Social networkers will recognise the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2009, unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site.

It’s fun to spot new words – although often they are uglier than three-week dead haddock (‘scrappage’ for example) – but be careful about their use in web copy.

The prime job of commercial web copy is to tempt your readers into a profitable relationship with you. The second priority is to get your site near the top of search engine listings.

While Google won’t care a whit about you unfriending scrappage, human readers quite possibly will. So don’t risk upsetting them. Keep your language simple, open, everyday, approachable*. And non-upsetting. It’ll stop people unfriending you.

*Errrrrr – one exception. If you’re just addressing a technical audience that’s on your wavelength, go ahead and use as much jargon and as many TLA’s as you need. They’ll be flattered to be thought of as part of an exclusive community.

Write Limited. Write for Web. Linked In. Twitter

Copywriting, web, webcopy, writing

Google’s PageRank is a number from zero to 10. A new site (such as this one) starts life with a score of zero. Over time, this score will tend to rise in value. Here’s how Google describes PageRank (as at 20 November 2009)…

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

It all sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it? Especially as Google go on to give valuable clues about how to acquire PageRank…

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

In addition to the above clues, you can find a lot of detailed information that explains how to earn PageRank all over the Internet. And until recently, I didn’t really question what I thought I knew about PageRank. After all, when I put in the effort I tended to see the results I expected.

Then I read an interesting blog entry on SEOCO. This article essentially accuses Google of punishing the web’s leading SEO sites by deliberately suppressing their PageRank scores.

Of course, I have no idea whether or not this is correct. Yet a quick look at the 4 sites in question shows they have the things normally associated with high PageRank…

• A lot of inbound links from external sites with high PageRank (i.e. many votes from important sources)
• A lot of well optimised and relevant content (from an SEO perspective)
• Deemed by professionals to be the best resources on the web for their specific areas of interest

For an example of this last point, type PageRank into Google. The #1 site on the list is Wikipedia, a source of unimpeachable knowledge (ahem). You won’t find SEOMoz on page one, despite offer over 1,000 PageRank-related articles. Faced with a choice between Wikipedia and SEOMoz, I know who I’d turn to when I wanted up-to-date and useful information about PageRank.

All 4 sites mentioned in the article have relatively low PageRank given their status. Could Google have some undeclared beef with these sites simply because they help people to understand search engine optimisation? And if so, why on Earth would the company take issue with such sites? What else does Google have issue with, and what am I missing out on as a result?

search engine optimisation, SEO

To use a cliché (something I normally wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, and would avoid like the plague), you only get one chance to make a first impression. It’s important, therefore, that that impression – in all likelihood your home page – should communicate clearly, concisely and compellingly what it is you do and, more importantly, what benefits that will bring to your customers.

So, what do you need to say on your home page? For many people that’s not an easy question to answer because they don’t think in the same way as their customers. When you work with a product or service, you see what you offer with supplier’s eyes, not those of a consumer. If that’s a problem for you, then read on; I’ll suggest a simple way of jumping to the other side of the fence.

When I ask clients of mine what it is they do, sometimes I get answers that leave me scratching my head: “Basically, we observe and track historic movements of stock indices across significant bourses worldwide, and using that data we construct behavioural models which, when married with real time data feeds, allow us hypothesise about future market movements, short, medium and long term. This allows our customers to identify upcoming transaction opportunities, whether of an instant acquire or dispose nature, or as potential go-long or go-short situations. Essentially, it’s non-trivial number-crunching and we have some seriously heavy metal in our computer room, mirrored to a distributed site so that in the event that in any one location we go into a crash and burn situation, then continuity is assured by automatic switchover. Is that clear?”

That’s not a real life example, but I’ve had real ones that are that bad, and worse. There’s a useful technique I apply, under my breath, when this happens which – politely – I’ll call WTF*.“So,” I ask politely, “WTF does that mean?”

Applied (and usually reiterated) with due regard to the sensitive nature of the client/supplier relationship, the WTF question lets my client – with some gentle prompting – distil a simpler statement about what they do. “We provide mathematically-based predictions of stock market movements to our customers, and we do it in a robust, fail-safe way.”

