Following my BrightonSEO presentation yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to use one of the WordPress plugins I recommended, Blackbird Pie, to recap the top tweets from the day:
It’s actually incredibly quick to write a post like this, all you need to do is install the plugin and insert the tweet URL into your post using the format: [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/kevgibbo/status/19346618549?].
Posted in conferences |This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed raise awareness on how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.
Image credit: Flickr
It’s essential that the different elements of your marketing reinforce one another if your budget is going to generate the highest possible returns.
Search marketing, traditional marketing and PR cannot happen in isolation from each other, or you will inevitably end up spending more than you need to on a less-effective campaign.
Join your marketing up well and you’ll develop a powerful corporate persona, provide seamless service to new and existing customers, and free-up more budget by eliminating waste.
So, with all these benefits, how do you join up your marketing? I thought I’d examine some of the different strands and take a look at how each can work more effectively with the rest of the marketing mix.
How to join-up PR and everything
PR is a vital element of your marketing strategy, it feeds into everything. PR is about managing your name. After all, without a decent reputation, the rest of your marketing is going nowhere.
Don’t forget as well that your PR executive or team are paid to keep their fingers on the pulse of your industry. They can be a trove of knowledge about coming trends, current issues and consumer concerns.
Your link builders can brainstorm ideas with the PR team and your email marketers can plan their campaign calendar with their help.
Often, your PR exec is also the best person to take up the reins of your social media strategy.
Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms are excellent PR tools, and it’s a great idea to have your company spokespeople blogging (check out my free blogging whitepaper for an in-depth look at why blogs are such a powerful tool).
That means your SEO team can return the favour and guide your PR exec in blogging best practice, boosting your website’s organic optimisation and cementing your corporation reputation with thoughtful insights.
It’s a virtuous circle of joined-up marketing excellence.
How to join-up SEO and everything
Finally the rest of the marketing world is starting to realise what I have been banging on about for years – SEO is not some technical website extra, it should be considered at every stage of your online marketing.
For example, your SEO team understand the terms you need to rank more highly for – they need to be in a position to feed this back to your PR team. That way, your press releases, social media work and blog content can be tailored to include these important phrases.
The SEO team should be included in all copywriting work for your site so that they can guide the copywriter in what’s needed to make your pages sparkle for search engine crawlers as well as for human visitors.
Plus, there’s a load of useful information being gathered around the company that your SEO team could benefit from.
What subject lines did best in the email marketing tests? That can feed into their PPC copy. What industry blogs were most popular on Twitter this month? That can feed into their link building work.
Although all elements of marketing are important, I think that PR and SEO should underpin everything a company does.
How to join-up email marketing and everything
Don’t view your email marketing as solely selling your products or services. Change your perspective and see it as a vehicle for marketing your entire company.
There’s great potential for your email to provide a platform for your other work and still drive interested customers to your products.
For example, you could add ‘Find us on Facebook’ and ‘Follow us on Twitter’ buttons to your emails.
You could include links to recent blog posts on your own site, or maybe even guest blog posts elsewhere (if you’re finding it hard to negotiate a guest post on a high-authority blog, offering to include it in your newsletter can be a great bargaining chip).
Perhaps some of your more skilled SEO copywriters or PR execs could write a newsletter to enhance your marketing? This can make your communication more effective and also boost your brand’s reputation among the recipients.
How to join-up social media and everything
I went to a pub the other day and there was a ‘Find us on Facebook’ sticker on the door. That’s great, keeping social media in mind at every point is really useful in terms of customer engagement.
The more opportunities you have to engage socially with the customer, the better. It massively enhances customer loyalty, as well as keeping your brand at the front of their mind when they next make a purchase.
Some social media marketers may feel they face a bit of a battle showing the value of what they do to the rest of the team. For example, perhaps your email marketing copywriter won’t want to include a ‘Follow us on Twitter’ button because it won’t take clickers to a sales page.
