Diary of a link builder (2) – Link Bait, Videos and Crème Brûlée

Attending SMX London earlier this month provided an excellent opportunity to meet and hear the thoughts of many of the large/ small companies and freelancers of the search marketing community but it was only a shame it didn’t continue for a third day in order to attend all of the tracks that clashed with those I attended.

But even so, the seminars and informal networking in between oozed excellent advice and examples of outstanding search marketing campaigns, particularly from the larger firms whose clients include those as big as Cadbury’s. As with managing any budget the skills resides in scaling down these often ‘big’ ideas to something workable for the SME client and related budget.

After the two day event, I left inspired, and perhaps a few pounds heavier from the second helping of Crème Brûlée but I was again faced with the predicament of ‘building links’.

Whilst web 1.0 methods of generating relevant links (“hey, can I have a link on your site”) will only get your campaign so far, there is increasing scope to harness more creative methods of generating brand awareness, backlinks and traffic – which, surprisingly, can be achieved on a budget.

But what do I mean?

Well, for this post, I want to explore link bait, which Jim Westergren defines rather simply as creating “something that naturally attract backlinks for your web page by getting people to talk about it…. In addition to attracting a lot of visitors”.
Successful link baiting campaigns can therefore assist in brand awareness in addition to strategies of differentiation presented by the richer top level multimedia search results of Google’s Universal Search.

Comprehensively exploring each link baiting strategy is not something I will carry our in this entry, but instead I will focus solely upon video content – which is but one of the many tools at ones disposal.

Viewing examples of existing video content provides an excellent method of establishing the wide range of videos formats to inspire you when creating your video content.

Creating a video product review:
This product review with details of price, what’s included and where to buy is an excellent example of harnessing video content to increase sales of your products.

Interesting and useful content:
Thought provoking and interesting videos like this one about global warming scream out to be shared, blogged about and commented on. These videos might also include high quality interviews or research within your subject area.



Funny Viral Videos:
Viral videos, ranging from Mentos and Coke and the numerous follow up spoofs needn’t cost the earth to produce, and if you are not creative enough to develop a new idea, why not borrow or tweak an existing idea?

Including these examples:

Using humour to get the message across is an excellent way of keeping the user engaged.



Downloading and remixing existing content is an excellent approach. This example sees 1980’s Horror 'The Shining' remixed as a family friendly love story.



Or this video, which rips off the original Sony Bravia advert, to excellent effect.



But creating a good video isn’t enough to guarantee success – and requires further promotion, be it organically through word of mouth or coordinated within existing marketing efforts including press release submission, networking with influential bloggers and posting on targetted forums for example. This is of course not to mention where the video itself is going to be hosted, which I will get onto shortly.

As more and more people jump on the link bait bandwagon it’s becoming increasingly difficult to promote traditional link bait over larger budget campaigns and with Internet users becoming more savy as to what’s entertaining and what’s simply an unsolicited infiltration of ‘their’ online spaces, care is needed in not only what is created by how it is presented.

Now obviously how you present your video is dependent on the objectives of the campaign. For example, is it simply a branding exercise and if so, why not upload the video to the major video sharing websites including Blinkx and YouTube along with a keyword researched title, description and tags before continuing your promotion.

If you however, wish to build backlinks to the core company domain or traffic to your website then you might wish to upload the video to the core domain, paying particular attention to the fundamentals of your ‘on the page’ optimisation including:

- Page titles
- Meta Tags
- Meta Description
- Alt attributes
- Page copy
- Video properties (author, copyright, description etc)

In addition, ensure you don’t orphan off the video by launching it in a Javascript popup player, instead embed it in both Flash and Quicktime player formats to ensure as many users can access it as possible.

But before you turn the green light on the video, ask yourself whether it fits in with the culture of the organisation and whether users (made up of bloggers, webmasters and forum users) will want to link to CorporateUrl.com/funnyvideo.com from their web space?

