Company & Position Overview

Return On Digital is a leading Digital Marketing agency with a mixture of high profile and SME clients. We specialise in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media, Conversion Rate Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing (PPC). Due to company growth, we’re looking to recruit a motivated junior SEO executive to join our SEO team.

Job Description

The successful candidate will be working as part of our SEO team, delivering innovative search solutions. This will involve activities such as content development, link building, on site optimisation, competitor research and contributing of ideas in brainstorming sessions.

A high degree of energy, commitment, initiative and enthusiasm is required along with a thirst for knowledge in the internet marketing arena. The ability to organise, prioritise and meet deadlines is essential as is the ability to communicate with clients, in a polite and professional manner.

We are not just looking for the finished article. If you are passionate about digital and are looking for somewhere to develop, this could be the career jump you are looking for.

Key Responsibilities

• Be involved in setting client’s digital strategies

• Make basic ‘on-site’ changes to client’s website

• Plan and implement and be part of link building campaigns

• Reporting on success and activity to clients

• Liaising with management team

Key Attributes

• You want to be the best at what you do, and are happy to learn along the way

• You will be currently taking part in Social Media and know your Facebook from your Twitter

• You will have had some experience in this role

Please call or email Guy Levine  0845 86 22122 or email careers@returnondigital.com

Previously mentioned within our 2012 predictions we discussed how the social media and SEO industry are beginning to count and look towards these Klout influences. For the majority of active social media users,  you are probably aware that Klout enables you to add  different social networking platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Foursqaure etc to your profile. However, this is where I have spotted a potential problem.

When undertaking an SEO or social project, it is in the clients, and your companies, interests to research and find who the major players are within your industry sector(s), especially on Twitter.

Personally, for me, this is where Klout exposes a major fault. If you have Facebook and Twitter account linked to your Klout profile then it is easily possible to increase or maintain a high Klout score. Yet the major problem with Facebook is that it’s a closed network. A random Klout user could have around 150 friends on Facebook and maintain a regular interaction and post frequently, which would  deliver and sustain a reasonably high Klout score. On the other hand this same user could have a Twitter account linked to their klout profile and be a sporadic tweeter.

Yes I know what you are thinking, Klout is a social platform to measure different communities such as Facebook and Twitter, however the majority of people judge the overall Klout score rather than looking into the comparison tool.

Check out the screenshot below of Tim Grimes (me) vs. Stephanie Goodman. You can see that Facebook relates to 77% of her score and 23% of Twitter, whereas mine is almost spread evenly across the two social networks.

Therefore, what I am trying to say is that if you are looking for influences on Twitter, based on their Klout scores, then make sure you run a comparison with your profile, which produces a breakdown of their Klout score through a percentage into each social platform. You may be surprised to see that over 70% of their Klout is Facebook related.

I believe that this is a common misconception with the Klout tool, seeing as it takes all the other social networks into consideration and does not just focus on Twitter, people often don’t think to check into which social platform their influence is based. Klout now even offer you an official Chrome plugin that produces an automatic overview of a user’s total Klout score on Twitter.

I am not suggesting that Klout is the be all and end all of social measuring tools and I am sure there is or will be a better tool out that we will all be using soon. My advice is simply to not take the overall Klout figure as to a person’s social influence and compare it with your own.

Let me know your thoughts on this and whether you agree, or do you simply ignore sites trying to measure social influence?

We are holding a FREE webinar to help you make sense of these changes:

‘A Guide to the New Google Analytics’ on Thursday 2nd February 2012, 1:00pm – 1:30pm

In this webinar we cover:

1) How to create a personalised dashboards and widgets to show the most relevant information for your business

2) How to use the ‘Real Time Data’ feature to your advantage

3) What the ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’ can tell you about your website

4) As well as sharing other top tips for how to make the most out of Google Analytics

To join our webinar, simply click here. 

You may be surprised by the amount of traffic Pinterest is receiving – according to the report by Experian, the site received over 100 million visits the week of  December 17^th. The site is currently dominated by home décor, crafts, fashion & food but this will no doubt expand overtime. The majority of users are female (58%) and between the ages of 25 – 44 (59%).