Your business needs to be more long-sighted than this. By building followers and fans, your company is creating a hardcore of loyal customers – people it can communicate with in a fun and social way. A click to Twitter is not a wasted click.
By giving discounts and special offers to fans, you can drive sales without intruding on anyone. You’ll also find it easier to get people to tweet your blog posts, share your content and rave about your deals – all of which feeds back beautifully into PR and SEO.
How to join up your offline and online marketing
Many small and medium-sized enterprises simply don’t bother with offline marketing, because the web is a far more cost-effective place to promote themselves.
However, offline marketing such as posters, newspaper, TV and radio adverts still work for major brands. There’s also similar great scope for local offline marketing for smaller companies, in the local press, for example.
But how can this join-up with your online marketing? Just as with email marketing, your offline promotions should show that there are even more value-adding perks available online.
For great discounts and sneak previews, find us on Facebook.
Find more great recipes back on our website.
Follow us on Twitter for more competitions.
You have limited space in any offline promotion but unlimited space online. Direct people to the web when you can and you’ll have more space to play with and another chance to win their custom.
How to join-up your team
Okay, this is perhaps the most important piece of advice in this entire post. Your marketing won’t be joined-up until the various relevant teams are working together.
Some large businesses will have whole teams dedicated to the different marketing strands I have outlined here – and it is essential these teams get to know each other.
You want them to communicate more effectively, brainstorm ideas with each other and share their skills. You need to facilitate that as much as possible.
Start by bringing the teams together and sitting them around the same desks if possible. Explain your marketing ambitions and encourage them to see themselves as part of one large team rather than their own smaller functions.
If your SEO is done by an agency like mine then ask for your search executive to come and work from your office for a few days, to build a good working relationship with your in-house marketers.
If this is a major change for your marketers then invest in some team-building fun. Send them off for a meal together or a team-building day or drinks. It’s worth it.
Your marketing can’t be joined up until your whole team – email marketers, link builders, paid search executives, the lot – see themselves as part of a bigger team and wider strategy.
Posted in conferences, online marketing |On July 19th I noticed that I could us the AdWords Bid Simulator tool at the ad group level rather than at the keyword level as is normal. I thought this was a very useful feature so I tweeted:
Later that week I thought I should email our Google rep to say how great this new tool was. However, when I went to look at the account I couldn’t see this option. I emailed her with
Early last week I thought I saw the Bid Simulator tool available at the Ad Group level. I was going to say thank you for adding this very useful feature but now I can’t see it anymore. Was I included in a beta for this or was I going mad? Either way, this feature would be very useful.
She replied with:
With regards to the bid simulator tool it is currently only available at the keyword level.There currently isn't a Beta for bid simulator at the ad group level but I will pass this feedback onto our Product team that this is something that you would find useful.
I actually questioned my sanity until I saw this yesterday:
I screenshotted to prove my sanity at a later date and emailed our rep the details. She replied
This is really strange because when I look in the account from my side and follow the same steps that you have in your screenshot I am not able to see the option.
When I check the account today there is no evidence of ad group bid simulator:
WTF is going on?
Posted in seo |
Chess by Alejandro Fernandez
Everybody seems to agree with the “content is king” mantra. At the same time most articles, blog posts in and outside the SEO industry seemed to ignore it. Not anymore: Content SEO and marketing resources are ubiquitous in 2010.
SEO blogs used to deal with other aspects of Web strategy. Content has often been taken for granted and thus on page optimization, web design, usability and link building took center stage all the time.
Good, great or even killer content for flagship blogs isn’t there automatically.Just publishing anything and doing SEO for it won’t suffice. You have to really craft outstanding content these days to get noticed at all.So how do we write or create content that spreads like wildfire on the Web? That’s not not as easy as some people assume. You need a content strategy in the first place, a high quality
“flagship” blog
imagesvideosinfographicsebookswidgetsor other highly valuable content types. These 30 content SEO, marketing, creation, strategy & promotion insights + resources should enable you to perform high quality content SEO campaigns.