To overcome this, you might consider creating a custom domain solely for the purpose of the video, an example being http://www.willitblend.com/ (which Ciaran Norris featured in his excellent SMX presentation) as users will probably feel more comfortable linking to you on this custom site rather than its ‘corporate’ big brother. Once the video has generated some traffic and backlinks you can always 301 redirect the custom domain to a new page of your corporate site.

Creating a concept:
If social spaces are to be social and existing viral content is either informative, thought provoking or hilarious then don’t forget to use these rules to your full advantage. In these spaces there isn’t a great deal of room for blatant business and sales, but this doesn’t mean you can’t get a message across.
Now, whilst I mentioned about keeping the video on an external domain, you might also consider creating the video external to the business, for example in the eyes of a customer, a new staff member or perhaps something unrelated altogether… think about the Cadbury drumming Gorilla advert?

The best strategy for increasing the exposure of your video:
Harnessing the major video sharing engines including YouTube and Blinkx is an excellent method of generating exposure to your video, but pay particular attention to your keyword research when selecting the title, description and tags for your video.

In addition, if you want to create traffic and backlinks to your website (or wherever you have hosted the video outside of YouTube) then why not only upload a short clip or trailer of your video to sites like YouTube along with the location URL of your full video so that users can view the full video or ‘find out more’.

In short, the aim of the trailer seeks to excite the user to find out more and, like a traditional trailer, should not give the punch line away.

In conclusion:
Creating video content doesn’t have to cost the earth, but, if executed properly, it can potentially lead to increased levels of traffic, brand exposure and backlinks. In the age of increasing social networking and indeed social time on the web it’s certainly not a tool to ignore, but that’s not to say it is suitable for every business.

Although not a marketers himself I think Charles Darwin provides an excellent point to conclude this post when considering exploiting new tools in marketing for the SME client in that:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”


For further information on the subject: be sure to check out:

1. searchenginejournal.com
2. doshdosh.com
3. logodesignworks.com
4. toprankblog.com

Search Tip of the Week (10)

This week we thought that we would give you our top 6 tips for submitting a press release online.

Submitting your press releases online can give you instant exposure to numerous journalists, get you featured in online news portals and increase the number of relevant links to your site.

However it is important that you don't just take your offline press releases and submit them online as they are. There are a number of ways you can tailor them to suit the online realm.

1) Select a few search terms related to both your company and release that you would like your site/press release to rank for.

2) Make sure you select an online press release submission service that allows you to place hyperlinks within the copy.

3) Build those terms into the main copy of your release and if possible hyperlink them through to the relevant page on your site (not just the home page.

4) Build your most important search term into the title of your release. This is because you will find that in most cases that title text will be the text that is used in th title eof the web page your release will be found on. This will help it to show for relevant searches on news port.

5) Make sure you have your full contact details within your release. It may be obvious but some online submission services dont have the facility to add them to your release separately and you want to make sure that journalists and bloggers can contact you easily.

6) Make sure the online submission service you select not only get automatically spidered by the major news portals, but is also proactive in sending your release to relevant journalists and bloggers.

If you want a bit more useful advice on press releases and how to write them go to samplepressrelease.info.

Alternatively for an extensive, focussed and quick press release distribution service try Daryl Wilcox Publishing

62% of small UK businesses not willing to invest in search!

I spotted an interesting post over at Clickz towards the end of last week concerning small businesses in the UK and their reluctance to embrace search marketing. A recent survey commissioned by Microsoft adCentre and conducted by Vanson Bourne shows that British businesses are wasting around £3billion on websites which have little or no search engine presence. Despite the fact that 76% of businesses who have embraced search marketing report an increase in sales (what's happening with the other 24%- arrghhh!), a whopping 62% of small businesses in the UK are not willing to make the jump.

The report cites three main reasons for this, which I will attempt to counter:

44% cited that search marketing is too time consuming!
If you plan on managing search marketing internally then this is a fair comment. There tends to be a presumption that search marketing, albeit time consuming, is pretty straightforward and therefore time is the only issue. Wrong! Search marketing requires a broad range of skills (I would argue a broader mix than any other form of marketing) ranging from copy writing to technical. If a small business owner expects to be able to learn and apply these skills effectively, no doubt with limited resource, then I agree that it would be time consuming. That is why search marketing agencies are here; to develop strategies for clients that do indeed require some input from the client but not nearly so much as the time required to learn and manage in-house. For me, time is therefore not an excuse if you are prepared to take advantage of the wealth of search marketing talent available in the UK by outsourcing.

