SEO PR TIPS

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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Disclaimer at the foot of Google News UK:

“The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.”

Please can someone at Google have a word with the person in charge of the algorithm – almost every day an inappropriate story gets coughed up into the Entertainment section.  Today’s example is pretty extreme -

Nestled in between

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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

Oscar Carreras, Sales Strategist at WebCertain kept us up-to-date throughout the Search Engine Strategies Conference in London via Twitter and has now most helpfully provided us with a round-up of the key messages.  Interestingly, all of his points relate to SEO-PR…

•    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?

What is the ideal length of a headline when writing for online impact?

Last year I made a new friend who is a chief-sub on the Daily Record, one of Scotland’s biggest selling newspapers (maybe the biggest selling – sorry Katie). We have very different experiences of writing, especially headlines. Katie is working to a restricted space on the printed page, whereas I have no restrictions – which sounds great until you consider the different criteria you are trying to fit into.

It’s the limited space that has created “tabloidese” that peculiar language of abbreviations, wit and hyperbole. The nature of the beast means that these headlines are pretty devoid of keywords, so a high impact newspaper headline (such as the Sun’s infamous “Gotcha!” front page during the Falklands War) would have little value in SEO terms.

How does your headline affect Google News placement?
Google, of course, won’t reveal their algorithm for the News channel and it is still something of an enigma for search experts.

I looked for an example to try and understand more. Last night’s big entertainment story here was the Brit Awards. Why does Hello get the top link with their slang heavy headline?

Well, obviously, the headline is only a small part of the algorithm!

Having read around, there is conflicting advice. Here are some of the basics.

• Get your most important keyword / message near the start, so if your headline is cut off it still appears
• Shorter is better, even if it means sacrificing some keywords – your introductory paragraph is just as important
• Think about people (not robots) reading your story – will your headline be of interest to them?
• If you aren’t using a re-direct / url shortening system, your headline will probably dictate the url of your story (as works with this blog). If you then want to “tweet” your story on Twitter, you need to consider how the link eats into your 140 character limit

Have you got any advice to share?

One thing that all professional writers are taught when they are starting out is to know your audience – visualise them in your head when you sit down and write and it will make it easier to pick the right words.

This is one of the cornerstones of writing press releases and remains unchanged. You imagine the grumpy sub-editor who has a chip on his shoulder about supposedly overpaid PR types, looking for grammatical mistakes as an excuse to spike your story. You imagine the stressed out young reporter who has a target of x stories per day to write and might just be tempted to overlook the fact that this is a bloody press release, because it won’t need much re-writing and it just about comes across as a kosher news story (not that working in the media has made me cynical. Oh no…)

But now if you work in online PR, you are more than likely writing on social networking sites and imagining your audience is a much more complicated affair (ignore the hecklers shouting, “it’s easy, they’re all geeks!”).

For example:
On Facebook, my boyfriend updated his status with the esoteric statement “…is baking in the boulangerie of the mind”, which was understandable to precisely one person (me, it’s a long story).

Again on Facebook, a friend posted “…thinks 5-0 will do very nicely, thanks.” This is understandable to everyone that knows that he is a Man Utd fan.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Laure is wondering where John is (and appropriately enough in this mixed up, muddled up world, this is a reference to said John’s unexplained disappearance from Facebook). Meanwhile I’m confusing people with an oblique reply to Oscar about the mayor of London (“who’s Boris?” I’m asked by a third party).

My point is that on social networking sites you are often addressing different overlapping audiences, with different interests, and with different levels of knowledge about your subject matter. Confusing things even further is the presence of friends-of-friends who don’t actually know you at all.

It’s obvious that if your boss or clients might be reading, this isn’t the place for letting off steam at the end of a bad day at work. Correction, it should be obvious.

If you are planning on using social networks for marketing or online PR, you need to go back to basics and define who you are and who you want your audience to be.

You have the choice to be an online mate, a handy bite-sized news source, the straightforward corporate face of your company, or the knowledgeable (but human! I am human, look what I had for my lunch while I was finding you that link to the latest data on web usage in Uzbekistan!) SEO-expert networker – the latter accounting for approximately 50% of people on Twitter by my reckoning.

NB – Imagining my audience for this blog is super-easy – it’s the most intelligent and beautiful group of humans known to man – aren’t you! Do leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.

The times they are a-changing.

A Twitter user published the first picture from the scene of the New York-Hudson River plane landing.

The caption reads “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

This is freaky.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has written an excellent article about the use of Twitter as a newswire – which appropriately enough I came across when a friend “twittered” it.

After having been heavily sarcastic about Twitter, I’m actually starting to enjoy it now – especially after installing the Mozilla plugin Twitbin, which makes it so much more user-friendly.

If you really want to, you can follow me being rather dull on Twitter…

The A0 poster of the 2008 Web Trend Map (841mm x 1189mm / 33.25in x 46.75in), is now up for grabs at http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-3-get-it/

For those who are not geeks and wonder what this web trend map is, it is all about representing in the shape of a tube map the main services and trends of the Web 2.0.

The Web Trend Map refers to more than 300 Web 2.0 services – using the world-famous Tokyo Tube map as its model.