Over the years many people have contested the notion that content is king.Most critics of king content have argued that content by itself is not enough.It doesn’t work the way some people want to make you believe “just create good content and the rest will follow”.You need to use several SEO and marketing techniques to spread the word about your content.Social media are key to get your content in front of an audience.Unless you do black hat SEO where you feign content where there is none every serious SEO campaign needs content. Ethical SEO is only possible via content. Where there is no content there is nothing to find by the search engines and thus nothing to optimize either. So SEO starts with content creation in many if not most cases.Most business websites offer only low quality content. Some of it can’t be even considered content at all because it has no other function than to advertise a company. Ads are not content and a website solely filled with overselling copy has no content. Content always needs to have some value. Likewise good ads can be considered content in case they consist of more than a sales pitch.SEO content is in most cases considered a derogative term. In fact so called SEO copywriting can in many cases not be described as content. It’s simply stuffing to feed search engine spiders with relevant keywords. Such spammy SEO techniques are rooted in the past where some SEO practicioners only cared for rankings and nothing beyond. Stuffing, as in keyword stuffing leads to a high bounce rate and low engagement. People don’t read stuffing, they are after real content. Thus I refer to content SEO here, not SEO content or “old school” SEO copywriting simply for the sake of mentioning keywords.For content SEO you have to create value. The values comes first the SEO follows. In design we say form follows function. In SEO we could say SEO follows content. It’s not that simple though. SEO and content are intertwined. You don’t create content first and think of the SEO later. You think strategically. What content can improve my SEO?Ever since the dawn of Universal Search where image, video, news, map and other results have entered the main organic search index on Google content via SEO means not just text or more than text. It means more media types even if only text is involved. PDF ebooks or white papers are good examples.Excellent content doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Creativity often needs a goal to be able to create something. In the best case you have a set of goals for the long term you want to achieve with your content strategy. The SEOptimise blog had a few goals when it started: branding, traffic generation, link building, readership growth. Sounds obvious doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t, a blog content strategy may entail other goals: lead generation, earning ad revenue or even sales could be long term business blog goals. Currently I run or write for four flagship blogs. Each of them has a different goal set aka content strategy.Your content strategy has to be aligned with your overall business goals. Are you trying to raise awareness and funds like most non-profits attempt to? Do you want to increase sales like most ecommerce businesses want to? Are you in the selling subscriptions business like many media or software as a service/SaaS providers?You have to determine your niche and audience, find out where they reside and address them accordingly. They may be on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon or in forums.Your customers are just part of your audience. To reach them you need to address influencers and connectors first. These people, often social media users, bloggers and journalists will spread the word for you. Your content strategy must include incentives for these people to link to you and make their friends and other online connections aware of you and your content.Perhaps most crucial aspect of the average content strategy is to create a reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Trust is the real PageRank and is increasingly reflected in search results. Google and other search engines measure trust using different methods. You can’t fake trust the long run, you have to earn it. You have to create trusted content.Do you have more insights or resources to add? Add them in the comments.
Tags: content creation, content marketing, content promotion, content seo, content strategyThis is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.
Google Alerts is one of the most powerful tools made available from our friends at Mountain View, but despite it’s huge potential it’s largely under-rated and doesn’t get the appreciation or the acknowledgement it deserves.
It’s been around for donkey’s years but is still in Beta, and the chances are you’re using it already in a simple way, perhaps to keep track of your own name to see whether there’s a Footballer in Spain with your name or a namesake who’s running for the local council.
You might even have it running for your companies brand name to keep tabs on any good or bad press you’re getting.
And if you aren’t doing either of those two things stop reading this article now (we’ll wait for you) and go and get that set up before you do anything else.
Seriously sort it out now…
But I wanted to share with you just a few of the cleverer ways it can be used that will surprise you and almost certainly make you life a bunch easier.
