For more information visit http://www.internationalsearchsummit.com or follow the latest updates on the day through Twitter: #ISSLON
@jennysimpson
@J__9
@IntSearchSummit
Live blogging on the day can be followed on Multilingual-Search.com.

Research is essential in defining the direction of ideas, if you don’t know the brand, how can you come up with new ideas? Knowing the products and services you sell and adapting them to fit with a certain brand culture can be tricky, however using a creative and imaginative drive will help you work to fit your products or services to suit the brand.

Creating a new service is a great way to enhance the agency portfolio. Every brand has a different culture, objectives and goals. Agencies working with brands need their products and services to be readily available and adaptable to suit the needs of any brand.

Having worked in SEM for around 18 months I think there is still a lot I don’t know, so I think this will be a great learning experience for me. I’m particularly looking forward to finding out more on video optimisation and mobile in Europe (Greg Jarboe and Bas van den Beld) also, as I use Twitter regularly, I think the presentation by Oscar Carreras on: Twitter – An International Strategy, will be most informative.

Hopefully there will be a few of us tweeting, so follow us #ISSLON @IntSearchSummit @J__9 @jennysimpson @davidecorradi… to find out more if you can’t make it!

Are you going to ISS? If so, who are you looking forward to seeing and why?

Online PR is used more now than it was 10 years ago, with the internet now established as a primary communications route and the increase of search engine optimisation (SEO), online PR has developed with the help of SEO techniques to gain prominent search rankings in the major search engines.

Press releases

The use of high value keywords is essential when writing press releases for online distribution, also high quality links are what takes your audience to your websites products or services.

When writing press releases it is essential to keep the content interesting and provide insights or useful information like statistics to enhance the likability factor so your audience will continue reading. Knowing your audience is key when creating a public document, the style and way an article is written needs to appeal to the reader. Don’t forget to include your keywords!

Press release distribution

There are many paid and free resources online to send press releases to, depending on your online press release campaign budget. Not all resources will allow you to publish links; however some will include your homepage URL in the company information. It’s worth noting that getting a story published on a site which doesn’t allow links may offer substantially higher value than one that allows multiple links – such as the BBC site. Publishing your press releases may be time consuming, but after a week or so you may start to notice search results for your keywords in the most popular search engines like, Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Unlike traditional search engines, social search engines can take a number of other factors into play other than SEO content, for example:

• How many times people share the link of an article for example, via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook
• How many people use social bookmarks to re-publish the link
• Tagging and connecting articles and posts through blogs/social networks
• Voting on articles posted to certain news wires (like Go Articles, Wikio)

Here is a selection of social search engines:
http://topsy.com/
http://www.icerocket.com/
http://www.whostalkin.com/
http://www.samepoint.com/
http://www.scoopler.com/
http://www.mamma.com/
http://www.gravee.com/

Experian Hitwise – has information from data centres in the US and UK as well as some European countries, more specifically stats and data from UK internet usage.

comScore – gives you up to date digital market intelligence from across the globe.

Alexa – includes information such as traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics and much more… from countries across the world.

You can refer to fan pages using the ‘@’ symbol before the name of the fan page – just like you do when you are referring to a friend e.g.

I have in the image already linked to the SEO-PR-TIPS Facebook fan page (in blue) – and to show you how it works used the @ sign to link to another page.

How SEO links in with Facebook

By using keywords in status updates and naming of groups and pages, when people use the search bar like a search engine – the use of good keywords within helps promote your presence.

Is a picture worth a thousand tweets? Quite possibly

I loathe seeing pictures of myself appearing in the public domain. Vain enough to do vanity searches, realistic enough to recognise that I’m not particularly photogenic, I’ve chosen in the past to use meaningless alias pictures wherever possible.

When I set up my Twitter account I used one of my favourite pictures of a wind-up robot holding up a pencil (see below) for my profile picture – it expresses how I feel some days!

This remained for over a year of intermittent and non-strategic Twitter usage, during which time I picked up 280 followers who were happy to follow my occasional rants about Google News, blatant RTs of press releases and WebCertain news, along with the odd, daft discussions about celebrities and ancient pop music.

Like many people with a corporate, yet personal, Twitter profile my Tweets are somewhat random, despite the advice I would give anyone – you must define what you are about on Twitter and stick to it!

I could have ruthlessly pursued building up more followers by keywording my Tweets and following the key influencers in my sector, but, really life is too short…

One simple step has made my follower numbers jump up in just a few days.

I’ve deleted the cute robot and replaced it with a real picture of myself. It’s a rather simpering pose, but I still feel  safe in my anonymity as it’s fairly heavily photoshopped – yet it is still a recognisable human (female) face and it is encouraging more people to follow me.

In four days of continuing with my unexciting and infrequent Tweeting, I picked up just over 20 new Twitter followers. In the old days of the robot, I would have maybe found 5 more people following me.

Interestingly, a number of people who I kind-of-know from conferences and the search marketing sector are now following me. I haven’t targeted anyone, I haven’t changed any other details on my profile page and I even Tweeted in French at one point… (I am not French).

Pretty obvious stuff maybe, but the rule seems clear –

If you are a corporate Tweeter – use a company logo
If you are a person (with a name) – use a picture

Whatever you do, don’t choose a robot for your profile picture…

Optimising your article could mean that 1000 people read it rather than 100. Getting your thoughts or article read from across the World Wide Web could be very important for your online status and reputation building.

I’m trying to get at how PR and SEO cross over, how doing some keyword research and optimising your text can get you known in your area of expertise. Here are a few simple rules I generally use:

1. decide on your subject area
2. do some keyword research, general, then narrow down your search topic
3. keep the keywords safe, as they could come in handy another time – always do a quick check to ensure you have picked the most searched for terms
4. write your text keeping your keywords in mind
5. When reading back your text insert your keywords > N.B. make sure the text still makes sense.

Inserting keywords can make all the difference to how many people view your piece.

Most of these strange results are quite amusing, or just gently misleading. Such as the main headline referring to one football team proclaiming “We wuz robbed” next to a picture of a player from the opposition.

A bit more disturbing is the tendency for stories to end up in the wrong news category, most often with a Weird World / Quirky story appearing in Entertainment.

There’s an example live at the moment:

Woman is savaged in 18st reindeer attack.

By no stretch of the imagination is this an entertainment story, even if the poor woman was once a contestant on a reality TV show.

Was the Google algorithm confused by the tasteless “Sex rampage reindeer Mr Frosty gores woman” in the Metro – Mr Frosty sounding like a cartoon character, or possibly a reference to the Xmas song “Frosty the Snowman”?

It highlights that human editors do a very valuable job!

Have you come across any strange Google News results (in any country)?  Or have you any idea how this story got into the Entertainment category  – please let us know…