If you haven’t already, I recommend subscribing to the Boom blog/newsletter as it’s kept far more up to date than my own blog here!

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DVLA Abuse of Domain Authority

There are a couple of great keynote speakers this year and I will be doing my bit too delivering a “What’s New In Search” session along with website reviews and sitting on the Experts Panel, so I hope you can join the hundreds of other East Midlands businesses and take advantage of this great (free!) opportunity.

You can see some pictures of the previous conference on Flickr here. Here’s one of me in full flow that I quite like:

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Online Marketing Conference 2011

Best of luck to Andrew with the new site – you just need some links now mate!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

New Website For Video Production Company

The article suggests that Google has very good reason to promote this service – it offers Google another way of measuring what people “like” on the web, even when they don’t have a website of their own from which to make links. That means that whilst traditionally, links from websites have counted as “votes”, not many web users actually had their own websites from which to link. Being able to track what users of social media sites are linking to adds a significant amount of web users to those empowered to “vote”.

Not only that, but because you’ll be logged in to your Google account, Google may well have some demographic data to associate with the link you’re making. And of course, Google can aggregate all the links being made through Goo.gl and get a picture of “what’s hot”, enabling it to inform its search results better when people are searching for related topics.

Of course, Google has a habit of changing its mind about services (goodbye Google Wave, pages being tracked in Google Reader etc.), but as the functionality is essentially the same as other URL shorteners, it might make sense to start using Goo.gl when making short links to your own pages for Tweets etc., just in case you do get that extra bit of SEO juice…

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Goo.gl URL Shortener: Possible SEO Effects

The email reads as follows:

Starting in the first months of 2011, we are making some changes to how your products in the Electronics category may appear on the UK and German versions of Google Product Search. In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our “product pages” where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. If you are submitting products in the Electronics category, please start including at least two of the following three unique product identifiers: MPN, Brand, and EAN.

These attributes will not be required for your feed to process correctly, however, to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible. You can find unique product identifier information on Product Search product pages, under the “technical specifications” section for Electronics items.

For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=160161

Clearly your product rankings are going to suffer if you don’t follow their suggestion, so if you don’t already put these identifiers into your Merchant Centre feed, now is the time to sort it out!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Selling Electronics Using Google Merchant Centre? New Guidelines

The Mercury Listing gets you this little lot:

• List your business in the top section of an UNLIMITED number of product/service headings
• Create as many new categories for your company as you require
• Include a flash animated colour picture of your products or logo on your entry
• Encourage buyers with an UNLIMITED number of words of information about your company
• Include as many deep links and linked images to your website as you require
• Email Link for any enquiries
• Modify at any time during the year

Clearly this is pretty handy for SEO, and you can see how it’s being used by some companies here and here. I have found Applegate to be quite handy for several of my clients, although I’m not guaranteeing it is the right thing for everybody – depends very much if you have the kind of business suited to that directory (primarily business-to-business), although the SEO benefit of lots of keyword-rich deep links to your site from a PageRank 6 domain can’t be denied for any type of website.

The cost? Usually £595 +VAT, but with the 30% discount, £416.50 +VAT. Note that you can’t get this online – you will have to call Sam on 01271 852 000 and quote reference IanLockwoodSR2.

Please feel free to Tweet, email and generally spread this discount code to anyone you think would benefit, it isn’t dependent on knowing me personally!

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Applegate Directory 30% Discount

This is a series of training workshops, held at London’s rather swish Hospital Club, based on the Customer Acquisition, Conversion & Retention model. The workshops will provide a holistic view of how to use online marketing techniques to achieve each of the stages in the customer buying cycle, so you can expect to learn about SEO, PPC, Analytics, conversion rate optimisation, social media and email marketing. You can pick and mix from the days on offer at £495 per day, or take all four days at a discounted rate of £1485, giving you one day free!

Click over to the itinerary here to understand more about how the Digital Marketing Academy can help you. Warning: There is a mugshot of me further down that page!

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Figaro Digital Marketing Academy

Rather than open the attachment, I saved it to my PC and had a read through the source code, as it’s a web page. The HTML revealed nothing much and references various online.hmrc.gov.uk URLs, until you get further down and spot that if you actually submit the form, it will be sent to this address: http://www.radio-rocket.eu/licznik/ndex.php

The page then goes on to grab various image files (security-related mostly, e.g. credit card logos) from sites including abbyparty.com, rbsworldpay.com and argos.co.uk. I’m sure they’ll all be delighted to know their bandwidth is being used to power phishing spam…

Don’t get caught out by this phishing scam – I’m sure most of you wouldn’t, but just in case you’re tempted by a refund from the taxman, resist!

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Nasty HMRC Phishing Spam

In a somewhat odd step, considering they have their own Local Business Centre in the States, Bing has outsourced the provision of local listing data to a company called 118 Information. Clicking the “get started” link on www.bingforbusiness.com takes you to a special page on their site, where you must search for your business by phone number/post code and if it isn’t listed, you can add your details and get a call within the next working day. I strongly suspect this will involve an element of sales, not least as the website professes to provide data for all these:

One other thing I noticed is that for some reason, the submission form is very broken in my browser – no tabbing, use of cursor keys or even delete! Way to go on the accessibility front…

Post from: IanLockwood.net

Bing Launches UK Local Listings, But Outsourced

This forum has been developed for decision makers in International & Export Companies to help them use the Internet to reach overseas markets, expand their business and drive profit.

The event starts at 8.30am and lasts until midday (slightly earlier actually, to allow time for networking). The cost is £55 inc. VAT and the itinerary is:

9.00 Andrew Schlich, AST Language Services – Successful Communication with your Overseas Customers
9.20 Anja Nelskamp, Metafocus – Why Languange and Culture Matters
9.35 Ian Lockwood, Internet Consultant – The Importance of Ongoing Online Promotion
10.05 Alan Clements, Metafocus – Why You Need a Global Internet Marketing Strategy
10.50 Panel Q&A – Joined by Thomas Schaal (International Trade Advisor for the UKTI)

As you can see, my slot isn’t strictly international-focused, but it is relevant to all online marketing. If you have any interest in marketing outside of the UK, I strongly recommend attending – Metafocus have developed a real reputation for specialist knowledge of international online marketing.

You can book online here.

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Driving Global Trade Through Internet Marketing