Using Google Alerts to Find Out If You’ve Been Hacked
With everyone switching to WordPress as a CMS there’s a very real danger of more sites getting hacked. It seems currently the main reason people are hacking WordPress sites is to fill them with links to websites in the less savoury corners of the web.
They’re even clever enough to cloak your website so only search engines can see the links and they are invisible to you.
So how do you find out if your website has been attacked bar waiting for your rankings to tank for linking to spam sites?
You can use a Google Alert, rather than entering a simple keyword set up your Google alert using site:yourdomain.com then add multiple keywords like viagria, cialis web cams, etc. If you add OR in caps lock between the words then it will look for any mentions of they keywords on your site.
Essentially you’re setting up a system which says email me whenever you find any of these dodgy words on my site, you might mention them innocently and get an alert but if something untoward is going on this should give you a early warning.
The only real downside is Google have already spotted the problem so it may already be too late.
This is a great little tip with a hat tip to Patrick.
Using Google Alerts to Find Out Who’s Linking to You
You no doubt know that search google with link:yourdomain.com will give you a rough approximation of some of the links pointing at your site. It’s no big secret that the data you get from this search is a little flawed, but setting up a Google Alert with this syntax is not a bad way to find out about some new links you’ve attracted.
Keep Track of Your Competitors Links
You can use exactly the method discussed above to keep track of new inbound links to your competitor sites, this method is arguably it’s even more valuable. If you discover they’ve had a series of infographics which have gone viral perhaps you should be exploring a similar approach, or maybe competitions are leading to high quality editorial links? Well then you should get your thinking cap on.
Find out Every-time Google Index a new Page of Your Site.
A real trend I’ve seen over recent months is websites suffering from decreasing number of indexed pages in Google, in most cases this hasn’t adversely influenced their search traffic or search entry pages but is still an issue of concern. Do you have a system in place to monitor whether your pages are getting indexed as you hope? or are you just submitting an XML site map and crossing your fingers? If you set up a Google alert for site:yourdomain.com you’ll get a notification every time a page is indexed, which will help spot any indexing issues you may be suffering from.
Use Google Alerts to Keep Track of Changing Content with RSS feeds
There’s certain areas to certain websites that you’d really like to keep track of but for what ever reason don’t have RSS feeds, I’ve found this a lot in press centre sections of company websites, for example.
It can be really helpful to get updated whenever a new page is added to this section of the site. Again a bit of clever Google Alerts syntax can help you. Setting one up for a query like site:theirdomain.com/press-centre/ would do the trick nicely.
See not bad for a free tool that’s been in beta for donkey’s years.
Posted in google, link building, seo |This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.
I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Yahoo, not only are they seen by most people as a bit of a joke, largely the stick is unwarranted. They’ve got some great little products and services, two of which I use to this great little way of keeping tracking of easy social media interaction opportunities.
The main service is Yahoo Answers, its a hugely popular social site where users ask and answer questions. If you’ve not checked Yahoo Answers recently, go over now and have a look, there will be dozens of people asking questions related to your industry – no matter how obscure or niche it is.
The nightmare though is having to revisit the site everyday to see whether there’s anything new or relevant. Fortunately the main categories have RSS feeds so you could set up the feed in your RSS reader to keep track of the mentions in your chosen category, but your a busy digital marketer, you don’t have time to check through every question asked on the site. That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in.
If you’ve never heard of Yahoo Pipes don’t worry, nobody has. It’s simple tool which allows you to do some very simple filtering and sorting of web data like RSS feeds. It can do some pretty clever tricks but what we want it to do is really simple. Take a feed from Answers, search for any questions that contain your keywords, discard those without and deliver those that do into a new RSS stream.
Start by dragging and dropping the a fetch feed icon from the side bar into the main screen. This will then create a box with a text field. Cut and paste the feed url from your most relevant category in Yahoo Answers. If more than one category is applicable click the addition/plus symbol and it’ll add a new text field for another category.