One of the great features is that it allows you to login using Facebook & Twitter, removing any tedious sign up feature. So you’re probably thinking whether you should use Pinterest. As an individual if you love visuals, or are looking for ideas for a project or want to brainstorm ideas, it’s great. It’s also a great platform for brands to drive traffic to their website. Brands can use Pinterest in several ways such as posting photos of coverage during conferences & events etc. Some of the major fashion brands have been using Pinterest to showcase the latest collections. In comes as no surprise that Burberry have been leading the way showcasing their collections:

Who knows whether you Pinterest will really catch on, but from the attention it has received over the past months, it has the potential to be huge, especially for a few industries. At the moment Pinterest is invite only – just leave a comment below with your email address and I’ll send you an invite. You can also connect with me on Twitter.

This wasn’t my best shot and you will see my 5D chose the wrong focus spot, but it captured a moment!

In any event, to overcome this you’re more than likely to have introduced a maths quiz or a lesson in reading hieroglyphics to your contact form, to ensure only humans fill them in – but it’s quite possible that at some point you’ll have put off people from filling (or being able to fill out) your form by making them decipher something like:

Essentially, you want to make it as easy as you can for your visitors to fill in your contact form, whilst making it as difficult as possible for spambots to get through your validation.

One technique that we have adopted of late has seen great success in doing this and (for now) we feel as though we’ve beaten the spambots at their own game.

When putting together a form that, for example, requests name, email & company – insert a text input box and whilst sticking to your naming convention, call this something like title.


<form>
<input id="this_title" type="text" name="this_title" value="" />
<input id="this_name" type="text" name="this_name" value="" />
<input id="this_email" type="text" name="this_email" value="" />
<input id="this_company" type="text" name="this_company" value="" />
</form>


However, use CSS to make the title field invisible to users – as it’s within the HTML, it will still be seen by bots and as it is the first field in the form, they will fill it in.

#this_title
{
display:none;
}


Then, in the script that deals with your form processing, just dismiss any form submissions where the title has been filled in:

$this_form_spam = $_POST['this_title'];

if ($this_form_spam == "")
{
// process the form and send email
}
else
{
// mock and laugh in the face of spam
}

So far so good, it appears to have a 99% success rate (give or take) and everyone is happy – you don’t receive spam and the spammers think they’ve spammed you.

Ultimately the majority of Facebook posts are to increase interaction and awareness. A major factor on interaction is the frequency of posts. After each post interaction rate seems to drop for each subsequent post. A really important statistic is that after 5 posts (daily) the interaction rate levels off. This can be seen in the graph below:

Ultimately page admins trying to reach a large percentage of their audience should post as many times in order to increase interaction. Facebook Edgerank highly weights recency in posts, so if posts are not frequent your fans may never see the posts. In the end it all depends on your page/brand & content but 4/5 posts in optimum, spread throughout the day. The most important thing to monitor unsubscribes – the unsubscribe rate increases moving along 1>2>3 posts/day, but levels off in higher frequencies. Each page admin needs to find the best balance between no. of posts & the no. of unsubscribes.

Source: Momentus Media

There is no doubt though that it has been widely embraced compared to Google’s previous offerings.  I don’t think it will rival Facebook as such, but think it’s a great alternative that those who want to share content of interest with people of the same interest, as opposed to logging onto Facebook and wading through inane bilge from old school mates!

As such, we have set up a Return On Digital profile to share content and interact with those in digital marketing cirlces – feel free to add us:

 Return On Digital on Google+

Social media now accounts for 1/5^th of our time spent online (90% in my case but I don’t really count) (comScore, 2011). In this blog post I will look to explore what has the potential to be huge in 2012 in terms of social media. An annual report from comScore has found that for every 5 minutes spent online in October 2011, at least one minute is used to view social media sites, whether Facebook or Twitter etc. Let me now take you through my social predictions for 2012:

1) Search & Social

As previously mentioned in this blog post, we are seeing increased integration of social in real time search and an increase in consumers looking to social networks as opposed to search engines. The gap between search & social is blurring fast, whether it’s tweets or Google Plus posts in Google search results or Bing offering Facebook liked results. I believe that search will not be able to scale without taking social factors into consideration and 2012 will likely be the defining year for this. For companies looking to preserve or improve their rankings, social marketing activities will no longer be optional; they will be a necessary element of traffic driving success.

2) Google Plus

Although 2011 looked like Google was going to make its first successful social network this hasn’t necessarily been the case. However in 2012 I expect that it will become useful not just as a social network but have influencing factor on rankings (got my SEO head on). As Dave previously mentioned Matt Cutts stated: “Social is a good way to create a reputation for authors. If the reputation of content authors is transparent, it will make the whole web better.”

