Tom Hallett

How many times have you returned to work after a short break to find hundreds or even thousands of emails waiting in a bulging inbox?

Not only does this mean you have to spend the first few hours back at your computer filing, deleting,  and replying to email. But it’s also easy to miss an important communication – and lose your sanity – as you struggle to work through your inbox.

Often, there’s not much that you can do about this. But have you ever considered how you can help make other people’s return to work a little less stressful?

One way is to simply delay sending email if you know that the recipient is on holiday.

Instead, just put your email together as usual. Then either schedule the send for when you know the person will be back in the office (if your email software allows this), or just save it in your drafts and make a note to send it at a later date.

That way, that’s one less email for them to deal with. Plus, you’re more likely to have their attention when they do receive your email.

Over the last few years, I’d been kidding myself that I had been practicing – and maintaining – “Inbox Zero.”

And the truth is that I’d been doing most of it right. I’d turned off the automatic notifications on my email so I could choose when to fetch new mail, and I was checking and processing it all just once or twice a day in batches, leaving my brain free to concentrate on the work at hand.

The problem was that I was sticking emails that I needed to take action on into a “Follow-up” folder. This was really just a new name for my inbox. And some messages languished in there for months on end before I took any action on them.

This all changed when we started using Gmail at work (instead of Outlook). Because Gmail is browser-based, every email has its own URL, so it’s possible to access that email from anywhere (as long as you’re logged into Gmail and you have that URL, obviously).

So now I do one of two things when I process email that requires an action.

I either:

1. Take action on it straight away, if it will take less than a couple of minutes to deal with.

2. Create a new task for it in Remember the Milk. Then attach the email’s URL to the task (see pic below). Then file the email, set a priority level, and/or date for the task.

Now the email’s out of sight, and out of mind until I actually need, or decide, to deal with it. And when it does come to taking action, I can open it up straight from my task list, and reply easily if I need to.

And that’s it – no email in my inbox.

Plus, it’s not only individual emails that you can link to – if you have several emails on a specific project, set up a folder for them and link to the folder instead.

Want to get your website’s images ranking well in Google Images? Here are three quick, easy tips that will help:

1. Use descriptive alt tags, filenames, and captions

For example, in the image below the alt tag, filename, and caption are descriptive, and they’re all similar, giving a good description of what the image is of.

Google Image Search Homepage

2. Put images alongside relevant content

If your image is a diagram of how to build a wardrobe, put it on a page about building wardrobes.

Then make sure that the page has relevant content, including optimised title tags.

3. Make sure that your site is “Google-friendly”

The more authority your site has in Google, the more likely it is that your images will rank well for relevant searches.

So don’t expect to rank well if your site needs some SEO work. Likewise, don’t expect to rank well for generic, high-competition search terms.

Further tips?

Do you have any other Google Images ranking tips to share? Share them in the comments, below!

Does your business have a Facebook Page?

Here are 4 quick tips that you can start implementing now.

1. Have a plan

It’s no use setting up your page and updating it willy-nilly.

So work out a plan that includes how often you’ll check your page and respond to any feedback, and when you’ll update your status or publish new content.

Of course, there will probably be times when you need to deviate from your plan. But having one in place will ensure that your page is updated regularly.

A plan will also help you to specify times when you’ll work on your page, leaving the rest of the time the get on with the other important parts of your business.

2. Don’t update too much

The people who “like” your business’s Facebook Page will see your status updates in their news feed.

So if you update it too much, it will create clutter in their feed, increasing the chance of them becoming “blind” to your updates, blocking your updates from appearing, or worse, “unliking” your business’s page.

It’s much better to update your status say, 1-3 times a week. Remind people that you’re still there – but don’t shove it in their faces.

3. Make it shareable

To get more support for your business via Facebook, you’ll need to encourage people to “like” your status updates, and share content with their friends.

So make sure that at least 50 percent of what you publish on your Facebook Page is “shareable.”

By this, I mean something that people will be happy to be associated with – after all, once they pressed the “like” button it will appear on their Facebook profile.

Naturally, shareable also means content that people will actively share with their friends, like special deals, expert information, jokes, videos, and the like.

