Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

A senior PR agent at a large agency once said to me, rather cynically, that if a client asks ‘can you do this?’ the answer is always yes, then you go and figure out how to do it.

No doubt there’s a bit of this when it comes to online pr and social media, levels of purported expertise vary hugely, so here are seven questions I’d recommend asking a prospective online pr agency/agent, to establish if they really ‘eat their own dog food’.

1) Do they write a blog? If they aren’t blogging at all, put the phone down or call a taxi. If they’re blogging less than once a week, you have to question their content led online pr strategy – do they really believe in it?

2) How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? – Anything less than 100 connections and they’re playing at it.

3) Are they a mayor of anywhere on Foursquare? OK, this is quite new but if they say yes, you’re talking to a proper social media geek that’s interested in what’s next, not just what’s popular now. Read the rest of this entry »

Furlong PR is pleased to announce an expansion of our product offering to include a full search engine optimisation service, in partnership with search engine marketing experts WhyCommunicate?

We see this as a natural extension to our core blog management and social media services which are focussed on creating inbound website traffic for clients in the technology & corporate sectors.

There’s such a close relationship between online pr, social media and SEO and each discipline ultimately has the same goal – raising brand profiles online. And while SEO companies are not experts in PR, neither are PR agents experts in SEO. We need each other.

We’re initially offering two products – an SEO audit which grades websites and blogs for SEO effectiveness and a reputation management service which measures brand sentiment and recommends ways to influence negative comments posted online.

Online pr helps unlock the IP lying dormant within corporations and SEO makes it discoverable to those you want to see it –  add in social media marketing and the combination has a powerful effect on website traffic.

On your wish list?

Maile Ohye, manager of Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, laid out her blueprint for a social media, content and SEO optimised website in an interview with TopRank’s online marketing blog last week.

The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.

Here’s what she said:

“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”

80% of visitors to company blogs are coming for the first time, a survey from Compendium has revealed.

The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.

First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.

Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.

Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.

Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.

StrongMail’s survey of marketer’s spend intentions for 2010, in a flat market, shows the upstarts email, social media and search continuing to cannibalise poor old direct mail and events while advertising remains unmoved.

PR comes in fourth, with a small net gain – damned with faint praise, which begs the question, where does PR fit in an increasingly online world?

Do marketers see PR as just about media relations, just more online than in print these days? I suspect yes. Certainly I don’t think they see PR as the natural place to look for social media or email content, definitely not search, yet these should be natural areas for PR people.

While many marketers say they are going to spend more on social media, they are still going to have a hard time negotiating a separate budget for it, which leaves the door open a crack. Read the rest of this entry »

Some 400 years after the gunpowder plot was revealed, political blogger Guido Fawkes is doing a better job than his namesake in laying explosive content at Westminster, particularly in the area of MP’s expenses.

While Guido plots content for his blog, the overarching battle for online visibility races on. On one flank you have the keyword and link focussed techy SEO practitioners wearing various shades of hat, white, grey & black, creating text bristling with optimisation. On the other side, PR and digital  agencies advance steadily into SEO territory with content crafted to build brand reputation online with social media levers attached.

The arrival of Twitter has changed the game again and lately, in favour of the content providers. Link building has long been the covert weapon of choice for SEO experts but with Google publishing Twitter posts, content providers suddenly have a powerful new link building tool all of their own.  Read the rest of this entry »