I was talking w/ a colleague the other day about Online PR versus Off site SEO. Whilst chatting it became clear that in the minds of some people out there that a degree of confusion exists around the terminologies due in the main, to the many cross overs of both.

I thought it might be useful therefore,  to layout the benefits of each, and highlight what they do, and show the commonalities and differences of each, showing both how they may be perceived and the benefits of each of their respective approaches.

The table below shows a set of typical aims for each of the respective terms

The table below shows benefits and risks for general methods used by each

When you look at the tables like this, it is clear that are many crossovers and that in terms of interpretation the two are very similar indeed, both offering obvious opportunities for each other.with the  reality  being that in many cases, neither constituencies (PR Agencies) and (SEO’s) are getting it and are still doing things in a woefully backward manner.

Woeful PR – Woeful SEO

How many times as an SEO have you seen a non optimised press release and thought, silly sods, why did they do it that way, as a PR practitioner how many times have you stumbled across a piece of awful content and thought, OMG, how rubbish is that message.

It has to be said that what may be obvious to some, may not be so to others. If you are a practitioner of  ‘Online PR’ working in a traditional PR Agency, and you believe that your remit is to simply improve perceptions and raise awareness, then you are missing a big trick by ignoring traditional ‘off site SEO’ methods.Through engaging with a search specialist you’ll be able to dramatically improve the benefits that you bring to your clients, helping to improve their site performance in the search engines.

It simply isn’t good enough to bang out press releases to news wires and miss the masses of easy win opportunities that are there for the taking, you need to wake up and start delivering or you’ll find yourselves over run by others that do.

Conversely, if you are selling SEO Services then it really is about time  (if you aren’t already) that you woke up and smelt the coffee and took steps to ensure that your mindset shifts away from old school traditional perceptions, taking a more holistic view around how all the various spaces can be used to enhance the profile of a domain, not only from a search perspective but from a PR one too.

If you are an ‘SEO’ then I don’t have to remind you around the potential pitfalls of too aggressive a link acquisition strategy, be that through a bought link or other automated approach. I’m not going to get into the intricacies of whether link buying is a good or a bad thing as the debate on that has been had – Google won it, if you do it and get caught and they feel like dinging you, then they will. What I wanted to look at was the whole social thing, as that is where the crowds hang out and where you are likely to garner most attention.  Social retards are about as welcome in the online world as they are in the off. Lets look at that for a minute.

Behaving in a Socially Responsible Way

No one likes a thief or a liberty taker – most of us work hard to earn our livings and do the right thing in our lives. Some of us take shortcuts which may well carry a degree of risk, but hurt no one if we happen to fall – from a service delivery angle, so long as a client is apprised of the risk, then ultimately it’s their call to take it and ours to decide if what is being asked is acceptable to our policies.  I think it’s useful too to consider that it isn’t always about search rankings either . In fact I’m pretty sure that what is often overlooked is that too aggressive an approach will often have symptoms of anti social behaviour and may long term, do a whole lot more harm than good.

Automated comment spamming,  twamming and the general exploitation of websites may seem like a short cut smart route today, but lest not forget that they may come back and bite us in the future. Responsible practitioners will of course know this already and will appreciate the nuances of good netiquette.

Search engines aren’t the easy touch that they once were, especially in some of the more competitive spaces. Rapid spikes or radical changes in link patterns are very easy to identify. Whilst exceptions to the rule aren’t rare, it’s good sense to consider that those which are monitored and show results with huge change maybe expected to be  associated with a valid buzz generation hook. It might also be a good idea to consider too, that if an  algo doesn’t nab you, then  a competitor probably will.

Get real Rob, it’s a competitive landscape

Hey, many of us are pressured daily to deliver, I know that – business wants and requires results – empty trust me promises of we’ll get there in the end are meaningless to a marketing director with targets to deliver. Staff will often rely on these, peoples jobs and livelihoods can live or die on the back of a first page result. Which I guess is a reason why search engines like Google with such massive market share are happy to create the double edged sword that SEO can be. Build a good site they say, do the right things they say, yet the reality is that their SERPs are often riven with results of participants who have all broken the rules to get there.

Coming from that perspective, then most might be forgiven for being a little confused. Either SEO is good or isn’t. The answer to which of course is absolutely it is, provided that it is delivered in a way that is clever and innovative. Too many SEO companies are old school, they believe that the old methods will continue to work – I don’t agree, I think they are doomed to failure and almost stupid to continue with, especially when you consider the wealth of other perspectives that unite an effective strategy.That’s a post for another day though.

mingadingwoo lingadingaloo

mingadingwoo lingadingaloo

Will publish more once complete

Update 2

None of the search engines  touched or indexed the nofollowed links. Google and Yahoo indexed (Yahoo eventually indexed and included it) but Bing, never did

Update 1

2.5 hours after posting this, Google has indexed both pages. A mobile search (core index didn’t show it) reveals that they’ve ignored the top 2 nofollowed links and indexed the two follow links.