Next click the Operators expanding button in the side bar, find the filter button and drag and drop it between the Fetch Feed Box and Feed Output. It’ll have a text field you can type the word or phrases you want to monitor for. The drop down fields give you flexibility whether you want to look just in the Question Title and/or description Etc.
You can add more than one keyword by clicking the plus symbol, it gets quite clever now as well, you could filter questions that include SEO and PPC or you could set it up for questions that include SEO or PPC. It’s pretty self explanatory when it’s in front of you.
Now you need to connect the feed to the filter and from the filter to the out put. Click the circle and the bottom of the feed fetcher and drag it to the start of the filter, then do the same from the filter to the output. It should look something like the picture below.
Nearly there now, just save the pipe and hit the ‘Run this Pipe’ button. This will take you to a page where you can subscribe to this new feed. But I’m too lazy/busy to check my feedreader daily, so I take it a step further and use FeedMyInbox to take the feed address and email me whenever there is a suitable question.
Clever time saving trick which with a little tweaking you can use on dozens of social sites with RSS feeds. Do you monitor any social sites like this? Any tips to save time checking back for opportunities?
Posted in Social SEO, search engine marketing, seo, social media, yahoo, yahoo search marketing |
Steve Rubel and his ridiculous ‘SEO is dead’ escapade during the Google Instant presentation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to articles about SEO from outsiders.Now that SEO has gone mainstream and everbody deals with it many people write about SEO who have barely a clue about it. Others, often web designers who know the basics of SEO from 5 or 10 years ago spread their outdated advice today.Journalists, bloggers from outside the industry and writers for publications completely unrelated to SEO attempt to “join the conversation”. I have no problem with that.Make your homework first though and then write. Also make sure to accept feedback. Some bloggers don’t like me pointing out their mistakes and delete my comments instead. Thus I decided to write about it where they can’t.Another reason to speak up on these SEO myths is that most of them get wildly popular on Twitter. The examples below have garnered hundreds of retweets during the last two weeks.
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2. You need to “submit your site to social bookmarking sites“ (like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon) via 1stWebdesigner and Helium
First off you don’t submit to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is guess what, about bookmarking! So you actually bookmark a site or rather a page as is more often the case. I use Delicious every day for that purpose like most other people. You can encourage people to bookmark you by different means but submitting your site like it’s a directory or something is SPAM.Then Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon are not bookmarking at all. The 1stWebdesigner author doesn’t even mention Delicious. Digg and Reddit are social news and StumbleUpon is social browsing/social discovery. On all of these sites ”submission of sites” for SEO reasons is frowned upon and that’s certainly not the way SEO works there. SEO on Digg means a clever linkbait headline or striking infographic. Digg ignores such submissions but on Reddit and StumbleUpon you get downright banned for “submitting s” as if it was a directory.-
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You surely wonder why I don’t link to the above mentioned articles. It’s becacuse every link counts as a vote for Google and any publicity. In case you know these publications I advise you to stop reading them as they spread lies, myths and misconceptions that will cost you money!Also don’t spread such stories on Twitter. You’re just showing how clueless you are when it comes to SEO.
Tags: 1stwebsdesigner, business insider, helium, mens news daily, seo is dead, seo myths, steve rubel, webdesignerdepot, worcester business journaltitle tags appear to be completely random and negligible. They assume that
title tags won’t get even really seen by the average user so why bother with them at all?
They forget that title tags get displayed in search results on Google and elsewhere and that it’s still one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
Also it’s not just one ranking factor.
Not all title tag optimization techniques are ranking factors for Google but they need to be implemented as well in a thorough on-site SEO campaign.Exact Match (of search query) – When your title tag matches the search query exactly than it’s 100% relevant for it. Example: searching for [seo news] without brackets would match a page with SEO News as a title tag. Nothing more or less.
