Yes! Its @FlyingWhiteDots and @ChimpleSinge of SiteVisibility live on the 4th plinth on Monday 13th July in aid of the RSPCA! Tune in and see them at 1pm!

To watch it -  http://www.oneandother.co.uk/     

RSPCA are tweeting and facebooking about Bryan.

Follow the RSPCA on Twitter - http://twitter.com/RSPCA_official

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

4th Plinth

Permalink + Comments

Fnar fnar!

Ironically, not the only character with this name whose image is returned on a Google search.

This man is also named Finbarr Saunders and is a Commissioner for Knox County and nothing to do with the Viz cartoon character.

When running a Pay-per-Click campaign, in order to eliminate unwanted clicks (which, of course, cost money), it is good practice to use negative keywords which more accurately describes the alternative meaning.

Suppose the bearded Finbarr Saunders was running a pay per click campaign to drive traffic to his site. In order to stop people clicking on his paid ad who are looking for the other Finbarr Saunders, it would be best practice to include Campaign Negative keywords such as “Viz magazine” and “double entendres”.

Another example is one of our clients who sell Safari holidays in South Africa. Now, some people typing “safari” into Google will be looking for something like this:

However, other people will be using the same search term when they’re looking for something to do with this:

Therefore, it is best practice to include “Apple” (on Broad match) and “Apple Safari” (on Phrase match) in the Campaign Negative keyword list.

This also applies to acronyms. For example, one of our clients runs Project Management courses and training. Many of the courses they run are named according to their associated acronym, some of which have more than one meaning, for example P2P also means peer to peer file sharing and PPS is also used to abbreviate, among many other things, PowerPoint Slideshow. Not to mention the acronym for Project Management Training, which also means something else entirely (because it does and I say so, OK?!).

In such cases, it is important to use the unabbreviated words in the ad where possible and use negative keywords on the unabbreviated alternative meanings, such as “peer to peer” and “power point slideshow” in the above example.

It is also necessary at times to be careful when using Broad match when bidding on keywords which could trigger ads appearing at unwanted times. For example, another Project Management course which is run in London is called Prince2, which is sometimes spelt with a gap between Prince and 2. Now suppose The Artist Formerly Known as O(+> were to announce some shows in London. If you were looking for tickets for the shows, you might type “Prince London tickets” into Google, which would trigger the ad to appear in Google. Chances are the ad would appear a huge number of times and it is likely that someone would click on the ad by mistake, which would mean the Project Management agency would have to pay for unwanted clicks.

In short, it is best practice to apply common sense when compiling a list of keywords. Otherwise, you never know what might get exposed to the public. Fnar fnar!

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

Fnar Fnar! When Keywords have more than one meaning in a PPC campaign

Permalink + Comments

1. What’s the worst SEO disaster the team have come across?
2. Do you know of any good examples of non-video viral success stories?
3. What are your preferred keyword research tools?
4. Can I sell podcasts and videos on iTunes?
5. Are google picking up tweets?
6. How should I promote a small business blog?

Download the podcast here
Show Links :

• http://www.seomoz.org/
• https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox - google traffic estimator
• http://www.tunecore.com/
• http://www.premiumcast.com/
• http://tr.im/
• http://bit.ly/
• http://searchengineland.com/
• http://su.pr
• http://www.tweetlater.com/
• http://hootsuite.com/
• http://www.marketingonlinelive.com
• http://www.magentocommerce.com/
• http://www.bing.com/

Download the podcast here

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

Special 50th Edition of the Internet Marketing Podcast

Permalink + Comments

photo credit: alexik How big is your slice of the pie?

There’s a huge gap, it’s very easy to measure our tactics and some of the outcomes, i.e. which back links did you analyse, what link worthy content did you produce? And you can measure the ultimate outcome by looking at the analytics data or even the rankings. But that ignores a huge area in between.
How many links have you got? The first step along this path of trying to cover the reporting gap is looking simply at link numbers. We historically favoured Yahoo Site Explorer because it updates quickly. But it’s hugely flawed. It doesn’t have any indication of trust which is so vital in link building and the numbers in the tool are really unreliable fluctuating hugely with no real explanation.

So here are some of the link building metrics I like to look at.

What’s the page rank of your best ten links? Page rank is pretty useless but when you look at your top ten links when sorted by page rank you can get a great indication of how trusted a site is. This isn’t a metric that will change drastically but a small increase in the average is hugely significant and shows a really effective link building campaign.

What’s your share of the links within your market-place? Your number of links is nothing if you don’t know how it relates to your competitors. I recommend taking a list of five big competitors, these need to be a mixture of those ranking well but also who the client recognises as an offline competitor even if they aren’t doing especially well online.

