MarCom Professional

Faceboook recently overtook Yahoo as the second most visited site in the United States. And in doing so, Facebook along with other social networks set the stage for a confluence of social and search that fundamentally changes who we, as a society, discover and share information, and in turn, where our attention is directed and driven.

Source: Mashable

Make no mistake, attention is shifting away from traditional destination sites and instead, it is fixated on personalized attention dashboards that funnel social feeds, the activity and focus of social graphs into one clickable view. It is, for all intents and purposes, changing how we discover and share information. More...

Photo by mimundo

Search engine optimization is a lot like the culinary profession.  There are experts in the field, with a growing reputation and a following for their art. There are five-star SEO’s, one-star SEO’s, and everything in between.

Just as famous chefs create spectacular meals, unmatched by the average cook, SEO’s work their magic on websites, rocketing pages to the top of search results.

The fact that you haven’t been a sous-chef in Paris doesn’t stop you from cooking a nice meal. Likewise, you shouldn’t be intimidated to tackle search engine optimization. More...

Consumers are no longer characterised by demographic thanks to search marketing. Instead they are defined by interest. Search allows motivated users to be matched with a brand.

This was the view of Colin Petrie-Norris, Managing Director, International Specific Media, speaking at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting conference this morning.

Petrie-Norris shared a list of items that he’d searched for in the last few days with the audience. These included a number of innocent items intended as gifts that he said that he would rather not share with his wife to make the point that Google knows more about a user than their friends and family. More...

Glide Technologies, the folk behind the Online Media Centre and GlideInsight, are holding a free, SEO Workshop at the CIPR HQ, 52-53 Russell Square, London, WC1B 4HP on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 from 8.30am to 10.30am.  Hell, they are even throwing in breakfast as well.

I’ll be co-presenting the workshop with Grant Whiteside, the Technical Director at Ambergreen Internet Marketing.  As a pioneer in the UK Search Marketing industry, Grant  has over a decade of hard-won experience under his belt in this dynamic sector. He is highly respected throughout the industry with experience across a wide range of industry sectors including B2B, Charity, Financial Services, Retail, Online Gaming, Hotels, Travel & Leisure and Recruitment. More...

When it comes to optimizing web content for search engines, there’s a lot to know, a lot to remember, and it’s always changing it seems. Wouldn’t it be great to have an SEO expert review your web content and tell you what keywords it is optimized for? And how to improve the search engine optimization of that copy? And then tell you if the improvements you made actually did improve the content’s SEO?

The folks at Scribe have built a tool that does all this and more — and put it right inside your WordPress admin site. But don’t worry if you don’t use WordPress, because in March they are launching a web-based version that is not tied to a specific platform. More...

We will be working together with a local business to increase targeted traffic to their website.

We will start off by analysing the current situation of the website, looking at visitor origin and behaviour so that we are well positioned to both learn from current traffic and improve upon it.

This initiation will be followed by an extensive period of analysis of the industry in general and the best performing sites of their competitors, it is important to see what other people are doing in your arena and to learn from them.

As a result of the industry analysis we will define a list of keywords, commonly used search terms, and implement these into the website's content and code. More...

Originally published in the Shutterstock newsletter as a two-part series…Part I / Part II

In the last post, I discussed the importance of social objects (images, videos, blog posts, comments, status updates, wall posts, etc.) in a Social Media Optimization campaign. This month, I am going to explore the five major ways that these social objects can be contextualized: keywords, titles, descriptions, tags and/or links.

Keywords

Keywords are the terms that people use to find relevant information in searches. When selecting keywords for your social objects, it’s important to remember that the keywords used by customers and influencers are not always what you think they’d be. More...

SEO for your website

To give it its full name, search engine optimisation is the technique of writing copy text on a web page in such a way that it reads well for the spiders. This can result in the site enjoying a higher ranking in the search engines for the targeted search terms.

It is a discipline that everyone talks about, yet literally only a handful of knowledgeable writers out there, have any idea of how to write this type of copy well.

And this is why…

I am convinced that to be effective at writing SEO copy, you have to be a direct marketer first – and an SEO copywriter second. (The best in the world at it, is a good chum of mine, Ian Dewar, who is an old DM ligger like me and ran one of the first DM agencies in London in the halcyon days.)

The reason is very simple: More...

We get asked frequently about the value of XML sitemaps for SEO. Apparently many SEO firms are saying, as part of their sales pitches, that where a current SEO company hasn't created an automated sitemap they are damaging a company's potential for ranking.

I say this is total and complete rubbish.

The sitemaps feature in Webmaster Tools was created as a way to help sites identify all their pages to search engines and let search engines know when they add or modify content. They also enable search engines to flag errors in reaching specific pages. They have nothing to do with ranking - they merely serve to help with indexing, if your site needs a little help. More...