55% said it is too expensive!
The investment required for a properly implemented search engine marketing strategy is often minimal compared with the more traditional forms of offline marketing and also promise a far higher return.

I acknowledge that costs are rising as online competition does likewise, especially for Paid Search. I have previously discussed, what I believe to be, a closing window of opportunity for very small businesses due to the rising costs of Paid Search and increased complexity of SEO. However, there is a way to go yet before we get there.

Search engine marketing costs should be put into context against two things; in comparison with offline marketing methods and in terms of ROI. Small business owners should consider these two factors carefully before declaring that search marketing is too expensive.


33% said it is too complicated!
Yes, search marketing does have a degree of complexity about it but only if you plan on managing search in-house, which as I pointed out above would be time consuming to learn and difficult to implement effectively as a small business owner. Small businesses are usually restricted by two things; time or money or both. If time is the issue then outsource search marketing. The result; you do not need to understand the complexities of search. As long as you have a broad overview, a business plan, a clear set of objectives and a means of measuring return, do you really need to understand the 'nitty gritty'. Compare it to an offline campaign; if you take out an advert in the local press, do you ask the supplier about the machinery on which it was was printed, it what ink, how long it took, etc? No! So, if you are outsourcing search marketing, which I would suggest is the better option for small to medium sized businesses, it is my view that complexity should not come into it; you pay an agency to worry about the real techie stuff; the rest of it is solid marketing practice applied in a relatively new and exciting environment - online.

In summary, the current level of waste is pretty astounding. If your site is currently contributing to the £3billion being wasted it's time to take a step back and ask yourself what purpose your site is there to serve, whilst opening up to the possibilities that search presents.

Search Marketing Word of the Week (13)

It's late on Friday afternoon and a cold pint of Guinness is calling so I'm going to keep this pretty quick!!

Our word, or in actual fact, phrase of the week is...

'On the page'

So what does it mean? Well, search engine optimisation can be loosely broken down into two main parts; what you do to the website itself ('on the page') and what you do away from the website to increase its exposure ('off the page'). I'll explain...

'On the page' covers how the actual website is optimised both technically and in terms of content. Therefore, coding, navigation, URLs, Meta tags, copy and more recently the optimisation of 'rich' media content, such as video and audio are covered by 'on the page' optimisation. A good SEO will also focus upon usability as part of this process.

On the other hand, 'off the page' SEO incorporates a number of different techniques aimed at increasing the number of visitors to a website, not just by ranking high in the ‘natural’ search engine results but also through other means, such as links on other good quality, relevant sites, activity in social media (blogs, forums, etc) and online PR.

Have a marvelous weekend!

Search Made Simple (Part 1)

"Life is like a box of chocolates". I think Forrest Gump hit the nail on the head with this one. The beauty of using symbolism and metaphors to help explain complicated things like life, is that they help the everyday folk rationalise and understand things they usually wouldn't be able to relate to.

This has inspired my new series on the Froggblog labeled "search made simple". Can I simplify search so that even Forrest would understand? Feel free to comment on my posts and suggest analogies that would better describe the concepts I am trying to explain.

As a senior account manager here at Leapfrogg I am constantly coming up with metaphors and symbolism that I feel will help clients understand why we are making recommendations and the value that the recommendations will bring.

My first analogy this week is one that I have used since my first days in the industry to help clients understand the problems caused by changing URL's, a problem that seems to be more prevalent with the rise of more sophisticated content management systems.

"URL's are like telephone numbers". If you change even 1 digit, the search engine will no longer be able to get through!

This may be oversimplified but it has the desired effect. We have worked with many clients who have changed their URL's just a bit and then can’t understand why their rankings have dropped. The key point to address is that even the presence of a forward slash at the end of a URL can cause search engines all sorts of problems and in essence damage your campaign.

