Here are the top Twitter directories I use:
WeFollow – Grouping Twitter users and messages using #tags
Twellow – Directory of Twitter users by category
Social brand index – Directory of public companies
WhoShouldFollow – By adding your user name this API will find people you don’t follow which relate to your Twitter bio.
Just tweet it – Like WeFollow this directory adds you automatically, you just need to update your status.

Email marketing: Is a form of direct marketing – sending emails out to customers / clients with interesting offers as well as industry news will help get you noticed and promote specific areas of your website.

Blogs: A company blog will enhance your presence online providing you give your audience interesting and useful information, whether it’s about your brand or the industry sector you are in. It helps to include links and produce SEO friendly content to ensure good search engine visibility.

Articles: updating your audience by providing current news updates through press releases will help improve traffic if you use high quality links and fully optimised content, as well as good quality online news wire resources.

Social Media: maximise your blog posts and articles by publishing links on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

More traditional ways to help improve web traffic includes, search engine optimisation (SEO), link building and pay per click (PPC).

With virtual social networking taking the world by storm it’s no wonder marketers have already jumped on the band wagon promoting their businesses and colleagues, for example, the use of Twitter has totally entranced our colleagues here @ WebCertain, follow: @globalppc @starbuck8 @jennysimpson @davidsegal @davidecorradi @ballueder @WebCertain @J__9 @YorkSEO @globalseo @andyatkinskruge @seoprtips @newscertain @WebCertain_DE @AnaVLeckenby @oscarcarreras, for updated information on specialised areas of multilingual search!

Promoting the latest international search summit, general information about PR, SEO, link building, PPC etc… has developed a wider knowledge on each subject, by sharing and re-tweeting relevant data to enhance the specialised knowledge arena WebCertain hold.

Many businesses and organisations are using online facilities and companies such as WebCertain not only for English articles, as we are multilingual; multiple languages from across the globe play a large part in how they operate, especially for clients. Online PR is a great way of getting your company, news / press releases / data, relayed around the world, especially using press release sites with an overseas domain, rather than the traditional offline methods. This however, does vary upon client needs; everyone wants something different and to be unique, so be adaptable and knowledgeable on your subject arena to create the best possible service for your company and your clients!

•    Video is the future

Not only there were several sessions about video but it was mentioned in at least 3 non related sessions. YouTube is already the second biggest search engine in the world and internet users across the world spend 30 min at least by average watching videos, not to mention the rising appearance of videos in blended or Universal search.

•    Online PR = Strategic Link Building Strategy

Online PR seems to be utilized by most of agencies as their main tool for strategic link building. In addition, blogging, social media, etc are all supported by online PR teams. Content creation should be a must.

(Jenny – my italics.  As I mentioned in my post yesterday about the boom in social media, the role for PRs to play is to create original content to support these activities)

•   The challenges and opportunities of Social Media

Social media pervaded all the sesssions at SES London, but it seems to be difficult to build a business model around it.

The way most of the agencies are approaching it is by leading by example and make it an integral part of their marketing toolset for lead generation and then show off that knowledge and results to provide with consultancy to clients or support in the way of apps generation, widgets, video creation, etc.

They don’t seem to offer to create profiles and handle them on behalf of their clients since it is not cost effective and not very useful since clients know more about their products that an agency will never do. Conclusion: walk the walk and don’t talk the talk.

(Jenny – yes, this is the major issue with these types of campaigns – who does what?  It’s all about user-generated content, but it needs a push – and imagination combined with technical / web know-how)
•   Reporting and analytics

Automation, analytics driven processes, etc seem to be the ways for agencies to scale services. The most important skill for both SEO and PPC, and maybe Social Media too, should be analytics expertise to reach conclusion out of empiric data.

(Jenny – and analytics is the main focus for the technology team at WebCertain)

Any more thoughts on SES London?

Mr Willcox is promoting a white paper he has written about online PR – and this campaign is pretty successful.  I’ve come across references to it several times accidentally – and the quote above annoyed me enough to repeat it!  Great campaign management…

SEO-PR-Tips Absence of advice about online PR?

We are trying to offer practical advice, along with adding our own personal spin on what’s happening right now. 

I’m sure the DWPub is full of great advice (they are a good company and we use their press wires), but you will get widely differing views on this subject from people, depending on their background.

Daryl Willcox is from a PR background and understands the value of targeted campaign management, use of key contacts, the human reaction to content.

I’m constantly dealing with people who view our work from an SEO perspective only – they see the “link farm potential” in our international news network, or they are only interested in reports that can prove direct referrals.

The boom in social media (and it seems to be all that clients and the search industry alike are talking about at the moment!) is actually proving to be a good thing for the way PR is perceived.  Creating a buzz, trying to build up word-of-mouth interest, devising events / issues that will make people care – suddenly these are becoming important again – almost as important as keyword density…

I’m watching this space with interest…please share your thoughts on the latest online PR developments

EDIT – Please note the clarification in the comments.  Thanks for the feedback Andrew.

“No link juice with E-Shots is there though?”

This got me thinking (Carrie Bradshaw-style) and so I wondered, can you generate link juice from email marketing campaigns?

Firstly, link juice is never going to be the prime mover in email marketing. As with other online PR strategies, the priorities are building brand awareness, relationship management and generating immediate site visits.

However, there are ways to exploit email campaigns and gain SEO benefits.
1. Host your email newsletters on a stand-alone domain. Optimise this site so it ranks – identifying it as a news site. This is an effective way to increase top level search engine visibility for your brand, products and services. (Part of the Ring of Fire)

2. Use your site CMS to build content pages for your e-newsletters and e-shots, the back pages, rather than the front page which appear in your readers’ inboxes. This is all good, relevant content that can be indexed by the search engines.

3. Do you send out messages with a strong visual impact? If you have designs that are genuinely interesting, it might be worth putting them on FlickR and other image directories.

4. Make a feature of the newsletter sign-up function on your website and make sure it is also included on any corporate blogs and forums. If you produce a well-rounded newsletter that isn’t just a list of points-of-sale, there is the opportunity to promote this as feature of your company / website in a PR campaign – thus, generating links!

I’m sure there are lots of other things, I’ll add them when I think of them. Have you got any tips to add?