3) Influence

In 2011 there has been a lot of discussion around ‘influence’ and how this is measured across social networks and in the online space. It has also been a very touchy subject in 2011, especially after Klout changed their scoring algorithm.  A lot of people argue saying that you can’t measure true influence with a number, while others say it will play a major role in a company’s media activity. Either way influence is likely to be a hot topic in 2012 – let’s be honest you can’t argue that Lady Gaga & Justin Bieber are ‘influential’ in the social space.

4) Twitter – customer service platform

Twitter will become even more prominent in 2012. It will move from being just a social network, which means that a growing no. of journalists will seek information and news sources on Twitter. By making yourself relevant you are likely to get some media attention. You just need to ensure that you are relevant and content rich. We all know content is king on social media, the more relevant the more it gets shared etc.

5) GEO Targeting

2010/2011 was the year for Foursquare which made check ins for locations a reality. The mobile web is something that will have a major impact over the next 5 years (something I will expand on in my next point) as the world’s more than 5 billion phones become ‘smarter’. We have seen Starbucks offer pieces of cake for checkins and I believe this is something that will be used more during 2012.

6) Go Mobile

Smartphones are also growing in popularity as a medium for accessing social networks with 3 in 5 smartphone users accessing social media sites in America. 2 in 5 are doing so nearly every day in America which is staggering figure. Even Twitter is now embedded within Apple iOS5 mobile operating system. Read more about being ready for Mobile Search here.

That’s my predication for 2012 – let me know if you any other ideas. Have a great Christmas and New Year from all the Return On Digital team.

Even Pubcon’s (the #1 SEO conference)  opening keynote speaker, Leo Laporte told us that SEO was dead!  This was greeted with mass murmurs of discontent and the following reaction from Matt Cutts:

His angle was that Apple will displace Google as the Search Engine of choice with Siri, that people will use voice activated technology to search rather than visit Google.  He also added Google will fail in social media as they are not focused whereas Facebook are, that Larry Page has a big challenge with Google+ – he then predicted an epic fall for Google and told us in the audience:

“If I were in your business, I would really be looking at alternatives to search engine marketing and search engine optimization”

His reasoning was that a career in SEO wasn’t viable as in the long run Google won’t be existent or the search engine of choice:

“We don’t actively have to search for anything anymore – that times are changing and Google isn’t on the right side of the change”

I think he is right on a couple of points – we do need to look for alternatives, but not to search marketing, but within search marketing.  And yes, the times are changing – but that is a constant and always has been, long since before SEO came along.

Indeed, Siri is already finding issues with it’s understanding of human queries – something that Google has been dealing with for years, and this is already an indication that Siri has a lot of catching up to do if it is to challenge Google in search.

The fact is, search engines will continue to live long and prosper – they will still need their algorithm to work out which the best/most relevant sites to present as results are – therefore, as SEOs we must be agile and react to these changes.

So my only prediction for 2012 (and beyond) is SEO will change, but it will not die.

What I will list though are key areas I think we all need to look at, if we are not doing so already, and be ready to embrace them as key factors in how we do our jobs.

Change Or Improve Your Approach To Link Building

One thing that may well be dying, if not already dead, is brute force link building.  The days of firing 100s of exact match keyword rich links at a page look to be numbered, Google are looking for (or more to that point, getting better at spotting) more natural footprints with regards link building and your back link profile will need to reflect this.

Moving forward, a mixture of brand, URL, “click here” and even nofollow links will serve your site better in the long run than a plethora of keyword rich anchor text links.  You may want to change your style and be less obvious – find synonyms and related phrases then look at brand / partially related anchor text.

If you’re “unnaturally” building links – don’t be so obvious about it, take the time and effort to mix your anchor text up a bit.

Be Ready For Mobile Search

Predicting mobile search to continue its rise in 2012 is hardly a bold prediction.  I’m not even going to predict it, but there are certain facts that you cannot ignore.

One is that its growth is massive and currently there are more wireless customer connections in the US than there are people, and this figure is set only to rise (not just in the US, but globally).

The introduction of Siri will also bring a new dimension to mobile search and the requirement that your business has a viable online mobile presence is more important than ever.

Note, this doesn’t mean you need rush out and build a mobile version of your site – that would depend entirely on the nature of your website and how customer’s interact it with it to get what they need (or in other words, achieve your goal).