4. Use your allies

Encourage friends and family to support your Facebook page and share your content with their Facebook friends. Ask customers to “like” and support your page and leave comments. Work with other businesses to share and promote each other’s social media efforts.

Remember, the more support and engagement you get, the more exposure you’ll get on Facebook, which will mean more “likes” for your page.

The DMOZ Open Directory Project is a great place for your website and web pages to be listed. Google and the other search engines consider DMOZ an authority website, and a link from there to your site will help give your site more authority.

In fact, Google has so much respect for DMOZ that they’ll sometimes use the DMOZ description of your site or page as the search snippet (the chunk of text under the main link to your site) in their search engine results pages (SERPs).

This is fine if your site has a good description on DMOZ. But, it can become a problem when you want Google to use the meta-description that you’ve specified for the page. After all, many of us will spend a good amount of time crafting the meta-description that we want searchers to see as the snippet.

Block the DMOZ description

However, it’s easy to make sure Google never uses the DMOZ description as a search snippet for your site. Just put the following code into your website’s pages <head> section:

<meta content=”noodp” />

If you want to control search engine snippets for all of your website’s pages, it’s best to add this code to every page on your site.

Lots of people are bigging up the role of social networking services in this year’s election.

I have to admit, I was dubious to begin with. But services like Facebook and Twitter have been buzzing with pre-election opinions and gossip, and lots of political parties and politicians are using social networking effectively.

Eastleigh’s PPCs on Twitter

On Twitter, I decided to follow three of my local constituency candidates – Chris Huhne (Liberal Democrats), Maria Hutchings (Conservative) and Leo Barraclough (Labour) – to see what they had to say and to see how they use Twitter to engage with voters.

After following them for a few weeks, here’s what was good and what was bad. And my tips on how they could use Twitter better.

Join the conversation

Don’t just use Twitter as a soapbox for your thoughts and opinions. Make sure you get involved in the conversation too.

For example, a quick look through Chris Huhne’s feed reveals no @ replies (conversation) with anyone else (bar a ‘Twitterview’ he did with Channel 4′s Krishnan Guru-Murthy). It’s almost a similar story on Maria and Leo’s feeds.

The Eastleigh constituency is tight (500-odd votes in it in 2005). So engaging with your followers is the digital equivalent of canvassing on the streets and knocking on people’s doors, and could mean the difference between winning and losing those key votes.

Focus on your strengths

Leo Barraclough’s Twitter feed consists of tweets such as The Tories will wreck this country and UKIP’s leader is a joke and an embarrassment.

Fair enough, that’s his opinion and if we agree, they are reasons we might note vote Tory or UKIP. But we’re on Twitter, not at the Labour conference – give us reasons to vote for you. Not why we shouldn’t vote for your rivals.

Back up your tweets with extra info

Tweets are restricted to 140 characters, but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide links to further information to back up what you’re saying.

On April 21, Maria Hutching tweeted that she was ‘off to meet local residents who are furious about the latest Lib Dem attempt to wreck a green field space’.

This tweet interested me, and I wanted some more information. So a link to an article or blog post with more details would have been useful. (I should also add that I asked her directly on Twitter for more info and didn’t hear back).

Again, providing this information could be the difference between winning and losing key votes.

Also remember that Twitter doesn’t have to consist of numerous ‘mini-blogs’. You can also use it as a feed for your website’s news section or blog to push content to a wider audience.

The personal touch

We constantly hear how voters want to be able to identify with politicians. So adding the ‘personal touch’ to tweets is a great way for the public to get to know you.

To be fair, Maria Hutchings has added a personal touch with tweets about her family life. And Chris Huhne has tweeted about his visits to local restaurants.

So why not take it a step further? You could use Twitpic to post up images of life on the campaign trail. Or integrate a location-based social networking service like Foursquare into your Twitter feed so we can see where you are on the campaign trail in real-time.

Don’t stop now

Since the last election the Liberal Democrats have been in touch with me regularly with letters and branded community magazines. But I don’t think I heard from the other parties until the election was announced.

So, once the 2010 election is over, continue to stay in touch and engage with the public through social networking as well as traditional media. And be ready to try even more ways of digital communication – who knows what social networking services we’ll be using by the time the next election comes around?

