Posts from — August 2010

Hooray! We’ve been shortlisted for the 2010 DADI Awards!

Our work for Virgin Holidays is up for ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ and our “Summer’s Hottest Playlist” campaign is in the running for the ‘Digital Media Strategy’ award.

Looking forward to November when we find out if we win…

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Aug 24, 2010

Search engine optimizers know what makes a good link. It looks like this – cheap Viagra - and it links through to your client’s page selling Viagra.

But half the job of good SEO is also keeping on top of what the search engines look for when deciding what’s important. The rules are always changing.

How Many Contextual Links Really Look ‘Natural’?

There’s a slight problem with doubting the importance of quality links with clear anchor text: they work. Without a doubt, the most important element of improving your natural search ranking is to get quality inbound links with anchor text that reflects your target keywords. SEO is still a numbers game at its heart — do enough of the right things and you’ll rank number one.

But this is where SEOs need to think about what the search engines see when they manually check what results are being served and decide if the best suppliers are ranking well, or if it’s just the biggest spammers.

What Makes a Link Relevant, Important, and Contextual?

There are plenty of examples of links created by SEOs with great anchor text. But if a gas and electricity link near the bottom of an article on cooking is actually “contextual,” then I’m the Pope.

The dictionary definition of “contextual,” just to labor the point, means “relating to, dependent on, or using context.”

Clearly, anchor text doesn’t always make a link contextual. We’ve all seen examples of irrelevant articles with links at the bottom. This is bad practice, bad for the user, and ultimately bad for SEO.

More SEO Strategies

You can certainly make the case that links with relevant anchor text are all that matters — that “Google isn’t actually as clever as you think” — and the SERPs will back up that view in the vast majority of cases. But staying ahead of the curve is just as important as finding ways to enhance your ranking in the first place. If Google is planning an update to reduce the power of spammers, then this is where they should start.

My Recommendation

Monitor and manage the spread of URL versus keyword-rich links across your client’s profile and don’t be afraid of getting really high quality links that only use your client’s URL.

At a broader level, it’s also important to try and build a database of the most important and relevant sites, and even individuals in each sector you target. Try to genuinely engage with them, through direct contact, through affiliate and display deals, and by using other more creative methods (where appropriate) to build strong business relationships online that add value to users and provide SEO value for the engines.

Setting the scene:
Facebook Places was announced yesterday and saw Facebook make their long awaited first steps into geolocation, an area currently dominated by Foursquare and Gowalla. These location based social apps are becoming more popular amongst business and marketers as a way to target people at specific locations, for example checking in at a Starbucks to earn rewards and free coffee. They have huge potential for campaigns, but are currently hindered by relatively small user numbers; they rely mainly on early adopters and have yet to really penetrate the lives of the average social network user.

Why is Facebook significant?
Facebook becoming a player in this game is significant because of the sheer scale of their membership. They already have the audience; they just need to bring the geolocation option into their Facebook experience.

Mobile:
Though Facebook can be accessed as standard via mobile, currently Facebook Places is only available iPhones, or geolocation enabled smart phones from the Facebook Touch mobile site. Currently there is no app available for android or blackberry devices, though they are planned at some stage.

Availability:
Places is only available in the US at the moment and no dates have been released for an international launch.

How does it work:
For the average user, Places will become an option whereby you ‘allow’ Facebook to know your location. Then you will be able to share this with your friends, find out where they are, and discover places nearby. You can add new places when you visit them, and tag yourself and your friends at locations much like you can currently do with photographs and video, and just like the current tagging options, you don’t need permission to tag your friends at locations, this has raised privacy issues already.
Your check-ins will automatically appear in your profile, in your friend’s news stream, and the news stream of your current ‘Place’. These can all be modified in your privacy settings much like everything else you can currently share on Facebook.

Clients:
Clients will be able to ‘claim’ their business’ on Places. Whether they’ve been added by themselves or someone else, owners will be able to claim ownership and automatically set up a Facebook business page which will then house and stream all the check-ins people make from their business. So essentially your local coffee house will have its own page acting as a live message board broadcasting customer check-ins.

Development:
Facebook will be making a Places API available to developers to scrape information from public places, and information users allow to be shared, so there should be an oncoming influx of interesting location based apps and games for Facebook users that will seek to take advantage of this new feature, Gowalla and Foursquare have been given access to Places, so checkins can be posted across both networks.

In practice:
Facebook as a platform for marketing becomes even more powerful with Places. Users opting to share their location become open to very focussed and direct marketing opportunities, and there is also the ‘game’ element of geolocation, earning rewards for checkins, following ‘treasure hunts’ around cities, finding out about exclusive and secret locations and so on. These are all ways companies are already using Gowalla and Foursquare to market to customers, with the 500million+ users Facebook currently boasts, the scope for these campaigns becomes even greater and the potential all the more interesting and exciting.

John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media

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Group Account Director Alastair Boyle is looking forward to presenting at Figaro Digital’s SEO & PPC event at London’s The Hospital Club this Thursday, August 4th.

His session ‘All search and no marketing?’ will cover the following:

In a world dominated by technology and algorithms, search marketing can often be all search and no marketing. In this session, Steak goes beyond the buzzword ‘integration’ and draws on real world examples to show how best to use search as part of the marketing mix. We’ll look at how search can integrate with brand campaigns as well direct response, how it can inform and assess offline strategy, and how to maximise the potential of universal search.