That still leaves much to be desired, and more work is required, because the next question to ask, politely, is “SFW*?” And this is where it gets interesting, because now we’re looking for a benefit statement. We probably won’t get there immediately, but we’ll get to an answer like: “Well, our service lets our customers buy and sell at the optimum point, within the uncertainty constraints of market behaviour.”

“SFW?”

“So they can make more money”

Great, between us we’ve got there, a solid reason for a customer to do business with my client. There are very few motivating benefits that make a customer think about spending money with a previously unknown potential supplier. This list is not exhaustive, but look for messages as powerful as these:

Business

* You’ll save money
* You’ll save time
* You’ll sell more
* Your profits will increase

Personal

* You’ll be healthier
* You’ll be richer
* You’ll be more successful
* Your family will thank you

Those, of course, are bold, bald statements but your home page should incorporate a lightly embroidered version of one (or more) of them within the first sentence. One of my websites opens with the sentence “You’ve invested time and money building a website – Write for Web helps you make your site work hard and produce a return from that investment.”

Do you need professional help to arrive at a powerful message for your own organisation? Perhaps not. What you do need is the ability to ask yourself questions and determine exactly what benefits you offer. And then, of course, you have to communicate them.

*WTF, SFW. Acronyms inserted to avoid triggering parental advisory warnings

Write Limited. Write for Web. Linked In. Twitter

No tags

The single most important tag in SEO is the HTML title tag. The content of this tag is used by Google for at least 2 purposes…

1. To allocate keyword phrases for which your site will be indexed
2. As a headline that appears in Google’s results pages

For example, the lead generation site ASureImage has the following title tag: Lead Generation – Online Marketing – SEO – ASureImage

Take a look at what appears in Google for this site…

As you can see, Google is using the text in this site’s title tag as it’s headline. What’s more, Google is using the meta description as it’s description for the site.

This alone tells us the title (and meta description) tags are important. When you add in the fact it uses the words in the title tag to index the site, it’s clear it has a big role to play in content optimisation.

html title tag, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, SEO, seo title tag, title tag

Ditch The Double Space

Hints and tips on this website are just that, not laws carved in granite. But here’s one guideline that really ought to be carved in granite, enshrined in an Act and passed by Parliament. NO DOUBLE SPACES AT SENTENCE ENDS.

Always put just one space after the end of a sentence. Years ago, when we used typewriters (they were introduced to stop us plucking quills from geese*), hitting any key advanced the carriage one space. And that space was the same distance, whether you’d typed a narrow letter like an ‘i’ or a wide one like an ‘w’. Depending on whether the next sentence began with a wide or narrow letter, sometimes it was awkward to see where a new sentence began. Computers are more intelligent than typewriters**. They know the width of the letter and so they adjust the space around it automatically. Inserting a digital double space now trips up the reader’s eye. They won’t thank you for it. Don’t believe me? Check below.

Always put just one space after the end of a sentence.  Years ago, when we used typewriters (they were introduced to stop us plucking quills from geese*), hitting any key advanced the carriage one space.  And that space was the same distance, whether you’d typed a narrow letter like an ‘i’ or a wide one like an ‘w’.  Depending on whether the next sentence began with a wide or narrow letter, sometimes it was awkward to see where a new sentence began.  Computers are more intelligent than typewriters**.  They know the width of the letter and so they adjust the space around it automatically.  Inserting a digital double space now trips up the reader’s eye.  They won’t thank you for it.  Don’t believe me?  Check above.

The single, not double, space is a rule that nonprofessional writers resist. Maybe because they think it looks professional. It doesn’t. See what authors, copywriters, journalists and editors do by checking any magazine, newspaper or commercial website. Count the double spaces you find – you won’t need to take your mittens off!

*Or, presumably, sparrows if you were writing the small print in insurance contracts.

**Actually, they’re not, but the people who write text display and word processing applications are. Just.

Write Limited. Write for Web. Linked In. Twitter

Copywriting, web, writing