If you’ve got a small business website, there’s a good chance you wrote the content yourself. And it’s likely you don’t update the copy (words) on key pages very often.

Here are 6 DIY ways to freshen up your website’s content to make it more readable.

1. Break up content with sub-headings and short paragraphs

When we read a web page, we usually scan through content looking for key information. So if your content is bunched up in big chunks of text, your customers are less likely to get the information they need.

Instead, use short paragraphs based around one idea per paragraph. Paragraphs of just one, two or three sentences are fine for web copywriting.

Then break up your content further with sub-headings to help your users scan the page more easily.

2. Use ‘I’, ‘us’ and ‘you’

When writing avoid referring to yourself and your customers in the third person. Instead, use personal language like ‘I’, ‘us’ and ‘you’.

Read these two examples - who would you rather buy from?

The company is very sorry but can’t send the packages to customers until December 21st.

We’re very sorry but we can’t send the packages to you until December 21st.

3. Use simple words

Review the words you’ve used in your content. Are they are simple as they could be? Have you used jargon or ‘corporate speak’?

This doesn’t only go for words you use to describe your business and services. Make you have used the shortest most simple version of every word.

Consider these examples:

• Demanding vs Hard
• Utilise vs Use
• Approximately vs About
• Discover vs Find

4. Start with your conclusion

People will visit your site for information, to buy your products, or to make an opinion about your services.

So include the most important information on a page near the top. That way it’s no big loss if they don’t read the whole page – they get the most important information right away.

For example, if a page is about the areas your company covers, that information should be in the first paragraph. Any additional information can then follow.

5. Link to other pages

Link to other pages on your site if appropriate. For example, if you talk about delivery options or particular services on your page, link to relevant pages using those words. (The words you use in a link  are called ‘anchor text’.)

Just make sure you avoid words like ‘click here’ that don’t describe the content of the page you’re linking to. It’s an SEO copywriting no-no and bad for accessibility.

6. Read out loud

When you’ve finished re-writing your content, read it out loud. You’ll find out straight away if something needs some extra commas or a rewrite.

When you do a search on Google, you get your search results almost instantly. So how does Google trawl through the billions of pages on the web to deliver such quick results?

To rank your web pages in their search engine results pages (SERPs), Google has to do 3 things:

1. Crawl your web pages
2. Index your web pages in its database
3. Decide how relevant your web pages are

Crawling your pages

Google sends out a computer program called a spider to index new and updated pages on the web. The spider (called Googlebot) is controlled by other computer programs. These programs decide which pages to crawl and how often.

The spiders start by crawling pages they have visited before. They also detect links they find on these pages and add them to the list of pages to crawl.

Indexing your pages

The spider processes information on each page it crawls, and stores it in Google’s index – a massive database of all the websites and web pages Google has crawled.

Google indexes all the words it sees on your site and where the words are. It doesn’t just index the ‘visible’ words you see on the page – it takes note of things like title tags, meta-description, file names, and the words used in links (anchor text) and much much more.

Google can’t index all types of web pages. For example, it struggles to read content in Flash and Javascript, and cannot read text in images.

Relevancy

So, when you do a search on Google, most of the hard work is done. Google just dips into its databases, finds all relevant pages and then ranks them by what pages they think are most relevant to your search query.

Google uses over 200 ranking factors to decide how to rank your web pages. Anything from the country where your website is hosted, to the words used around links to your website, can affect your ranking.

A web page’s title (title tag) is probably the most important on-page factor that Google will look at when it decide to rank a page.

But title tags are not only important for SEO. They affect how users interact with your site, and can mean the difference between someone clicking through to your site, or visiting one of your competitors instead.

Read on to find out what a title tag is, and why it’s important not to ignore them on your website.

So what is a title tag?

Right click on this web page and (depending on your browser) choose ‘view source’.

Now look for the words between the  <title> and </title> tags in the HTML code. This is the page title – commonly known as the title tag.

Where will I see a page’s title tag?