Imagine changing your telephone number and not telling anyone. Those people dialing your old number will be getting a dead line and eventually will give up calling.

To search engines URL's are the telephone numbers of a page. If you don't tell them the URL has changed they will simply drop that URL from their index so that they don't keep dialing a dead line. They may find the content on the new URL, however this will be treated as a brand new page.

Like your own telephone number, only change it if you really have to. If you do change your URL's make sure you tell the search engines that the page has moved by using a 301 redirect.

I have had the same mobile number for the last ten years. This has nothing to do with SEO, it just makes my life easier.

Image courtesey of Wikipedia

The Froggblog in 2008!

The Froggblog has made great strides in the last few months. But we know it can be better. Therefore, we had a long and fruitful meeting yesterday to discuss where we believe we currently sit in the 'blogosphere' and where we want to be in 2008. So here goes...

First and foremost, identity. Is it completely clear who the blog is aimed at? We certainly know but what about our readers and potential readers? Well, we specialise in providing search engine marketing solutions for small to medium sized companies. It therefore only makes sense that we blog about search engine marketing from this angle. We want to help small business owners to grasp the basics of search with regular 'tit bits', advice and information, whilst also providing commentary, aimed at the industry, covering our thoughts on the latest trends and developments. So the first change we made was to the blogs' introduction:

'Search engine marketing advice for SME’s – from your side of the pond!

A virtual lily pad of thoughtful tit bits, advice and observations by dedicated professionals.'

Secondly, personality. We want you to get to the know the 'Froggers!'; their unique personalities, their role within the Leapfrogg team, their experiences, the challenges they face, their ideas and points of view.

So next up, out came the camera, make up on(!!?) and pictures taken. No doubt you have noticed our mugshots just to the right hand side...what a pretty lot we are eh?

In addition, each of the contributors to the blog are going to provide more detail in their profiles about themselves and their role within the organisation. We want each team member to contribute to the blog by coming at it from their specific angle. By understanding each of the Froggers unique skills we hope our readers will know where to turn for specific information.

So for example, Simon is our link building and social media man; keep a look out for his regular, rather tongue in cheek diary of a link builder posts. Suzanne loves anything to do with usability, Amelia is our PPC Manager, Andrew heads the SEO team and Christos, as our Senior Account Manager, faces the daily challenge of ensuring that our clients grasp the often confusing and ever-evolving theories in search marketing. He's great with analogies so expect some rather interesting, and often amusing, posts. Claire will soon be moving from account management to our SEO team; she'll be telling you all about her experiences as an SEO trainee when she starts her new role in the New Year.

And what about the Directors? Well Rosie, the MD, is one of the few female owners of a search engine marketing agency we know. As well as sharing with you her vast knowledge with regular tips of the week she'll tell you all about the challenges of managing a company which has seen growth of 780% in the last four years!

And me...Ben...well as Sales Director, alongside the odd regular post, such as 'word of the week', I'll share with you my thoughts on many different search related subjects. Its worth noting, I like the occasional moan so if something winds me up I'll vent my anger on the blog!

The main objective in 2008 is to show you the extent of our knowledge across all areas of search engine marketing whilst also demonstrating our down to earth nature. We think there are one or two out there who take search engine marketing, and their opinions, just a little too seriously. The Froggblog is here to lighten the mood, whilst providing advice, ideas, and opinions all with the small to medium sized company in mind.

So expect plenty of change around these parts in the coming weeks and months. Roll on 2008!

SEM & SEO Pies

I came across this great graphical representation of the "3 Pillars of SEO and SEM" and wanted to share.

Ian McAnerins pie charts give a nice simple way of looking at and comparing the main factors involved in the paid and natural search engine optimisation of a website.

Search Marketing Word of the Week (12)

It's that time again; each week we pick a term related to search marketing and attempt to explain it; in simple English! No 'mumbo-jumbo' and no long words; just a straightforward explanation!

So without further ado, lets pick a word. This week, I'm going with...

'Cloak'

If you are reasonably new to search and therefore already familiar withe the phrase 'black hat', on hearing the term 'cloak' you might now be convinced that search marketers are more concerned with dressing up like Dracula than marketing websites!!

