Anchor text: not everyone knows what it is, and yet it’s vitally important to the business of SEO. It’s quite possible you’ve written some yourself, without ever realising you were doing so, for it is one of the fundamentals of the web. Like most things that fall into that category, it can be shaped to benefit your search engine rankings.

The concept is quite simple. Say I were to link to your website, and you sold cakes. I might write my link like this: You can find this fantastic cake shop here.

However, I might also choose to write: Recently I found the best cake shop I’ve ever come across in my life.

Now, it’s not just people that read webpages: search engines’ crawlers do, too, and they set great store not just by links, but by the text used to write them. Yes, incoming links from high-quality websites will do your own site a lot of good, but the text used between those ‘A’ tags will benefit you even more. In the second example, anyone searching for ‘the best cake shop’ may well come across your site. Conversely, not many people search for the word ‘here’ when looking for a cake shop, that’s for sure.

Clearly, incoming links are to some extent out of your control: you can’t choose what other sites write about you. But you can always ask, and that’s what many successful sites do: they’ll include a page named ‘linking to us’, with a message such as ‘you are welcome to link to this site, but please use the following text’. Some might find this a little too transparent and heavy-handed, but the net effect of hundreds of folk linking to you, using the same text, will mean that you rank very highly for that phrase in the search engines.

If you don’t like to display your needs quite so blatantly, the other method is to contact web editors and bloggers directly, choosing those who are in a similar arena to your own site. Offer to exchange links, or give them some incentive to link to you.

This is one of the hardest slogs in SEO, but it reaps huge dividends if done diligently. The other option, as ever, is to delegate the donkey work to a company such as ourselves: we can get you inbound links, with the anchor text you desire, at a very reasonable cost. That way, you won’t be relying on the very few people who search for ‘here’ when what they are looking for is cakes.

Firefox recently announced that their internet browser has been downloaded a mind-boggling billion times.

Now, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that this means Firefox has a billion users: typically, a single user would have downloaded the browser each time it brought out an update – plus, many people will download out of curiosity, and never use the software.

So, no, Firefox doesn’t have a billion users, but undoubtedly it does have a very strong userbase, and this reminds us of an important point. When was the last time you looked at your website in anything other than the browser you yourself use every day? Be that Firefox or Internet Explorer, or something more esoteric altogether, it pays to take a trip to the other side every now and again.

You may be horrified by what you see: styles that render perfectly in your own rosy world-view may well be spilling out of their neat confines on other browsers or operating systems. Finding out is relatively easy: there’s no need to go and ask your Mac-using, Safari-loving neighbour if you can look over his shoulder. There are a number of services, some free, which will allow you to see your site on a vast array of OS/browser combinations, and, for the sake of your business, I’d strongly advise you to do so, at least when it comes to the most popular combinations.

Employ a reputable company – like us, may I hazard to say – to build your website, and cross-browser testing comes as a standard part of the package. Worried by what you see in that unfamiliar browser? Then give us a call, and we’ll get everything looking hunkydory again, for every one of your hoped-for billion users.

If you are one of those who habitually uses Facebook in your day-to-day social life, then you probably know instinctively how best to use it in the marketing of your business. Keeping abreast a lively social circle does not require wildly different skills from making sure that your business is the talk of the town.

On the other hand, if your personal Facebook profile has been lying bare and bereft since you signed up, the chances are that you need a few pointers. Here is a beginners’ guide to the use of Facebook for marketing.

1. Keep adding fresh content

Whenever you add something to your Facebook page, be it a status update, a photo or a wall post, it will appear on the homepage of all those who have chosen to be your fan. This is a delicate balance: if you update too frequently, you’ll annoy people; too infrequently, and you’ll fall off the radar altogether. Try to add fresh content two to four times a week. Keep your updates interesting or valuable, and you’ll be a welcome addition to the daily feed.