How many links does Google tell you that you have? Google’s link count within webmaster tools is the most accurate indication of the number of links you have that are affecting your link popularity. You need to be integrating this number into you reporting and keep a close view of any changes.

At what velocity are your links increasing? I think link velocity is one of the most important but over looked ranking factors. We’ve seen recently how quickly Google reacts to changes in search volumes, so I see no reason to question whether they would treat links in the same way.

So how do you work out velocity, well if you think back to GCSE science you may remember Velocity = Distance/Time, transpose that onto links and you have Link Velocity = Links/Time. So you really want a graph showing your percentage increase in links every reporting period. Did you increase by 25% last month but only 5% this month? That’s more concerning that if you increase by 15% each month as your velocity is consistent.

So anyone else have any favourite metrics to look at to measure your link building efforts? Leave a comment below…

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

What’s the best way of measuring link building efforts?

Permalink + Comments

Citizen Journalism Pecha Kucha - Zac Colbert from SiteVisibility on Vimeo.

This week the session on citizen journalism is provided by Zac Colbert one of our content experts who has been published talking about digital culture in all number of places including fairly recently adbusters.

As with last week we’re still early days on this project but would love to hear your feedback both positive and negative so get stuck in with the comments.

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

Citizen Journalism Pecha Kucha - What is it and what does it mean?

Permalink + Comments

photo credit: pshutterbug Getting the last drop

But if you are sending out these email link requests how can you make them more efficient and more likely to turn into that killer link that will send your rocketing up the results?

Contact less people – it may seem counter intuitive but the less people you contact ultimately the more links you’ll build. I think you need at least three visits to a site before you can be sure whether you should contact them. The first to see if they are similar and on topic, the second to make sure they are the type of website to link out and the final time to understand how to frame your request.

So be certain that they will see the value of your request before you fire up Outlook.

Find someone’s name – if you can find a personal email address or at least the name of the person most likely to check the generic email you’ll already have moved your request above 99.9% of the link requests sent this year. It’ll show you’ve spent some time on the site and that you’re a human being, vital given most of the webs’ slowly souring relationship with email.

Make sure your phone number is on your email address – you’d be surprised how many of our link requests are followed up over the phone, in fact for certain clients’ phone works better than email in the first place. Again for everyone involved it gives the process a personal touch. If you’re concerned that by doing this you may be inundated with phone calls I’d suggest you may be contacting too many people.

Keep the email short and simple – I’ve seen some link requests which if you printed would take three pages of a4, I can’t help but think that is over kill. The most precious commodity to everyone in business is their time, you don’t want people to waste yours so you shouldn’t waste theirs either.

If people have questions they’ll ask, there’s no reason to engulf people on the off chance they may be interested.
Follow up any responses as quick as you can – if a webmaster has taken the time to read your email and then reply with a follow up, you are really close to getting a link. So don’t sit on the reply for 24 hours by then something else may have come up in the office of your contact and you miss your chance. So reply as quickly as you can, it’ll move the process along and increase the likelihood of success.

Sweeten the deal with content – this is something we are doing more and more frequently rather than just email someone for a link we ask whether we could write a guest post, or attach a whitepaper they might be interested in or suggest a new page they might want to introduce which we might be able to contribute to. It’ll take more of your time but will increase your chance of getting the link plus it will make the eventual link much more valuable as it’ll be contextual and editorial.

Be patient – you’d be surprised how long it can take some times to respond to a link request. You know what it’s like, a small task can sit at the bottom of a to-do list for months. That’s where your link request may be. Our current record is eighteen months but it was a high page rank link on an academic site so was well worth the wait!

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

How to increase the success of your link request emails

Permalink + Comments

Sitting with nearly 2000 other people engrossed in one person talking for an hour, I realised just how much people building link bait content can learn from the curly haired wunderkid.

Weave a narrative into your work – When trying to make big sweeping points about society and life in general, Gladwell always uses a narrative to get his point across. It’s not surprising how successful he is at writing because every human being is hardwired to appreciate a good story.

We look for stories in random patterns and events even when they aren’t any. This almost primeval desire is something the link baiter really ought to think about. Can you use a narrative to progress your idea of content? If you can - you should.

Take complex ideas and make them accessible – Gladwell gets quite a bit of stick for riding on the coat-tails of the scientific researchers, historians etc, who he bases his theories on. But what he does excellently is take complex uninviting data and findings and synthesize them into a form lots of people can understand and enjoy.

This process is a goldmine for the link baiter, take something deep and hard to grasp created by a specialist in your sector and makes it easy to digest. It’s impossible not to be a little reductive in this process but it needn’t be a problem as long as you treat your base material with respect.