Both page variants had identical content, I linked to the first two with nofollow, and the second with straight vanilla links.The keywords chosen were picked as they don’t exist anywhere in any db’s on either Y!, Bing or Google.

Bing has indexed the home page for the keywords but has yet to display a ‘linked to’ url. Yahoo hasn’t touched it.

It discusses the very nature of the web and how we use it both as individuals and groups. It comes down very heavily on the side of the line that proposes that web 2.0 is this flattening leviathan that has encouraged individuality and self expression to the detriment of traditional structures of communication. It is also illustrative of a mindset that exists, whereby certain sets of journalists feel threatened and marginalised by bloggers and the general push towards freedom of expression on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Bebo et al.

It’s no surprise of course, newspapers both offline and on are struggling to maintain their place within existing structures. Web 2.0 has steam rolled through traditional advertising models and offline media has found it very difficult to adapt.  The days of a corporations media spend being unquestionably allocated towards some page 2 side column or magazine supplement are fast dwindling as marketing managers come around to the power of online for tracking of ROI.

Of course, broadsheets and red tops have all made the foray into online with mixed results, yet from the tone of Bryan’s piece you’d be fair to conclude that people of his ilk are disappointed by their place within the ecosystem, failing to appreciate the value they get from Google, instead choosing to bemoan the web generally.

You can get a taste for Bryan’s venom on page two in particular.

Institutions — publishers, newspapers, museums, universities, schools — exist precisely because they can do more than individuals. If web 2.0 flattens everything to the level of whim and self-actualisation, then it will have done more harm than good.

I don’t get the whole whim and self-actualisation thing as being necessarily bad, in fact I’d say it’s a force for good, and if anything it shows that institutions like those he refers to need to adapt or put simply, they deserve to die! They all have their place and can continue to thrive in an environment that just so happens to have changed and enabled people to break free of some outmoded sense of  observance of a time that is past. This doesn’t mean that respect is lost or the institutions are devalued and to suggest that they are is just ludicrous. Knowledge, growth, society and people absolutely need more than the sum of a computer, Google, Twitter and Wikipedia to grow and thrive, no one anywhere would be so daft to suggest otherwise, yet ultimately the offline institutions and amongst these I’d include the odd arrogant newspaper that believes it deserves attention and observance, exist to serve the interests of the people who use them. It is not the other way around.

A further objection to the cult’s radical individualism is that it doesn’t have the intended hyper-democratic consequences. Wikipedia, for example, has tackled inaccuracy and subversion by introducing forms of authority and control that would seem to be anathema to its founding ideals. Bloggery is forming itself into big, institutionalised aggregators such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and remains utterly parasitic on the mainstream media it affects to despise. Even Twitter is already coming to be dominated by conventional, non-web-based celebrity — Oprah Winfrey in the US and Stephen Fry over here.

Whilst a first reaction is one of so bloody what, that view is tempered by the obvious pain that Bryan feels on this, so in that regard, let’s just be fair for a little while longer and address what he says.

Besides the use of emotive vernacular like “the cult’s radical individualism” or fear of the “hyper-democratic consequences” it’s clear that he thinks that the body of work that is Wikipeda ( a non perfect but evolving useful resource) has taken small steps to wrestle with what he perceives as some huge body of non-authoritative inaccuracy (or at least that’s what’s implied) whilst bemoaning that blogging too is slowly evolving into various stables of niche topic powerhouses, obliterating the previous occupants through being fleet of foot in their models. Some might suggest that these Main Stream Media (MSM) that he avers they despise , might just have asked for their loss of market share through arrogant assumptions that they deserved their place unquestionably.  MSM, all of it bar none, has simply been unable to adjust to the model. People on trains given the choice between dirty grubby fingers sullied by print or a clean shiny smart phone to read on a commute into work, are increasingly going for the latter. Papers are either out of date or irrelevant. People can now choose what it is that interests THEM, they do this through vehicles like Twitter and sure, whilst trending features may be an outcome of a crowd mindset, it’s often far better than one placed down from on high by some politically motivated editorial policy.

I’m not going to regurgitate the revolution that Twitter is, breaking news, massive take up, crowd lead charity events etc as that’s all been said and by most it’s valued and appreciated. Bryan’s piece at best, is a clear illustration of the fundamental lack of grasp that people like Bryan have about web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever you want to call it. It’s akin to a cry of a dinosaur unaware of the impact of the meteor that caused its demise as it choked on a sunlight starved atmosphere, too large to do anything about it, powerful, yet completely powerless to adapt. If institutions like the ones to which Bryan alludes wish to survive, then they need to step up and adapt, else they’ll go the way of the dinosaurs too.

