Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category

Technorati have introduced a new feature to their website called Twittorati.  Twittorati is an area where people can see what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about.  The subjects of the blogs are on a variety of subjects and as a result the tweets are a weird and wonderful mix of opinions, stories, news items and random comments.

Twittorati allows you to see tweets in real time and they can be organized by latest tweets or by authority ranking.  Tweets can be filtered using Technorati tags and Twitter hashtags.

Personally, I feel it is a great resource to check on a morning to find latest news and developments in a variety of subjects.  Also a great place to find quality people to follow on twitter.

If ever there was an example of what not to do on your social media campaign this would be it. Habitat, the major UK retailer has been engaging in some very underhand tactics through the popular social networking site Twitter.

With only a few followers on their Twitter account Habitat chose to promote their new sale in a rather unethical manner. Using the popular hash tag facility Habitat targeted keywords that had absolutely nothing to do with their current sale but are heavily searched upon within Twitter e.g. #Apple, #phone and even #Mousavi.

One thing is for sure they certainly got people tweeting about their brand but not in the way they had intended. The spammed twitter users were furious with the blatant misuse of the tags.

It would appear that Habitat have now deleted their initial attempt at promoting their discounts and instead have started engaging with followers in a more ethical way.

Although this was a tough lesson learned by Habitat I can’t help but feel they have severely damaged their brand and whilst they can try to hide the evidence, it is almost impossible to remove completely.

A fantastic blog by Karl Harvard this week on econsultancy.com talks about how SEO is evolving from just keywords and content. Off site optimisation such as blogging and contributing to other social networks.

A social media engagement strategy is now key in terms of SEO for clients. The key is getting clients to buy into this and accept this as part of an SEO strategy. With SEO, there is a distinct skill in writing optimised content and being able to code effectively for SEO. With social media marketing, its all about research and time - making sure that you put the effort in and that you are selective in where you put the effort in.

The theory of themes still runs true - if you run a site that sells gardening equipment, make sure you post on other sites within your genre. Relevant quality traffic is what you want, and building a picture of your site being a regular contributer to popular relevant content sites is key.

Social Media Marketing as we term it here, is the area we expect to grow the most over the next 12 months, and its long and short term benefits towards your overall SEO strategy should not be overlooked.

Not too sure about the goal hanger term though Karl. Where I come from it was called a “jonny liner”, presumably because a lad called Jonny was obsessed with standing on the goal line…

A recent post about writing content for SEO sparked a thought about generally writing website copy…

In every case with a new website, we tell clients to make sure they write compelling copy, and even look at hiring a copywriter. Most copywriters we have worked with have heard about SEO, but are not always sure how to write good optimised copy. Give them a list of keywords and phrases however, and the copy comes back keyword rich and focused on the user. This is exactly the balance everyone should aim for.

All content on the website must be interesting to humans, and as such should be written for them. Its all well and good getting web content ranking highly in search engines, only for users to visit the content and find it dull and uninspiring. This will not encourage the user to carry out the action you want, whether it be a sign up, a purchase or whatever. It’s kind of like walking into a store which you have seen a great advert for only to find the store is hard to find your way around, or the staff are unhelpful. It’s not going to inspire you to do what the advert set out to do.

A study this week highlighted how major US companies are failing to take advantage of organic search. It’s well documented that blue chip business invest heavily in paid search, but the figures this study unearths are more than enough to raise an eyebrow. A staggering $51 million is spent by Fortune 500 companies on paid search per day, on around 85,000 keywords.

Looking at how these businesses perform on organic search should make fairly depressing reading for marketing directors of these businesses. Just over 10% showed a strong visibility in organic search results, with this defined as having presence in the top 100 total organic search terms and a rank in the top 30 results.

Just imagine what these business could achieve through online marketing if 10% of their yearly paid search budget was apportioned to natural search! The old chesnut of “no one searches for our brand online” (a phrase I have heard far too many times from major UK businesses through the years) no longer applies. By actively investing in paid search, these businesses are stating their intent to attract more visitors to their website. There are contrasting opinions about how many search engine users click on paid results compared to organic results, but we have always worked on a 80:20 split in favour of organic. Does this not make this look even more appealing for these businesses?

We can only assume that this type of assessment holds true of equivalent UK businesses. If this is the case then such companies should take heed of this report. The right SEO strategy can work wonders for any business - and we have the results to prove it! Not only have we increased traffic to our clients websites via SEO, but we have also managed to reduce paid search spend, whilst increasing conversions from the same campaign! This has to be the target for any business serious about gaining an ROI via search marketing.