It's therefore rather apt that 'cloak' is a term most commonly associated with the dark side of search and therefore the black hatters of this world. ' Cloaking' involves delivering different content to the search engine than the content that is visible to the human visitor. Why would you want to do this? Well, cloaking is designed to deceive search engines so that they display a page of content that would not otherwise be displayed. Although there is the odd instance where cloaking is legitimate, it is more commonly used by black hatters to game or manipulate the search engine results.

So, if over the course of the weekend you come across a man dressed from head to toe in black, complete with cloak and hat, tread carefully!! If you're not careful, he'll have your website blacklisted from the search engines quicker than the swoosh of his cloak!!

The Brighton and Hove Web Awards go from strength to strength

A great night was had by all at the annual Brighton & Hove Web Awards last night. The awards are created and hosted by local charity the Sussex Community Internet Project (SCIP) and are part of the Brighton Digital Festival. The month long festival celebrates the city’s reputation as the UK's leading hub for new media with the awards being one of the highlights.

We were once more proud sponsors of the event and with search at the core of our business we were delighted to be judging and presenting the ‘Leapfrogg Searchability Award’ for the forth year running. This special award highlights the prominence of search engine marketing for local website owners. The winning website, Visit Brighton, impressed the Leapfrogg team with pretty solid ‘on the page' optimisation, high link popularity and some movement in to social media activity.

The latter has seen massive growth in the last year. To succeed online, every website owner needs to consider social media in their search marketing strategy. We certainly noticed a higher level of activity, compared to last year, in website owners participation in blogging and distribution of video content, for example; which is great to see.

We would like to add however, that although the standards improve each year, there is a great deal of room for improvement in certain areas, not just for the sites that did not make the shortlist but even for those that did! This reflects the fact the search marketing is an ongoing activity where resource needs to be dedicated to a wide range of disciplines. We therefore hope the award will help to raise awareness of the importance of search and inspire other companies, both locally and nationally, yet to invest their marketing budgets online.

As this once small, low-key event has continued to grow in size and status within Brighton & Hove so too has Leapfrogg. We first presented at the awards four years ago. In this time we have jumped from a team of two to 13, working with many small to medium sized business owners to realise their potential online.

One or two of those staff had rather sore heads this morning as a result of the complimentary wine! Ouch!!

Content v Community

This post is in response to an article regarding "Content is Dead. Community is King" which was recently published by Stoney DeGeyter.

The article quite rightly pointed out that e-commerce sites would benefit if they invested in an infrastructure to support user generated content to discuss, share information, offer reviews and ratings on the products or service. This approach effectively creates a community whereby the article explains there are more opportunities for repeat business rather than a one off sale.


From a search engine optimisation perspective, user generated content which allows visitors to upload reviews and ratings is another method of promoting fresh content which is great news, however, there are caveats, for example, additional infrastructure needs to be in place which is not going to be cheap for many small and medium sized businesses. In addition such forums and reviews need to be policed which requires resource as there is always the possibility a disgruntled customer will use this medium which could have the opposite effect to what you are trying to achieve.

For those e-commerce sites either thinking about redesigning their websites or launching new websites, there is a golden opportunity to design in user generated community around their individual products and services to build communities. All is not lost, however, if there is no opportunity to build such infrastructure, the simple way to do this is to simply add a blog to the main website, this can be done cheaply using blogger or wordpress as examples.

Revisiting the thought that "Content is Dead. Community is King" as far as search engines are concerned, I dont think so! User generated content built into ecommerce stores is another method to add fresh content and by doing so, there are many tangible spin offs including building communities, possible repeat business and gaining link popularity.

Search Tip of the Week (9)

This weeks tip is related to building links. We put our heads together and decided what we think is the MOST important thing to do when conducting a link campaign.

We decided without a doubt it's "Get Personal!"

By this we mean make the effort to contact each webmaster you are trying to set up a link with, with a personal email or telephone call. We put together the following tips

Take the time to find out who the right person is to contact on the site you want to approach for a link.