Web 2.0 does drive individuality, absolutely, it frees us up and removes the chains of imposed ways of thinking pushed out through TV and old school journos. That is a blessing, that is the most invigorating fact of life today, that for those who  embrace the opportunities that it presents, stand to reap huge rewards from.  At least, that’s my individualist ‘amateur’ point of view

So after reading Daves post at Latitude I’m now having a  quick play with microformats and while I was at it, I thought heck why not link to the London SEO thang and see if this gets picked up.

If you consider yourself to be a good DJ and would like to play a set, please ping Ciaran on twitter. We’re not looking for people to press play on their iPod, you’ll need to know how to Sphinn spin and mix old-school vinyl. No trance or weird shit please, some of us are old.  http://londonseo.org/blog/londonseo-posh-poseurs-party.html

We often hear the word ‘holistic’ bounded about these days. Increasingly (and rightly so) companies are looking to connect the dots and put together the various pieces of their marketing puzzles.

The challenge for many is that they aren’t quite sure themselves, they are looking for people and companies who can sit down and explain to them what fits where and why.

How Does PPC affect Organic CTR’s?

Just recently I was having a discussion about PPC and it’s relationship with SEO in the SERPs, specifically, does a PPC listing help organic clickthrough (CTR).

It was very late and I’d had quite a few beers and was very stuffed with Chinese food but even so, we managed to get to a point whereby we discussed a variety of other questions which such a question begged, namely that it depends on the vertical, the user, the PPC position, the Organic position, the brand, the creative etc.

In other words, there is no simple answer other than yes, quite probably. PPC helps organic CTR.

The Pie is big with lots of flavours

I used this example because it’s relatively fresh in my mind and has a natural segue to the core question. SEO and PPC are indeed just a part of the online marketing pie – there’s also Online PR, Social, Affiliate and Display too – All are related, very few large corps can do one without any of the others as there are lots of inevitable overlaps and blur lines – It’s right today in these frugal times that marketing managers looking to maximise the impacts of their budgets, should be asking probing questions like – Should you do one w/ out the other? What aspects of each inform the other? Where should they target their budget to get the most bang for their buck? How will you track ROI for them? Which piece of the pie will deliver the most? Yet answers to these aren’t always as clear cut or as straightforward as we’d like. Many of them require scrutiny and analyses of the pieces used and the pieces that are likely to come into play. Not many big corps still really *get* online. Many struggle with the idea of a unified strategy, preferring to go with the segment that’s the most tried and tested.

No surprise there either, why would they direct positive ROI spend anywhere else – it’s all about ROI after all Rob you dummy!

Well yes and no. Yes because absolutely, if company X invests 100k and gets 300k of sales from a single Channel then the jobs a winner, it’s a no brainer, right? Yet no, because to do so is to take ones eye off of the ever shifting fluidity of the other channels out there. 2k On PR could deliver 50k worth of Organic Serp positions, as could 10k invested into Affiliate, Display or PPC. Whilst it’ll usually be on a case by case basis, there will be very few scenarios where wholesale investment in one channel would be a sensible online strategy.

Some of you reading this might be asking, “yeah ok, but what about offline” and of course you’d be right to ask too! Why wouldn’t a good agency consider offline, they’d be mad to ignore the impact of a good TV, Radio or Paper Media campaign. Your agency or individual (if they were any good) should be falling over themselves to get access to your analytics package to advise upon strategy or to demonstrate past impacts through retrospective analyses.

Yet how many today do? How many companies can actually sit down and give a coherent definitive overview and strategy and deliver on budget? My guess is not too many. It’s a good reason why that on many projects, you’ll find quarterly or monthly inter agency reviews, whereby agency A will sit down with client and agency B, C and D and all attempt to discuss the strategy w/ out giving away too much IP to probable or likely competitors. Yet for the companies who can provide that full 360 overview, who can clearly demonstrate how and why doing X will deliver Y to the bottom line, who can clearly show how aspect XXX strengthens the position of strategy component Z, the benefits and potentials to win new business is huge.

To state the obvious, it’ll be the companies who are demonstrating these traits and abilities who’ll grab the most market share – companies who invest in their people and think outside of the box with experience and insights are the ones who forward thinking businesses will want to trade with. Businesses that recognise that having six or seven different relationships to manage is a whole lot more time consuming and draining than one.

Companies like the one I work for (plug plug) who can step up and deliver, should do really well as a result.