MarCom Professional

le Analytics is a very powerful tool but sometimes its results can be misleading. It is very easy to see a green improvement percent and think that all is well. Even metrics that we have benchmarks for don't always mean what we think they do. A good example of this is Bounce Rate. If you've never heard of Bounce Rate before, check out the Analytics glossary at the bottom of the page.

The SEO vs PR debate continues to rumble on. However, on a very tactical level, it occurred to me that certain SEO practitioners are starting to emulate some of PR’s worst habits – specifically, the bad pitch. Or at least it’s SEO equivalent – the poor Backlink Request.

The key qualities they share are irrelevance and lack of personalisation.

Journalists hate getting mass-mailed irrelevant junk. And in a similar way, if you run a website or a blog (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of us these days), it is just as annoying to get spammy link requests.

I’ve yet to receive a carefully crafted and personalised request for a backlink that shows the person making the request understands what my blog or sites are all about. More...

Re-using content in order to reinforce the search terms and SEO for your site is a smart move.

This helps Google work out what is relevant for search strings that lead to your content, particularly if they produce several results from your site.  If they continue over time it strengthens your position in the search rank for that string.

We have been reviewing the site statistics and it is really encouraging when posts written in the past continue to bring in new  readers for a long time after the first publication.

Our Twitter competition ideas post written back in June is still bringing  in great visitors from organisations such as

• Interbrand
• Choice FM
• Warner Music Group

Very pleased with the outcomes from that one piece as those visitors were just from last week’s stats. More...

My recent post “Where’s your brain at? Where’s your consultancy at?” was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the CIPR Social Summer session on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession’s paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle.

Well personally I’m excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I’m posting today to highlight a couple of posts I’ve just found.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz’s CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider in the PR domain. More...

Do you 'do' search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who 'get' SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that's how it should be.

Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening's CIPR Social Summer conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid.

Unfortunately, such an obvious exhibit of a 'ponkey' in the form of Escherman's Andrew Smith was unavailable for us to examine more closely, and I pretended to know nothing about either topics when such prodding was mooted. More...

The PR industry has failed to embrace search marketing. That was the conclusion of a group of PR, social media, and search marketing professionals that met yesterday as part of the CIPR’s Social Media Summer series to debate the issue.

There are well-publicised exceptions highlighted by the recent NMA search league tables but the majority of the PR industry has seemingly yet to wake-up to even the basics of search marketing.

Analysis by ­Escherman’s Andrew Smith shows that the majority of the PR Week Top 150 agencies are failing to make even basic efforts to optimise their own web sites. More...

Here’s an event that you might want to check-out on Thursday evening.

Its a debate hosted by Phil Sheldrake, Daryl Willcox and myself as part of the CIPR’s Social Summer 2010 workshop that will ask has the PR industry missed the boat on the optimisation of web content to attract the attention of Google, more commonly known as search engine optimisation?

The emergence of the multi-million pound search industry during the last decade suggests that this may be the case. Search agencies are increasingly packaging planning, content development and analytics, into a payment-by-results model. More...

About 18 months ago*, I paid around £85 for a piece of software called Market Samurai. I can hand on heart say it is has been one of the most valuable tech investments I’ve made in that time.

To describe it as a general internet marketing tool doesn’t really do it justice. Whether it is drastically reducing the amount of time to handle keyword research or detailed analysis of SERPs, I constantly refer to it.

One of things that stands out for me is the vast amount of useful training material provided by the Market Samurai team – for free. Just watching a few of these videos would probably save PR firms many man weeks and hundreds of pounds of Mickey Mouse training from less reliable sources. More...