Posts in SEO/SEM
What your Bounce Rate Says About You
Bounce Rate benchmark
If a Bounce Rate is over than 40%, I take it as an indication that site visitors are not getting involved with site content. That is to say, more than 40 people in every 100 visits are clicking on the page and clicking off immediately without checking any other content on the site. More...
Why poor backlink requests are like bad PR Pitches
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...
How to re-use your blog post feedback to boost SEO
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...
SEO changing up its game… it’s called PR
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...
Where's your brain at? Where's your consultancy at?
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...
CIPR Summer Social debate finds PR and search marketing remain separate worlds
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...
CIPR Social Summer debate: Has PR missed out on SEO? Will social media be next?
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...
How UK PR firms can improve their SEO capability overnight for £85
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...
How to Integrate Email Marketing, SEO and Social Media
Social media is changing how businesses find customers and how customers engage with brands. There are many reasons to believe that it will eventually overtake email marketing, but I’m a firm believer that it’s here to stay. In fact, I believe email marketing combine with search (SEO) and social media will the best strategy moving forward.
However; let me get a few things straight. First, email is the original social network. Second, you need email to open social network account and get alerts. And third, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will continue to index and aggregate social network data not to mention most social network has their own internal search engine as well. More...
PRCA breakfast: SEO for PR
The PRCA hosted a breakfast at Ketchum Pleon this morning where myself and Fernando Rizo (@fernandorizo) ran attendees through the basics of organic and pay per click (PPC) search.
My presentation covered organic SEO as part of the PR process. Fernando spoke about using paid search to kick start PR campaigns and conversations. Its a neat tactic that he calls contextual marketing “so as not to threaten the ad guys.”
Here’s my slide deck.