Another way to think about if you need a mobile site seems obvious, but only consider it if you get mobile traffic – so take a look in your analytics and take it from there.

What the rise in mobile search does mean is that you should ensure the best experience possible for mobile users and their various browser agents, by focusing on two key areas – valid HTML and optimised page speed.

Another thing to bear in mind is ensuring that your website has clickable phone numbers (so always use text, never images) and addresses, preferably marked up using micro formats or similar.

Go Local

This goes hand in hand with mobile search – 33% of mobile users are searching for local content relevant to their location.  Not to mention continued testing and integration of local listings in the natural SERPs and continuing emphasis on personalised search.

So there is no excuse – get your site listed on the local listings: Google Places & Bing Local and use microformats/schema.org to develop rich on-site location pages.

You should develop a proactive review policy – get customers/users to review you either on Google places or amongst the local business review sites such as Yelp.

Aggregate review results are becoming more visible in the SERPs, so where possible ensure you have reviews on your site using the correct microformat/schema.org markup – this does work, we’ve applied this successfully to client sites and seen the results in the SERPs.  We’ve seen increased click through rates for terms that rank page 1, from having a 5 star rating appear within their listing.

Be Social

We are seeing increased integration of social in real time search and an increase in consumers looking to social networks as opposed to search engines.

The integration of search and social media continues at a rapid pace which again tells me that SEO is not dead, but that the way in which we will look to drive rankings and traffic to sites will change.

It’s quite possible that in time, your Klout score may become as important, if not more so, than link authority.  That said, it’s not enough just to have a Facebook or Twitter account, the user behind it is the most important aspect – you need to engage and be engaging.  You also need to go and find the Social Media networks that your target audience are on – there’s no point in having a Facebook profile page if your target audience is on Google+ and so on.

Search engines look for quality signals – quantity is easy to game, so quality will become more important as the algorithm becomes more sophisticated.  This quality will come from interactions with “important” people and real, human, substantive engagement.

Moving forward, you should start to think about social media more like search engines.  For example, you should consider the parallel aspects of websites and twitter, and the mindset is not too different than how it is already:

• - Domain Authority = Username Authority
• - Duplicate Content (bad) = Retweets (good)
  Google discounts duplicate content in regular SEO. The opposite is true in social (sharing)
• - Blogging Freshness = Content Freshness = Microblogging Freshness
• - # of links = # of followers
• - inbound links V outbound links = # of followers v # of people followed
• - quality of links = quality of followers
• - linking to good/bad neighbourhoods and the themes of twitter users you follow

So the social signals you should bear in mind (on Twitter and beyond) that can affect search will be along the lines of:

• - Increasing  the amounts of links your content/domain from tweets & retweets
• - 2^nd tier SERP visibility – increase your presence in the social networks
• - Blog comments – as a signal that people are reading your content
• - Facebook Likes (Bing already uses these)
• - YouTube views
• - Status updates in relation to keyword sharing

Integrating search and social in 2012 is a must.  And whether you like it or not, so is getting involved on Google+.

Understand AuthorRank

Google has been recently pushing authorship mark-ups to be included on websites, as they will be starting to highlight content creators in their search results.  In addition to this, Matt Cutts gave a keynote at Pubcon, where he told us:

“Social is a good way to create a reputation for authors.   If the reputation of content authors is transparent, it will make the whole web better.”

By using the markup rel=”author” you can create an author for your website and by becoming active in social you can write content, get links to your content where the better the links are, the more trusted the author becomes.  You can also go beyond your site and comment on relevant blogs and forums – and use the URL fields to link back to your author page.

Do all this to build your brands author authority, because:

“The name of the writer can be used to influence the ranking of web search results by indicating the writer responsible for a particular content piece … Assuming that a given writer has a high reputational score, representing an established reputation for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that writer will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable writers in search results.”

Not my words, but the words of Google.  Who were actually talking about Agent Rank.  And those words were them mashed up a bit by Jim Boykin to complement the idea of AuthorRank, but you get the idea.

In Summary

So there you go.  Those are the key areas that I feel we, as SEOs, will need to understand and embrace if we are to continue to prosper in search in 2012 and beyond.  As I said, SEO is not dead, but if you fail to move with these changes and rely on the old (all be them tried and tested) SEO approaches, you may well get left behind, and pretty much come across as being dead.

Don’t die.