Your Carbon Footprint that is…

We are proactive in reducing our carbon footprint and being aware of our impact and possibilities to reduce our impact on our environment.  In addition to trying our air travel, through Climate Friendly, and wanted to offset the emissions of our other (essential) emissions-intensive activities.

Climate Friendly works with corporations, businesses and individuals to measure, manage, and offset their carbon footprint, by  providing a quick and easy calculation tool, to take action immediately.  While these tools allow you to calculate offsets for flights, electricity and car travel, we wanted to offset more than those things, so we sent an email to Climate Friendly to see if they could help.  They quickly responded and sent us spreadsheet for us to fill in and  return to them to finish the calculations.

Before we could complete the spreadsheet, we needed obtain certain figures, make calculations and implement procedures to produce more accurate figures — so we thought we’d share how we went about doing it…

The first figure we tackled was our electricity, dividing the KW usage (from our electricity bill) by 5 working days, divided by the staff members.

For paper consumption, we went through our invoices and extracted all paper purchases i.e. A4 80gsm, A4 110gsm, FlipChart per 60gsm etc. worked out an average over the period of time and tracked it in a spreadsheet.

Taxi travel and freight figures were extracted from our cashflow reports from our accounting system.  For paper waste, we didn’t empty our 7 litre recycling bin for 4 weeks and measured how much we filled it for that period.

At the end of the day these figures are not absolute, but by continually measuring our consumption, our hope is that we’ll no longer be grappling for figures, working on guesstimates or making assumptions.  We’ll have a more comprehensive understanding of how big our footprint really is.

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One of the more obviously powerful things about Twitter is the ReTweet – where one user effectively “forwards” a Twitter post from another member.

If you are an organisation posting on Twitter, and you are aiming for a ReTweet, care should be taken to keep the character length of your post even shorter to allow for the “RT @<yourid>: ” at the beginning of a message, where “<yourid>” is your Twitter username.

It’s a simple thing (and reasonably obvious), but I find it’s an easy thing to forget when you aren’t used to it, or under time pressure…

(If ReTweeting is important to you, Dan Zarrella’s analysis of ReTweet trends and corresponding report.)

In preparation for some workshops earlier in the year, I spoke with Damian Maclennan about his community building efforts with Sydney Cyclist using the Ning platform. Damian has kindly granted me permission to blog the conversation here.

In the interview Damian talks about why and how he went about setting up the community, his thoughts on Ning as a community platform, and he shares some of the lessons learned in building and maintaining it.

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It’s been, like, forever, since my last post in this series – feels like time to pick it up again and finish the series…

The suggestions in this post are focused on the “behind-the-scenes” elements of your site – to the untrained eye they may not be visible/obvious.

This post definitely sways towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to understand these things for when you’re briefing your tech team.

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In the previous posts in this series I’ve focused a lot on the “conceptual” aspects of SEO – the non-technical things that can make a big difference to your SEO efforts. Many of these aspects have other practical and usability benefits.

Over the next few posts I’m turning to some of the more technically-oriented things that you can do to optimise for search engines. These posts definitely sway towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to get an overview on such matters if only for when you’re briefing your tech team.

Today’s post focuses on technical matters that are visible to your participants (i.e. they impact how your users access the site). Future posts will look at some of the behind-the-scenes things you can do to assist search engines.

As before, many of these tips are best practices for other reasons, but they all certainly provide SEO benefits as well. Some techniques will have a bigger impact than others, and how much impact a particular technique may have on rankings is largely unknown (as far as I can tell) as most search engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets. So even if you can’t apply all these techniques, it’s still worth incorporating as many as you can into your site.

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So, you have a good understanding of your participants, have worked out a structure and site design that meets their needs, and now you’re ready to write the content of your site – the copy.

While many of the principles of good copywriting apply in the offline and online world, there are a few tips for copywriting that are specific to on-screen reading and search engines.

Over the jump I’ll review some of the things I’ve learnt about writing effective copy for the web.

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One of the nice things about legitimate SEO approaches is that “best practices” for websites are also best practices for search engines. Making information findable for your visitors, also makes it more accessible, and more useful, for search engines.

Over the jump I’ll expand on a few techniques that can help increase your site’s visibility to search engines.

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Any successful SEO strategy starts with a key premise: that your website/blog/page has something of value to offer to your the people you want to motivate. Applying SEO techniques to a site that simply doesn’t meet their needs (or worse, a strategy that lacks an understanding of who they are) won’t really make a lot of difference.

Whether it be a blog or a web application that you’re building, knowing what value you provide (and what that means to the participants of your site) is a critical piece to the puzzle. While with a blog you may be able to get away with not going to great lengths to analyse your audience and traffic sources etc. some of these principles outlined over the jump can be useful.

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I’ve had a couple of conversations with friends and clients over the past few months looking at Seach Engine Optimsation (SEO) and what that involves.

It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but search engines are the “first port of call” for many internet users, and usually represents a significant proportion of traffic to websites (in my experience anywhere between 30% and 80% of site referrals come from search engines).

Therefore it’s important to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.

Bad rap

SEO has received a bit of a bad rap because of some vendors’ attempts to “game” the system – that is use nefarious techniques to try to “trick” search engines into giving their sites higher ratings. However, there are a lot of things that we as practitioners (developers, producers, designers, content writers etc.) can do to help our clients achieve better rankings.

While I’m no SEO expert, I have picked up a lot of tips and techniques over time that I thought would be useful to jot down here in a series across the next week or so. The notes will take the form of a series, and will be tagged SEO to make them easier to find for future reference.

(Note: I’m going to focus on organic search results, not targeted search advertising such as Google AdWords)

Many facets to SEO

The first thing I think worth mentioning is that SEO is not something that you can just “bolt on” at the end of a project. Aspects of SEO permeate many levels of a project – everything from information architecture (how a site is structured and information presented), search term and site analytics data analysis, copywriting (the content of your site), web publishing system choice, HTML coding, and more.

To my mind, the various facets of SEO can be broadly split into three categories:

1. Site strategy
2. Copywriting/content
3. Information architecture
4. Technical

Each is interelated – without certain technical capabilities, information architecture related SEO methods may not be possible. Similarly, without strong site architecture, copywriting methods are less effective.

Therefore a wholistic approach is required, from the beginning of a project to the end execution, to facilitate a strong SEO strategy.

In the coming posts I’ll expand on each of these and delve a little deeper into some of the techniques that can be employed.

In the next installment I’ll touch on what I think is the most critical aspect of SEO: creating something worth finding.

I’ve just been chatting with a client about email marketing – exploring which tools they should/could use to support their email strategy. I thought I’d do a quick review of some of the options we looked at.

Click through to read the full post.

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