Address them by name in your email

Don't just send a blanket email, talk about the site, prove you have visited it. Mention specific content on the site that you like

Don't be afraid to do a little sucking up

Follow up email correspondence with a phone call

We often get responses from webmasters saying how nice it is to get a personalised email and how much generic link spam they still get. We get the link because we bothered to make the effort!!!

Remember, treat others how you would be treated yourself!!!!

Search Marketing Word of the Week (11)

As we near the end of another busy week it can mean only one thing...'search marketing word of the week' of course!

This weeks word is...

'Mirror'

No, not the one you look in 'Mr Vain'

Mirror in the context of search marketing relates to an identical website hosted on a different address. So for example, www.site123.com and www.site123.co.uk. In times gone by, and sadly even to this day, search engine 'spammers' have attempted to monopolise the search engine results page (SERP) by creating multiple versions of the same site hosted on different addresses. The search engines got wise to this tactic and although you are unlikely to be penalised for 'mirrored' content, the duplicated sites are almost certainly going to be ignored. And of course, link popularity may well be diluted between the different domains - how is anybody supposed to know which version of the site to link to!!

So, a tip for you. Create one site, on one address and if you happen to own variations of the domain, ensure you point them at the main site.

Until next time, have a wonderful weekend!

Why web writers should support the Hollywood writers strike

Well apart from the fact that if it wasn't for the last time the writers guild of America went on strike back in 1988, we wouldn't have the deeply thought provoking and unscripted series Cops, with its catchy little theme tune.."Bad boys, bad boys,whatcha guna do.. whatcha guna do when they come for you". Genius, stays in your head all day (a bit like a migraine).

Seriously. Being the armchair freedom fighter that i am, i have to applaud any show of strength by the thinking community that doesn't involve tear gas, especially one that has the power to stop the American media machine dead in their tracks. Imagine flexing your creative muscles and causing a ripple that topples the likes of Lost or the West Wing. That's pretty impressive stuff and for me it screams the importance of content as loud as most of us SEO consultants do. Like ABC, the Internet would be nothing without the power of words.

There is a lot of talk about Americans turning from TV to the web, when their favourite shows are simply not aired or the standard of writing slumps, due to the horrible deadlines imposed on remaining writers. Techcrunch have said in their article about the walk out that "Users are already choosing online entertainment over TV. Giving content creators of all levels their chance to shine". The Internet world stats site stated that out of a world population of 6,574,666,417, 18.93% use the web, that's pretty impressive.

The Nielson Company begged to differ in their Press release "Television Tune in is at record levels", Nielson stated that the American house holder watches approx 8 hours of television a day. Patrica McDonough Senior Vice President of planning and policy at Neilson said "Television clearly remains a very important part of daily life in the United states". The Newyork Times published the Neilson statistics, and added that it was easy with all the buzz surrounding social networking sites and You tube video for web procrastinates to label TV as an antiquated medium. My favorite comment came from Robert Thompson from Syracuse University, also mentioned in the article, who voiced his opinion on TV versus Web, saying "The idea that somehow, because we have the Internet, everybody is moving to 'viewer generated video' - cats playing pianos - instead of watching professional high budget sorts of stuff, it just isn't true".

I do feel that this view point is born out of either defense of one media or another, or simple confusion, but for what ever reason a whole host of intelligent people are misinterpreted the idea of the scope of the Internet. It is almost like they imagine Google exec's wondering around wearing sandwich boards announcing that the "END IS NIGH - the Internet will one day replace television FOREVER". I agree that it is idiotic to expect the world population to tune into a chihuahua swimming in T-cup instead of watching their favourite episode of Lost, but i would expect people to perhaps switch off the TV and indulge in another pass time that the web has on offer, i.e: debate, chatting, blogging, downloading music and pod casts etc, because they wish to wake up out of their semi coma existence and get involved. I have inserted Martha Stewart's favourite piano playing cat Nora with some contemporary Bach, for your None TV viewing pleasure.I did like one comment on techcrunch by Dave R regarding the writers walk out, he asked "Who did they get to write the Picit signs". Good point Dave, maybe it was Nora. "Go Writers of America, GO. Oh and with all this free time, could you possibly devote some time to working on a new drama about two otters holding hands please"

