Entries from June 2013 ↓

No one is perfect (no, not even you) and that’s why proofreading is an essential skill for any writer.

Copywriting, blogging, emails etc., must all be error free if you want to build your reputation. Yes, sometimes, despite your best efforts errors will slip through, but it’s important to make sure you minimise this from happening.

To help you out, here are a few tips to improve your proofreading.

1. Not now!

However tempting it may be to proof your copy or blog post as soon as you’ve written it, don’t.

Leave it for at least an hour (preferably 24) before checking it, that way it should be easier to read what you have actually written as opposed to what your brain thinks you’ve written.

2. Hard copy

Yes, I know we’re supposed to be in a paperless age, but it’s a proven fact that reading from a hard copy is much easier than from a screen, maximising your chances of finding all the errors.

3. Silence

If you get distracted you’ll miss typos, so make sure you turn off your social media alerts, email and phone so you can concentrate on the job in hand.

Then read through slowly, marking the errors as you find them in red pen (just like school days). Make sure you mark where each correction is by adding an ‘x’ beside the relevant line in the margin.

4. Loud and clear

Read it out loud too. This will help spot any punctuation errors or typos you have missed and it will help you hone your conversational writing style.

5. Check details

If you have people or brand names in your document double check to make sure you’ve spelt them correctly. The same goes for any other details (facts and figures) and web links.

6. Last call

Once you’ve gone through all these steps and made the corrections to your document, give it one more read through before you publish it or, if it is a piece of copy, send it on to your client.

Granted, none of this is ground breaking stuff, but considering your reputation is at risk, it is essential.

Do you have any other tips you can add?

If so, leave a comment below.

Author:

Sally Ormond – Copywriter, MD at Briar Copywriting and blogger.

The curse of the Google update

I set up my business, Briar Copywriting in 2007 and have always done my own search engine optimisation.

Despite a few hiccups along the way, I have managed to maintain great rankings for my chosen keywords. But then Penguin came along, closely followed by Penguin 2.0.

This latest change was meant to weed out those sites with slightly dodgy links. As I have always done my own link building and have been very careful about it, it’s incredibly frustrating when I get hit despite not bending the rules. So I’m now left having to look through all my inbound links to see what’s causing the problem.

But that’s beside the point.

Why is search engine optimisation like riding a bike?

Well, I am currently training for an epic charity endurance bike ride – the RideUK24 Newcastle to London challenge that’s taking place this August (300 miles in 24 hours).

Over the weekend I cycled from Suffolk to Bedfordshire and back (stopping over night), which is total of 160 miles (carrying a rucksack – not advisable when cycling long distances).

Whatever happened I knew I had to keep going. If I didn’t:

1. My training schedule would go out of the window
2. I would have fallen off my bike as my shoes clip to the peddles

And search engine optimisation is the same. As soon as you stop promoting and link building, your website will start to plummet.

But as if that wasn’t enough to contend with, Google has the power to make or break a business over night (even those who have always abided by the rules – sorry, I’ll stop ranting and get on with the meat of this post) simply by tweaking its algorithms.

That’s great to get rid of the spammy sites so the results you see are the most relevant, but not so great when you’ve done nothing wrong and you still get hit (sorry, got back on the soap box again briefly).

So how can you make sure your site stays in favour with Google?

Well, up to last week I would have said link build naturally and carefully, never pay for links and if you exchange links, be very careful whom you do it for.

But then, I’ve always built links naturally and never bought or exchange links – so what’s the answer?

Perhaps Google can answer that one?

Over to you Google

I’d love to get a definitive answer to this one.

So if anyone at Google happens to stumble across this post, perhaps you’d be good enough to explain?

What about you reader? How have you coped with the algorithm changes? Have you had to recover from the updates? If so, how did you do it?

Leave a comment below and let’s find out what the effect of these algorithm changes really mean to business.