Posts by Claire Thompson

Claire Thompson is the co-founder of SEO PR Training (http://www.seoprtraining.co.uk) and runs Waves PR, which she founded two years ago. She has 15 years PR experience. She has great taste in wine and lousy taste in music. The two are not unconnected! More articles and bio from Claire Thompson
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Yandex Interview with Ilya Segalovich at #ISS

ISS

In a fascinating ‘fireside chat’ type interview, Ilya Segalovich was interviewed about Yandex’ development.

In a frank exchange, Segalovich revealed that the name was originally an abbreviation for ‘Yet another Index’, and the motivation for building it was that there was no alternative – in the early 19990s the Internet didn’t exist in the state it is now, and the developers didn’t see huge market for it. Their first product was used by 100 people – Segalovich was both engineer and customer support.

There was no shopping index in Russia – the founders tried to make “something beautiful” to help.

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Understanding and Implementing Geo-Targeting #ISS

ISS

Andy Atkins Kruger of Webcertain, gave a whistlestop tour at ISS London of which signals matter for international search.

His toolbox would, broadly, include: local domains; ccTLD; webmaster tools; server location; sitemaps;  alternate hreflang and canonicals; and signals such as currency and links. (The meta language tag is, he noted, now defunct.)

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Targeting the Mindset of the Customer #SMX

SMX London

First session at SMX London 2013 I attended was run by Christine Churchill from Key Relevance looking at targeting the mindset of the customer.

Why Keyword Research Matters

Christine opens with declaring that keywords should be at the heart of all search marketing – the first and most important step in SEO. Keywords, she says, are the single most important thing for site relevancy.

Reassuringly she notes that it’s important to get into the customer mindset using the example ‘duplicate a CD’ and ‘burn a CD’: which would the customer look for: business jargon may work inside the industry, but mostly it’s not what customers search for.

Churchill is a fan of the long-tail term – they tend to be closer match and therefore convert better.

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Where’s the Form Going?

forms-2

Have you ever thought about what happens to that lovely ‘contact us’ form you carefully placed on a website? You know, the one that you use for claiming a ‘conversion’ in analytics. I’d urge you to periodically review what’s happening to it, and become your clients’ best friend. (more…)

An Introduction to Analytics by Dave Rorher – #seslon

SES London

“Reporting is great, analysis is better. Data is great, information is better,” suggested Dave Rohrer as he started his presentation at SES London.

A whistle stop tour of the difference between counts, ratios, dimensions and metrics lead to a recommendation that users collect everything they can – mostly in case they need it later – and then segment subsets of traffic for greater insight where it matters now, creating goals (logged/recorded actions) such as conversions, characterising visits (looking at the user journey) and asking the meaningful questions. Good questions outrank easy answers in analytics, Roher contends.

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SEO & Website Migrations: How to Have a Smooth Transition – #seslon

SES London

The final session of the day looked at SEO & Website Migrations and how to ensure a smooth transition. There are a lot of common mistakes that happen when websites migrate during redesigns but there are ways that these mistakes can be easily avoided.

In this session, the two speakers walk through key points that need to be considered during website migrations.

Speakers

Daniel Patmore, Search Marketing Manager, Argos
Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

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B2B Video Marketing – #seslon

SES London

Having done a lot of research ahead of a video competition last year, I was interested to see what this session would hold. It was a great session run by Phil Nottingham from Distilled and Greg Jarboe from SEO PR.

Phil Nottingham, Distilled

Nottingham established a great principle up front. Replace B2B with B2CC (business to commercial consumer) when you think about video. It’s a great principle across all social media and communications.

He also proposed a strategic rather than tactical (we need video) approach, suggesting four broad goals for video usage: rich snippets, conversions, brand awareness, links, and social shares. In each instance the objective will dictate the platform, and if you’re trying to achieve all four your video is likely to be too watered down to succeed.

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Future Forward – Shifts in the Digital Revolution – #seslon

Coplin-keynote-2-featured

A presentation by Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer, Advertising and Online, Microsoft UK

I have seen Dave present before. This was new material, engagingly and thought provokingly delivered. The near term future will, it seems, see an amplification of the trends and buzzwords that we are already seeing played with – mobile, big data, apps: the web of things, people and places, blurring the distinction between the real and digital worlds. Reality augmented.

For this to work, we need ever more powerful processing and a better understanding of identity. This is the crux of things – personalisation not just on a ‘once searched for dog food, quick deliver more dog related stuff’, but split into four domains of context: emotional state (happiness, sadness, anger); social context (who you are with); environmental context (place and time of day); and reaction to current states of the World.

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Trust and SEO

trust

Let’s face it. Anything you do as an SEO is based on trust.

Clients don’t get an immediate return on their money in the same way as buying, for example, a sandwich, pair of shoes or even a report. It’s an invisible service, often based on best guess.

I work with a company whose CEO, the management author Kevan Hall, often talks about ways of building trust in large organizations. His ideas resonate with me, and so it’s with a hat tilt to Kevan that I address the subject here (although the thoughts here are my own).

Trust is a cornerstone of PR activity. The journalists, bloggers, clients and others that I work with, all need to trust that I know that the information I share with them can be trusted for use or publication. The standards to which the media are generally held also hold PR people to account (and in this context I push aside the kind of reporting that the UK’s Leveson inquiry has addressed, although mostly the publications told the truth – it was how they got the information that mattered). For the most part PR people lose their jobs if ‘called out’ in public by a journalist or blogger.

SEO has a pretty major reputation issue by comparison. SEO for many is synonymous with spam, poor grade content and doing lots of shady stuff.  Whilst the industry is very, very needed, one of its biggest partners, Google, is, it would seem from many of the blogs and articles, anti-SEO. (more…)

Poot, Poot: The International Search Summit Drives Into Town

ISS

It’s hard to report back from a conference with an overview: if you weren’t at the conference, unless there was a huge buzz, few people are going to spend time trying to catch up after the event. This, therefore, could be the post that no-one reads. Which is a shame, because International search is difficult. There are few specialists out there, so best guess is even harder than with genuine ‘local’ search.

International search is broad church, the lessons from one site may not apply to all, the number of approaches is huge, and the range of budgets is vast. An already small – international- conversation is further fragmented by the fact that Google’s algorithm rolls out in different countries at different speeds.

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Finding Forward Features

media

So you want to know what the media are going to be writing about to try and gain inclusion for your client. Where do you look for information about features that are going to be written? This is a short, and by no means exhaustive guide based on my own experience. (more…)

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