News

Why Spam Commenters Are Better At Marketing Than You

05/09/2011

Spam is annoying. The problem is, if it didn’t actually work, then no one would do it. One of the worst types of spam is blog comment spam. You put you all of your effort into writing an awesome blog post only to find that all the comments on it are spam. Nothing from a real person. What’s even worse is when you don’t realize a blog comment is spam. You might think you’ve generated a genuine comment when, in reality, it’s just an evil ploy for inbound links and clicks.
Let’s take a step back. Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from things we don’t like. As inbound marketers working to drive leads to our business, what can we learn from blog comment spam? (more…)

What is a web sites page title for?

18/07/2011

Lets get straight into it.

You may or may not know, SEO is generally split down into two categories.

1) On-site SEO

2) Off-site SEO

And as the rather obvious names state, they are specific elements which look at elements both on and off your web site.

For the purpose of this article, I am going to be talking solely about the On-site SEO (sorry).

The first and possibly most important element of your on-site SEO is looking at your page title.

When we say page title we are referring to that intro text, that sits at the very top of your browser when a website is open. It is also where Google find the bolded title they display in their search result pages.

This serves two purposes.

1) It tells the user what the site is about in a quick, concise sentence.

2) It also tells the search engine what your web site is about.

Purely from an SEO point of view, this is your first opportunity to tell Google exactly what you do, or more importantly what you wish to rank for. For example -

Lets say you run a web site that sells trainers. And you create a title that says the following -

“Online shoe store”.

Firstly, you’re not really being specific enough. And secondly, it is generally perceived that you can list up to 66 characters (including spaces, comma’s etc) per web site title, so make use of the entire space.

A more appropriate title would be this -

“Online trainers store, for discount, cheap & kids trainers”.

This is much more specific to the trainers industry, and also talks about the variation of trainers you can offer. Including -

  • Discount Trainers
  • Cheap Trainers
  • Kids Trainers

Increasing the chance you will rank for those phrases as well.

The last point to mention would be, to try to make your title as grammatically correct as possible. This is likely to make more sense to your human reader, which is ultimately who you are trying to attract.

Thanks

TLS

 

The Importance of Social Media and SEO for Public Relations

06/05/2011

Many would call the age we’re in, “Information Overload“.

Consider: Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month.

World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003. The age of communications and digital relationships between brands, the media and consumers has changed faster and in ways few could have anticipated.
With an ever increasing universe of data and ways to connect, PR and communications professionals are in a compelling position to master the new rules for consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing. As participants and content creators savvy about the search and social web, PR professionals can directly impact online brand visibility, customer engagement and acquisition.

A big part of how Public Relations pros can show more value for their efforts is to understand how the intersection of search and social media provides a powerful means to reach and engage media and consumers that inspires interaction, sharing and meaningful business outcomes.

Some of the fundamentals online PR and communications practitioners should seek to understand in the world of Social Media and SEO include:

  • Stay on top of future trends in search, social media and content marketing for PR
  • Gain insight into how social and search strategy can amplify media and public relations outcomes
  • Understand how to develop search & social persona;s – think like your customer’s customerBe able to conduct strategic and on-demand research for keywords and topics relevant to search and/or the social web
  • Know best practices of SEO for Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and any other digital media produced for news distribution
  • High level of expertise with tools to improve quality, efficiency and scale

Call it convergence or consolidation, but no matter how you look at it, marketing and public relations expertise is unifying to bring brand messages and influence to the new search and social web.  It’s a compelling thing for PR professionals to gain an understanding of how search and social media channels can improve reach and placements. It’s even more impressive to step into the shoes of their customer’s customer as a marketer would and really understand how news is discovered, consumed and shared.

If you’re a public relations professional, have you begun implementing search and social media optimization into your news content strategy? How are you educating yourself and your teams on these best practices?
Later today I’ll be speaking to a soon to graduate class at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN about these topics and I’m also giving a 1-hour presentation at the upcoming Vocus User’s conference in Baltimore to a group of experienced PR professionals on Integrated Social SEO & PR.