Web Write 101

My private obsession: data visualisations.

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It’s not the tools themselves, but using them right that matters in social media land. Here’s some ideas from the Future of marketing micro-conference in November 2010. read more »

I was lucky to catch William Gibson speak in London in October 2010.

He talked about his new book ‘Zero History’ and about writing science fiction and writing in general. William is my favourite source of quotes when teaching. “The future is here, its just not evenly distributed” being one of my favourites when I teach social media. And of course he invented the term ‘cyberspace‘. read more »

LinkedIn is perfect for web writers.

Groups are essential for keeping abreast of topics.

Here’s some worthwhile LinkedIn Groups for web writers to join:

Freelance Web Writers

Web Content

The Content Wrangler Community

Freelance Editing Network

Seasoned writing and editing pros

The National Union of Journalists

STET: Professional Copy Editors

LinkEds & writers

• 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.

Google Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page.

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

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