Published by Janine on 11 May 2010
The International Search Summit London is now only 2 days away, with this year’s focus on Innovations within the search marketing industry. Hosted at the Barbican by WebCertain, this is now WebCertain’s 5th search marketing event, which attracts search professionals from across the globe.
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Published by Jenny on 19 May 2009
Just look at that tag cloud…
When my then-colleague, Mademoiselle Mondon and I started this blog last year, Twitter was just one of the crowd of social networking sites that we paid cursory attention to.
Published by Jenny on 18 May 2009
The opportunities and threats of marketing through Twitter
At the Social Media International Search Summit hosted by WebCertain in London on Thursday 14 May, I gave a presentation on the use of Twitter as a marketing tool. Twitter is definitely a “marmite” concept – it divides people. There are some who have embraced it with almost religious zeal and it provokes red-faced rage in others.
Published by Jenny on 14 May 2009
The fourth International Search Summit hosted by WebCertain is taking place at the moment. This conference is focussed on Social Media. Whether you weren’t able to attend, or just want a reminder of what was said – here’s an overview…
Also follow #isslon on Twitter for live updates.
Published by Jenny on 01 May 2009
These tips are all about making sure a news release has the most impact on the search engines.
The general PR principles of having a strong, original and appealing story still apply and should never be discarded, but there are some tricks you can use to get great SERPs for your news stories.
1. Research the keywords that you want the press release to rank for and use those repeatedly (not repeating yourself too much though!) throughout the press release.
A starting point here is using either the plural or the singular of your key search terms and using the company name in full whenever appropriate.
For example “Spain holidays” v “Spain holiday”. An online press release is typically around 400 words long, so there are lots of options! Realistically, you will probably have the opportunity to place approximately 5 key search terms prominently in your release.
2. Write your press release in the format that most online wire services use and prepare all the information you will need – this will save you a lot of time when publishing.
This format is: Headline, introduction / summary, main body content, About the company, company contact details (including postal address), keywords / tags.
Don’t forget to include the full url for the site you are publicising…
3. We find it helps to produce text and html versions of the press releases we distribute in advance. Having the code already prepared saves a great deal of time when publishing. A neatly presented word document with hi-res images is the format we use when sending to individual editors.
4. Bear in mind that your headline is the most important part of the press release, as sometimes it will be picked up on newsfeeds and can be the only part of your release that is indexed by search engines. It will also appear in the all-important h1 and h2 tags…
Therefore try to get your most important information in the headline – including the name of the company you are promoting.
5. Where to publish your press release? There are 100s of excellent press wires around the world allowing publishing for free, quite cheaply, or very expensively. We constantly review our resources and their value to us goes up and down all the time.
The ideal press wire –
a. Gets indexed in Google News
b. Allows hyperlinks
c. Has a good reputation
d. Has press contacts / high visitor volume / good RSS feed set-up
6. We recommend producing different versions of the release (or at least, the important early sections of the story) as this allows more prominence for results when mass-distributing.
7. It is recommended that you make your usual approaches to journalists well before commencing on your online PR campaign. Approaching a journalist with a story that has already been published will not go down very well.
8. Include images, research shows that our eyes are drawn to images that appear in search listings. Don’t forget to put links on your images where you can and include optimised alt-tags.
9. If you regularly distribute press releases for the same company, try using different images each time you publish a release. Instead of always using the company logo, use a stock image that reflects what you are talking about. For example, people using computers.
10. Use social networking sites to spread your story further, especially if your content is strong enough to have a viral appeal.
WebCertain has its very own unique international press release publishing service, currently operating in 25 countries – www.newscertainnetwork.com .
Our Arabic and Hebrew news sites are currently under development, along with a number of other international news sites.
Contact us to find out how you can make the most of our search engine friendly, multilingual news publishing service.
Published by Janine on 17 Apr 2009
Internet PR and Marketing investment continually rises, while offline spend is in decline, marketers are continually looking for new methods and approaches to suit business needs. The current climate of the economy has forced many companies to re-strategise in many areas, where spend is minimalistic and productivity potentially maximised.
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!
Published by Jenny on 19 Mar 2009
Getting quite excited here as the plans for the WebCertain International Search Summit on Social Media are really coming together…
There will be speakers from Plaxo, Bebo and LinkedIn.
Also, yours truly will be talking about the threats and opportunities of marketing through Twitter. That’s a huge topic and there’s no shortage of information and opinions out there – the challenge is sifting through it.
Take a look at the full social media search summit programme
Published by Janine on 23 Feb 2009
Lee Odden of Top Rank log has posted the latest list of the top blogs about search marketing.
They promise “a mix of new and old, funny and serious” and there are over 400 blogs included on the list.
You won’t find us there, but WebCertain’s Managing Director has been on the list for some time with his news site about international search marketing, Multilingual Search.
Other favourites of mine include -
Mikkel deMib Svendsen: Mikkel is one of the most recognisable people on the conference circuit (he’s the guy in the orange suit!) and more than that is one of the most knowledgeable people around on Reputation Management issues.
Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing: Forrester are the market leaders on digital research.
Hubspot: Home to some of the best tools in the industry
Published by Janine on 19 Feb 2009
I’m a bit late noticing this post about PR in the Czech Republic, from PR Blogger.
Always keen to share tips on international PR strategies.
We’ve been doing some work in the Czech Republic recently and found a good number of online press wire services – after putting in some leg work and doing some digging around.
So far, I would concur that -
“In the Czech market it seems there is a lack of exploitation of new media. Blogging and social media in general are perceived as ‘something for the geeks’ by the general public.”
Published by Janine on 04 Feb 2009
Techradar thinks that “Facebook has jumped the shark”
The Telegraph seems to publish about 5 Twitter stories a minute, which proves it is hot stuff (they have an editorial policy of making sure they are writing stories on the top Google searches, something they have been mocked for.
But, hey wait a minute – this providing what the reader wants rather than forcing upon us the biased views of the owner – right kids? And it was what we were doing years ago at www.ananova.com – before I’d heard of SEO)
However, at the moment at least the Telegraph list of the top 30 Twitter users is blank…tut tut.
Tech Digest doesn’t think Facebook will be around in five years
I don’t know, but I do know that Friends Reunited is but a distant memory…