2. Give your Facebook users something that others don’t get

So, what should you be updating with?  Don’t just duplicate content that’s on your website or spout marketing babble. Reward your Facebook buddies by making them feel like members of an exclusive club. If you can afford to, give them special offers, making it clear that they are only open to Facebook users.  If not, exclusive content can be as simple as photos they won’t have seen elsewhere, or even glimpses into the workings of your company from behind the scenes – it costs nothing, and makes folks feel like they are part of ‘the gang’. Or how about tips on using your product or service?

3. Encourage communication

Make it clear that you value feedback from your customers. Invite them to write on your wall (and make sure you have chosen the setting which allows them to do so). Post regular questions along the lines of ‘what would you like to see us offering?’ or – if you are brave enough – ‘what could we be doing better?’. Most important of all, reply. Wade in, join the debate, and show that you have read everything that has been written.

4. Use the message function

You can send an ‘update’ to everyone who has nominated themselves as a fan of your page. Even though you will never have the personal email addresses of your fans, your message arrives directly into their Facebook inbox (and their mail inbox if they have chosen that setting), effectively giving you access to the most valuable mailing list you will ever have: self-determined enthusiasts for your product or brand.

Use caution and do not spam your fans. A message a week would be considered too frequent by many, unless you have a genuinely attractive offer to promote. A monthly message might be better received.

5. Search for mention of your product or company

Facebook’s ’search’ function is becoming better by the day: you may find that by searching for your product or brand name that you find not only unofficial fan pages, but mentions in status updates, photo comments, and all over the Facebook network. Don’t leave it there, though: if appropriate, leave a response. Make it clear who you are – transparency is a must – and if you discover a negative viewpoint, try to address it positively.

If you follow these five simple rules, you’ll find that with only ten to twenty minutes’ work a day, you have forged some of the most valuable relationships your business will ever have. Read more about using Facebook for business on Facebook’s help pages. No time to implement these ideas? The simple, and cost-effective, solution is to use Notting Hill Internet Services to manage your Facebook profile for you.

I heard on the World Service recently that Kenya has finally joined the world of broadband. It always astonishes me to realise that the benefits of high-tech living are achieved by something as fundamental, though mind-boggling, as feeding a cable more than 10,000 miles long along the sea bed.

But it was a casual statement in the news piece that really got me thinking: East Africa will finally have an internet presence. The impending impact is almost inconceivable: small businesses will have a chance to gain global customers. Cross-continent friends and divided families will be able to stay in touch with ease. A whole nation will have a chance to make itself known on social networks and forums. News from Kenya can now be transmitted as speedily as it is from our nearest neighbours.

Now, if your business happens to sell globally, you may simply be happy to learn that there’s a new potential market for you online. If you outsource work to call centres, you may sniff the potential for another economical business model. If neither of these apply, you may wonder why it’s worth even thinking about Kenya. My point is that what is about to happen there is what has happened here in the western world, only more gradually. A small piece of news like this gives us a chance to look afresh at the vast changes that have happened in the way we run our lives, socialise, buy and sell, all within the last ten or so years.

If there’s still any lingering doubt as to how the internet changes lives, consider that the undersea cable cost a cool £360 million. No-one invests that sort of money unless they are very, very sure there will be a return. Expect to hear the voice of East Africa online very soon – and for the planet to have shrunk that little bit more.

The devil's advocate

As a copywriter and online editor, I’ve always considered it my duty to ensure that the text I publish online is absolutely correct. I double check for grammar errors and misspellings, and I’d be mortified if one slipped through. After all, I am representing my brand, and a professional image can be badly dented by sloppy writing.

Imagine my shock, then, when an SEO professional suggested to me that I might want to introduce a few common errors into my web copy. Admittedly, he was playing devil’s advocate, but there was logic behind his stance, which was as follows:

People use their most lax English when they’re online, unobserved. Almost always, folk are in a rush to get off the search engine and onto their destination, so typos are commonplace. Add into the mix the fact that the greater population may not aspire to the high standards of spelling and grammar that we editors may impose upon ourselves. Indeed, spend any time with the log files of your website, and you’ll see many highly, erm, creative spellings of your key words.

