’s Keyword Tool. You’ve now got a long list of words and phrases to use on your web pages.

But which keywords are best? read more »

• Tweet with users’ words in mind – so that Twitter’s search can find your posts
• Use the appropriate hashtag for things like conferences and events
• Link to your Twitter profile page from your website
• Choose a ‘real name’ carefully as that will be first in your <title> tag, therefore it will be very visible in the search engine’s results pages.
• You may want to put a few relevant keywords in your real name too.
• Put your main website URL in your profile.
• Add keywords to your short bio
• Write twitter posts for Retweets so that you encourage others to spread the word.
• Tweets are now indexed in real-time by Bing and Google.
• Write keyword-rich tweets if possible.
• Select the initial characters of each tweet carefully as this will be shown in the search engine results list too.
• The links you post aren’t counted towards your ranking by Google. However you should ensure that any links to your site, that use a URL shortening service, use 301 redirects in case anyone chooses to link to your pages from their site, using the shortened URL.

After 12 years as a tutor of courses about Web publishing, I thought I’d experienced all training calamities: a person reading The Guardian all through a course (the first time I’d taught at PTC), the Internet connection going down, the training laptop being stolen mid-way through a course, an in-company course where all the websites I needed to look at were blocked… I could go on.

read more »

Here’s an introduction to SEO and social media, sometimes known as Web 2.0.

read more »

Twitter is all the rage at the moment with everyone from the NHS to Number 10 Downing Street using this tool to communicate.

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page. read more »

Matt Cutts from Google has been collecting questions from the public for several months. Over the last month he’s been putting the answers on You Tube as videos. read more »

When organising a conference, agree a tag that can be used when delegates categorise their blog posts, slides, photos and videos. Then people will be able to easily find the related information later using tag searching sites such as Technorati. read more »