When I set up any PPC campaign I always put in a tracking URL so I can track the user once they have landed on the site.  This URL may look like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=xxx_campaign&utm_term=blah_blah

When I read the article on Google Analytics Blog I was stunned that they recommended putting 301 redirects on these urls:

‘If this link is popular enough, then search engines will begin to index this URL. It may supplant the same version of this page without tracking parameters in the search results. Clicks on this new organic result will increment the visits number for Google(cpc) when it should really be attributed to Google(organic).’

I was always aware that the spider that indexes PPC landing pages shared data with organic search results (why duplicate processing power?). However the implication of this is that the data from PPC has a great impact on your SEO results, especially is the content on your website is inaccessible to the search engines (either flash or search queries).

I had heard that running a PPC campaign is a sure way to boost your SEO rankings……but this is proof from Google that actually is the case. Especially if the PPC landing pages are more popular than your main pages.

So what action do you need to take?

• Download a report from Google with your destination URLS, key phrases and clicks
• On the terms which have a high number of clicks you need to implement a 301 from the tracking URL to the main URL
• That way if the natural listings pick up your tracking URLS, then the traffic is being directed through the main site and any PR associated with this is transferred across too.

Online retailers in the UK have been pushed in recent times to improve their website’s accessibility characteristics. Everyone knows about the River Island debacle, and since this, many of our favourite high street names have stepped up their efforts to make their site accessible to all.

But what other benefits are there to improve your website’s accessibility? Well for one, improving this will almost certainly result in an increased effectiveness in your quest for search engine optimisation perfection!

Take something as simple as providing a replication of text links on your website if your website uses an image or Javascript based navigation. When a search engine comes to visit your website, it can now access these pages that were previously “hidden” from its spiders due to the way the navigation worked. This means they have more chance of including these pages in the search engine results, which means people have more chance of finding them, visiting your site, making an enquiry etc.

In fact, when looking at the W3C standards a good majority of them are relevant when it comes to basic search engine optimisation. So improving your websites accessibility will help your SEO in the long term. Carrying these improvements out will make your website more “accessible” overall.

The next step on from accessibility is usability. Again usability practices and good search engine optimisation can be very similar. Providing deep links into internal web pages to allow website users to access more relevant content is good usability practice, but also helps your internal site architecture which in turn impacts on your website’s SEO.

So although the implementing improved accessibility and usability on your website can be a bit of an upheavel, your website’s long term prospects for search engine optimisation will be improved.

With the growth in usage of the social media marketing and companies actively participating in sites such as twitter, facebook, digg, etc, there is a growing need for companies to monitor what people are writing about them online.

There are many online tracking tools to do this but the all only seem to monitor certain elements.  Others are positioned as Online PR tracking tools, which to some extent this is what it is, but at the end of the day, it’s about what some conversation people have had about a particiular company / article /blog posting etc.

Some good examples of free social media tracking tools would be:

Google Alerts - get email updates from relevant Google results (news, blogs etc)

Tweet scan - get updates from twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time

However you still have to trawl through the alerts you receive in your inbox and work out which are important or ones that you can ignnore.

I came across Brandwatch which is a great online tool for pulling all this information from social media sites into one interface and allows you to track your competitors - and tells you if the chat is good or not! it even segments the data so you can view it by media (blogs, news, forums etc). How refreshing to find some technology that solves the hassle of the tracking and makes the information easy to interpret.

Shari Thurow wrote a great article about ‘Are you a SEO Hybrid‘.  We have long been an advocate of ‘holistic SEO’, where we have looked at the wider problems associated with search engine optimisation.  We have come across many challenges where we have had to work with internal development teams to look at how we can change the site architecture or how dynamic URLs work.

The Wider Implication

SEO overlaps with many teams such as PR (how they write the press releases or manage social media), IT (how the site and HTML were built) or the e-commerce team. The challenge is leading beyond our authority to work with the individual teams to achieve the overall goal.  When people think SEO, they need to think about the wider remit of the project and ensure that all the stakeholders are involved in the project from the outset rather than getting them involved half way through.

Getting people involved

Getting all the stakeholders involved in the SEO project can be a real test of negotiation. During the sales cycle we always aim to understand who the main decision makers are and the decision making process it. When you start describing the long term vision of where SEO could grow the company tends to get people’s attention and is a good starting point for the discussions

In the past year the micro networking site Twitter has grown in traffic by 10 fold in the past year (source: Hitwise).  Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites on the internet and looks like this is continued to grow.

How can you make the most of Twittering?

Let me explain the opportunity by giving you a scenario. Company X has set up a twitter monitoring postings related to their products they sell on their e-commerce website.  One of the alerts shows someone is looking for a voucher for their website.  They respond to the individual with a discount voucher for their site.  If they had not been monitoring Twitter, one of their competitors could easily have taken this opportunity to promote their site.

Including Twitter monitoring as part of your online marketing mix or part of your social media marketing is certainly worth considering as the website is growing so quickly.