Consider, if you will, the famous film It’s A Wonderful Life. A quick glance at Amazon’s auto-suggest search box reveals that it’s as likely to be searched for with that crucial apostrophe in ‘It’s’ as it is without, no matter how much that might make us grammar-pedants cringe. So the question is, should you optimise both for those who would never dream of missing out an apostrophe, and those who drop it like a hot potato?

Personally, I do not have any problem with putting both variants into my metadata, where it need never be seen by anyone other than a search engine’s crawl-bot. The thought of deliberately including such an error on my web page’s copy, though, is quite a different matter. And yet, to optimise properly for those who miss it out, that is the suggestion.

It’s A Wonderful Life is just one example, and perhaps not a terribly important one. The issue becomes more complex when you consider foreign languages with their accents and umlauts and so forth: hasty typists will leave them off, but does that mean that they would be comfortable to see webpage copy reflecting their own lazy typing habits?

To take this concept to its extreme, would you deliberately introduce misspellings of your own brand name on your site? I’m guessing that the answer is certainly not. Ultimately, I suspect that introducing misspellings is the strategy of someone who prizes SEO above all else – because it is his job to do so – while it’s equally a strategy that a careful editor would never accept. Where would you stand?

Are you one of those people who uses twenty words when two will do?

Verbosity can be a great asset on the shop floor. However, if you are the one responsible for writing the copy for your business’ website, you may find that you’re not getting as many leads as you’d like. Chatting away to your customers in real life can give them a warm, cared-for feeling, but when it comes to websites, less is more.

It’s a peculiar fact that the majority of people read websites at a cracking pace. Something about the infinite number of possible links to click on, perhaps, gives us a sense of urgency. In the early days, marketers simply took the copy from their print brochures and put it online, but they soon discovered that what works on paper simply isn’t as effective on-screen.

Website users want you to cut the waffle. They’d like to be told what to do, and in as few words as possible. In theory, that’s simple, but just you try it: it’s a real art. Go through your text and cut out any repetitions you find. Labyrinthine figures of speech should go. Sentences with multiple clauses should be shown the door. Often, it pays to cut out the first paragraph or two all together.

The trouble is, folk get attached to their own prose. It’s hard to see it dispassionately. The answer, then, may be to hire a professional copywriter – and not just any copywriter: an online specialist. They are adept at saying exactly what needs to be said, in as few words as possible.

And now, I’m off to edit this post to half its length.

Habitat, the UK furniture store, has never been at the forefront of online technologies. Take their website for example: it may look impressive on first view, but you can’t order from it; nor it doesn’t showcase every product they have for sale. Primary amongst its failings in my opinion is the way that offerings are divided by room: living room, kitchen, bedroom, etc. Fine of you’re after, say, a bread bin, but where do I start if I want a rug, a lampshade or some shelves?

To be fair, the site does also offer a search facility, but the classification of a site is a major consideration and I’ve always thought that this fundamental failing is a sign that Habitat’s web marketing team may not be quite the best that money can buy (hey, Sir Terence Conran, with your knowledge of design, I’d have expected you to know that web design is as much about ease of use as it is about looks).

My misgivings were given another boost this week when Habitat briefly made a major error in the twittersphere. Clearly, someone in marketing thought it was about time Habitat started reaping the benefits that a twitterstream can bring – so far, so good. Indeed, I can imagine many design and shopping aficionados – myself included – quite willingly signing up to find out when the next sale will be or when a stunning new product has come on offer.

But Twitter, though seemingly simple, can be a bewildering place for the ‘newbie’. Unfortunately, Habitat’s people had understood the concept of a ‘hashtag’ (ie, putting a keyword with a # symbol next to it; users can ’subscribe’ to – or search on – specific hashtags so they will see every tweet thus labelled) but not quite how to use it. For example, what they could have tweeted was:

Habitat launches its new spring collection! #furniture #habitat #design

That way, anyone especially interested in furniture, design, or Habitat itself, would have got the message. Instead, they put out several messages along the lines of:

HabitatUK Our totally desirable Spring collection #iPhone

HabitatUK Our totally desirable Spring collection #poh

HabitatUK Our totally desirable Spring collection #Apple

As I type this, I can only think that the person who was ill-advisedly put in charge of the twitterstream was a young work-experience person who assured everyone that he’d heard a great way to get maximum exposure… because, of course, pushing your message in front of people who want to hear tweets about, say the election in Iran, or Madeleine McCann (two more examples of the hashtags they used before the story started spreading and the tweets were taken down), is not going to go down at all well. Indeed, some would call it spam – and many did.