As well as in the page’s HTML code, you’ll see the title tag in the following places:

1. In your web browser, usually at the very top above the toolbar:

The title tag for this site in the Firefox browser

2. In the search engine results pages (SERPs):

The title tag for this site in Google

3. The title tag is also usually the default title when you bookmark  a page on your web browser, and on online bookmarking services like Digg and Delicious.

The title tag for this site when saving a bookmark in the Chrome browser

The title tag for this site is included by default when saving a page in Delicious

As you can see from these examples, the current title tag for the home page of this website is SEO, Web Copywriting & Internet Marketing Tips | Tom Hallett, Southampton, Hampshire.

Why is the title tag important?

There are 3 main reasons why you need to spend time on your web page title tags:

1. Title tag text will be the link text to your site from the search engine results pages and other places where your site is bookmarked. So they need to entice people to click through to the page.

2. Google and the other search engines place great importance on the content of your title tags when they decide how to rank your website. So they need to include important words that sum up the content of the page effectively.

3. The title tag is the first thing that appears when a web page is loading. So it can reassure users that they are on the right page as soon as the page starts to load up. And, it can keep users on your site if the page is slow to load. If the first thing they see is ‘untitled page’ they’ll more likely to click on the back button.

If you run a small business website, it’s likely you’ll write a lot of your own copy (words). But are you making the most of the opportunity to get found in the search engines?

Here’s some top tips on writing with SEO (search engine optimisation) in mind. And it’s not as hard as you’d think.

Use your customers’ words

Before you write or rewrite a web page, do some research to find out what words your customers are using. You might call a spade a spade. But they might call it a shovel.

Ask current customers, see what words your competitors are using, and take advantage of Google tools like the Keyword Tool and Insights to compare search volumes and get ideas on alternative words and spellings.

Write naturally

There’s nothing worse than a web page stuffed full of keywords so it doesn’t make sense to humans – and the search engines know that.

So write naturally with your customers – not the search engines – in mind. By all means, mention your keywords when you have to. And use plurals and synonyms to attract searches on variations of your keywords.

Remember titles…

As the copywriter, you don’t just need to think about the words on the page – you also need to write your web page title tags.

The title (also known as the title tag) appears between the <title> and </title> in the source code of your page (try right-clicking on any web page and selecting ‘view source’). In most web browsers you’ll then see this title in the very top of your browser (in the grey bar in Internet Explorer 7).

The title is also the link to your site in the search engines results pages (SERPs). So make sure it describes your page and entices potential customers to click through to the page.

The title of a page is probably the most important on-page (i.e. within your control) factor that search engines take into account when deciding if a page is relevant to a search query. So make sure it includes important keywords and is unique.

…and meta-descriptions

The meta-description lives between the second set of speech marks in the <meta name=”description” content=”This is your meta-description”/> part of your page’s source code.

Most search engines don’t use it as a ranking factor. But they’ll show it in the SERPs if they think it’s relevant to a particular search query. So spend some time writing a good meta-description that includes variations of your keywords and other information that will entice users to click through. But don’t make it too long – 2 sentences is usually enough.

Add content regularly

Regularly adding new content to your site is a great way to get ahead of your competitors in the search rankings.

Each time you add a new content-rich page to your site, you are increasing the chances of your site being found by new variations of keyword and key phrases.

For example, in the last few weeks this site has been found by these key phrases in Google:

• Overuse of capital letters
• Can search engines read capital letters
• DIY SEO Google Maps

Now, these are not keywords I have targeted when writing content for the site. But by regularly adding content, I’ve been found by these and many other ‘long tail’ phrases.

Each phrase may only amount to 1 or 2 visits. But times that by all the other variations of keywords and phrases, and it can add up to a lot of search traffic.

Regularly adding new content also tells the search engines to come back and crawl your site more often. This then leads to more authority, when they see fresh relevant content added on a regular basis.

Be an authority figure

If you run your own business, you’re probably an expert in your field. So share your knowledge on your website.

Not only will you get known as an authority in your industry. Good useful content will also attract inbound links from other websites – ‘votes’ for your website in the search engines’ eyes.

Or offer to write guest articles on other relevant blogs and websites in exchange for a link back to your site in the article. Another great way to get good inbound links to your site.