Make your audience feel clever – another master stroke of Gladwell’s writing is that you come away feeling a little bit cleverer without having to undergo anything too rigorous. Again if you can achieve this with your link bait you’ll do well. Help people learn but make it as easy for them to learn as you can.

Construct your work in easily digestible chunks, with clear headlines and built around self contained arguments and ideas.
Just because it is common sense doesn’t make it unexpected – You can summarise Gladwell’s books in one sentence pretty easily.

His most recent Outliers – there’s no such thing as ‘luck’

His second book Blink – sometimes the more you know the worse decisions you make

And his break through hit Tipping point – Things that get popular reach a certain point where they very quickly go from niche to mainstream.

On their own none of these topics are revelatory; but the skill is taking something not entirely unexpected and explaining it in a lucid and engaging way. It’s the same with link bait. You don’t have to do anything completely unexpected as long as the way your present your argument it original and unique.

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

Enroll in the Malcolm Gladwell School of Link Bait

Permalink + Comments

I’m attempting to climb the 4 peaks in just 36 hours between the 22nd and 24th July.  It’s a hardcore 31 miles with no sleep with about 12-14 other happy trekkers to raise funds for Tackle Africa, a charity which raises awareness about HIV using the medium of football.

I’m not an experienced hiker, I have never climbed a mountain before, and I can imagine it’s going be an ‘experience’ I will never forget.  Think super blisters and seized muscles….

Anyway, I’m trying hard to raise money, as much money as I can for the charity.  As I only decided to do it a few weeks ago, raising the money (and getting fit enough) is going to be a tough call.  So I thought I’d see if any readers out there would be kind enough to donate something to the cause?

My target is £500 and I would love to raise more for them… (But at the same time, will be ecstatic to get anywhere near close to the minimum of £500). Any amount counts, so go with any donation, they all add up

http://www.justgiving.com/jennieburraway

For those of you unfamiliar with the four highest peaks in the UK this is what I’ll be doing in a crazily short amount of time:

Slieve Donard (850m) – Northern Ireland
Ben Nevis (1,344m) – Scotland
Scafell Pike (978m) – England
Snowdon (1,085m) - Wales

Donating through Justgiving is quick, easy and totally secure. It’s also the most efficient way to sponsor me: Tackle Africa gets your money faster and, if you’re a UK taxpayer, Justgiving makes sure 25% in Gift Aid, plus a 3% supplement, are added to your donation.

Thank you for reading and thank you ever so much if you sponsor me!

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

The 4 peak challenge

Permalink + Comments

AI Digital batted first and after kitting up I was bowled for a duck. Bryan did marginally better with a single run while our Batsman of the Match was Damon, slogging the balls all over the shop despite some wild bowling. Damon scored 64 not-out, and retired to give other batsmen a turn. Overall we scored 177 and next was our turn to field.
 
photo credit: loloiegloloieg

Rocc did well, although weren’t hitting the fours and sixes achieved by our more-competent players. Jason was a safe pair of hands around the wicket and the help of three friends; Hamish Kent, Chris Foulerton and Luke Westland on bowling duties were integral to our outstanding performance.

Numerous catches and wickets later, AI emerged the winner to much jubilation, joy and lashings of lager.

Everyone was a winner in the end; a fun game of cricket was enjoyed by all including the spectators. We have just been challenged to a few more matches, and might be appealing on the blog for extra players again, so if you’re interested in getting involved we’ll keep you posted via the blog.

Thanks again to Chris, Luke and Hamish!

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

AI Digital Cricket Success!

Permalink + Comments

19 Ways To Build Links to Your Website - Pecha Kucha Kelvin Newman from SiteVisibility on Vimeo.

If you’ve not come across Pecha Kucha before I reccomend looking into it. Despite not being able to pronounce it properly I love it. A presentation format/structure with 20 slides with 20 seconds each.

It’s great for two reasons - if like me you love the sound of your own voice it forces you to remain on concise and on topic or if you’re a less confident speaker six minutes twenty isn’t to daunting to fill.

We’re always keen to share knowledge internally here at SV but I thought it would be great to share some of these sessions with you are loyal blog readers.

First up is a presentation from me on 19 different ways to build links to a website, rather convient with the number of slides.

Over the coming weeks you’ll get to see presentations from other members of our team. Some directly about search and social others more broadly about digital.

You can watch it here - SEO Pecha Kucha 19 Link Building Techniques

As always we’d love your feedback positive or not in the comments.

Post from Apple Pie & Custard the blog from SiteVisibility a Brighton SEO Company

19 Ways To Build Links to Your Website Video Presentation - Pecha Kucha

Permalink + Comments