You see, one of the great things about Twitter and all social media networks is also one of its biggest potential pitfalls: word spreads quickly. There’s nothing a seasoned tweeter likes more than to jump on a big brand and point out its failures, and this (small, possibly excusable – depending on whom you listen to) error caused mirth and reportage right across the blogosphere and onto the mainstream press.

A smaller misdemeanour, and one that hasn’t been as widely picked up on, is that of course if you were to actually subscribe to the Habitat twitterstream (as opposed to one of the hashtags it misused) you wouldn’t be best pleased to have the same message repeated to you multiple times, only with differing hashtags.

The moral of this story is: if you are not confident that you know how to manage your social media output, hand it over to the experts… which we modestly like to believe that we are. We can offer a full advisory service on Twitter and all other social media platforms, so do contact us if you wish to avoid public ridicule of the Habitat kind.

We booked a break at the woodland holiday camp Centerparcs recently. Now, as someone who works in online marketing, I tend to notice when it’s done well, and I must say that Centerparcs has one of the best online booking experiences I have ever encountered. It’s not perfect, but then again I am not sure I have ever encountered a complex retail website that could be called completely perfect.

Part of what surprises me is that Centerparcs predates the internet, so all their online booking functionalities must have been conceived long after the company was already up and running. Having said that, they’ve had perhaps a decade to refine and improve their websites, and it seems to me that there’s someone doing some very smart thinking there.

What is so impressive about Centerparcs’ website? In brief:

1. Its ease of use. Its homepage offers a ‘quick availability search’ for those who know what they are looking for; but there is also in-depth information about locations and offerings for those who aren’t familiar with the product.

2. It funnels the user towards a purchase. No matter what page you are on, you will always see the green button inviting you to ‘book now’. There’s no ambiguity about how or where to book; no onus on the user to find the application form.

3. It uses special offers to create a sense of urgency. Visit the site at different times and the prices on display will fluctuate too. This is a good psychological trick – when you see a low price, you want to book for fear you won’t see it again – but also indicates that they have the flexibility to respond to low forward bookings by means of reducing prices at short notice.

4. It upsells: once you click on that ‘book now’ button, you’re invited to purchase a number of additional options, including the choice of a cabin nearer the centre of the park; a crate of groceries to be waiting for you; bike hire, and so on. Miraculously, this isn’t done in a hectoring or bothersome way: somehow they strike the right tone in making you think, ‘Oh why not, we’re treating ourselves, after all….’.

5. Once you have booked, they send you regular emails asking if you have booked all the activities you may wish to participate in. This provides a useful service for the customer – because it’s true, some activities do get booked out – but also, of course, allows Centerparcs to keep itself fresh in your mind and urge you to spend more. Importantly, though, these emails are not spaced so closely together that they become annoying or spammy.

There’s one thing I think Centerparcs could have done a little better. There’s another clever marketing ploy they have, which is that if you rebook within 28 days of your break, you are guaranteed to get the lowest price, plus a voucher to spend in the shops while you’re there. To make my experience absolutely perfect, I’d be impressed if when I revisited their site, it picked up my cookie and recognised that I qualified for this special offer, only showing me the lowest price. I guess it’s easy to talk about these things, and not always as easy to implement.

White Stuff, the high-street clothing store, has a very good website and online strategy. I visited for the first time because I liked their clothes, and I stuck around – subscribing to their newsletter; paying several repeat visits, and crucially, making purchases – because I like their online level of service.

As a marketing person, I’m often very aware of quite how I’m being marketed to, and how successful it is. Send me newsletters too frequently? I hit that unsubscribe button faster than you can say ‘lost customer’. Take me to a website with flakey navigation and no security at checkout? I’ll take my custom elsewhere.

White Stuff have recently added a feature which has placed them even higher in my regard: customer reviews. It’s not a new concept: it’s one that Amazon has made us all familiar with – but there’s no harm in copying your strategy from the best, and I think we’d all agree that Amazon have got most things nailed in the world of online retailing.

From now on, customers can record their opinions of the clothes they’ve bought. This has the obvious advantage for the customer: a personal opinion, even if it’s from someone you’ve never met, can often be more helpful than marketing blurb. Consider, also, the advantages for White Stuff:

• They get a whole load of content written for free
• They get to find out precisely what it is their target market most likes – or dislikes – about their goods
• Customers are a whole lot more likely to buy a garment if they have seen that others have already done so, and are glad they did

Now, clearly, we also have to be aware that there is a potential downside. Suppose you get some poor reviews in there: would you simply delete them and allow only the glowing recommendations to stand? Tempting, but inadvisable.

In the age of social media, customers demand transparency above all else. It’d soon get out if someone attempted to upload a negative review, only to find it wasn’t displaying. For the customer reviewing strategy to work, you have to have faith in your product, and in the fact that the vast majority of reviews will always be positive. In this context, a few unsatisfied reviews won’t do you any harm at all: and, in fact, you will learn from them. If customer after customer tells White Stuff, for example, that they love their fabrics but their skirts are too short, that’s a useful lesson for them – the kind of finding that they might otherwise have conducted pricey focus groups to discover.

The addition of user reviews to the White Stuff website tells me two things: that they have belief in what they are offering, and that they are prepared to listen to their customers. With a strategy like that, they are most certainly on the right track.

There’s been a lot of talk about the ‘free economy’ recently, with Google as the most-cited example. Aren’t we lucky to have as powerful a set of tools as Google Search, Google Earth, Google Maps, and all the other innovative Google offerings, for completely free?

Of course, Google aren’t operating at a loss: far from it. They make their money by providing services to the vast majority of us for nothing, but charging a small percentage of people to place adverts on their pages. As you’ll know if you have ever set up a Google Adwords account, the charges can be minimal, but multiplied by hundreds of thousands of millions of clicks, those charges make them a mighty profit.

It’s not as clear a division as ‘users get it free; businesses pay’ across the board, however. If you are a business owner, there are still some ways you can get some free and useful publicity from Google – mainly because they need you.

Have you visited Google Maps recently? If so, you may have noticed a new feature which allows you to enter a generic search term such as ’supermarket’ or ‘coffee shop’ in the bar where you would normally enter an address.

The pioneers of easy search, who have already set up Google maps so that you can enter whatever’s easiest for you – full address, postcode, or street name – have added this step to make it that bit more intuitive. What could be easier than typing ‘launderette’ into a search bar, and seeing the locations of the nearest washeterias superimposed on the map?

But, even if it may seem that way sometimes, Google doesn’t know this information intuitively. It is depending on its users to input the information for it – and that’s why it needs you. Take a click around, and you’ll see the depth of its ambitions; there is room for photos, customer reviews, links and a description of each business.

For a small business such as yours, this could be an invaluable marketing tool. As users turn to handheld devices such as phones and iPods, accessing the net on the go, it will become increasingly important to show up when that all-important phrase (language school, dry cleaner’s, café) is typed into a Google map showing your local area.

While the information can be input by anyone, it would serve you well to get in early and create your own listing: then you will have control over the images used and the precise description of your business (you won’t have any control of the reviews of course; the only way you can do that is by ensuring that you are providing consistently excellent service).

This you can do via the Google ‘Local Business Centre’ which you’ll find on www.google.com/local/add. It costs nothing, takes seconds (though it may involve an instantaneous automated phone call to ascertain that you are where you say you are) – and will bring you all the benefits of marketing on the mobile web while it is still free.