How to Link and delete analytics from your Google Adwords account

I have just managed to link a working analytics account to a clients Google PPC account. This might sound pretty straight forward, but not when your clients PPC account already has an analytics attached that isnt in use, and they have another analytics account which is already full of data and needs to be added. Inspired by Simon's somewhat incestuous post about Link love i thought I’d also share the love.
Ok firstly Log into your client account at https://adwords.google.co.uk and click on the analytics tab then:


1) If you do not have an Analytics account;

• click the Continue button to sign up for one - DONE

2) If you already have an Analytics account;

• Click I already have a Google Analytics account.



• Select the name of the Analytics account you would like to link to from the drop-down list



• Keep the checkboxes selected on this page, unless you are sure that you would like to disable auto-tagging and cost data imports.



• Click Link Account and the accounts are linked - DONE

3) If you find that there is an analytics account attached, BUT there is no data in there and the code is showing as not verified.

• Check your client site contains the same analytics code as the empty analytics account. If it is the same then the client should check if it is set-up properly and this should then start logging data.



• If the code on the clients site isn’t the same as the code in the analytics account;



• Call your client and asked them if they have access to the other analytics account,



• If they do, get them to set your personal Gmail address as an administrator or get the login to set it up yourself



• Once you are an administrator, log in to the clients analytics with your Gmail address and password



• Add the email used to access the Ad words account and copy it into the Users with access to profile section in the analytics account as an administrator in the analytics account and save it.



• To delete the empty analytics account;



• Call your Google customer service and ask them to delete the empty analytics account from the PPC account, as you can’t do this manually.



• Once you get an email saying this is done



• Log in to your Ad Words account at https://adwords.google.co.uk.



• Click the Analytics tab.


Click I already have a Google Analytics account.


• From the Existing Google Analytics Account drop-down list, select the name of the Analytics account you would like to link to *.



• Keep the checkboxes selected on this page, unless you are sure that you would like to disable auto-tagging and cost data imports.



• Click Link Account - DONE

Hope this explanation makes perfect sense!

Search Marketing Word of the Week (10)

I'm a little short on time this week (a trip to Ikea beckons...arrgggghhhh) so I'm going to have ignore my urges to add some wit to this post and crack right on...

Letter please frogg...

K

OK, k is for keyword...

A keyword or phrase that a person using a search engine types into the search box.

Uhm, not much more I can add to that.

Until next week...

The 'holy grail' of search - regularly updated content

When was the last time you added something new to your website, perhaps an article, a white paper, an updated product description or some latest news?

Regularly adding to and updating the existing content on your website is integral to your search engine marketing efforts for a number of reasons, the main being concerned with your target audience. Fresh, unique and relevant content encourages repeat visits to your site whilst also building trust within your community.

We always advise our SME clients that the 'holy grail' for their search marketing efforts is to be considered THE 'authority' in their field. By this we mean the most trusted resource for information within their market.

This is relevant to even those clients in a B2C environment where historically the main objective has been solely to sell their products online. One way in which you can build trust in your brand, your products and your website is by going the extra mile and adding good quality content, such as more detailed descriptions, product reviews and buying guides.

This leads to a richer user experience and therefore a more informed purchasing decision can be taken. The number of people purchasing products online is growing by the year but there remains a massive segment of society who are nervous about buying online for a whole myriad of reasons but nearly all of them stem from trust. By adding good quality content to your website you can help to bridge the gap and encourage those that may be visiting your site, especially for the first time, that your products are of good quality and that you can be trusted.

At the end of the day you can optimise your site all you like, build links, participate in social media and so on but if visitors coming to your website do not have trust in you, all of these efforts are wasted because quite simply they will not buy from you! In my view those sites that simply offer a product or service and nothing more will find themselves lagging behind in the coming months and years. The sites that are most successful will be those that look to offer something more; something of real value, over and above the normal 'call of duty'.

Another benefit of regularly updated content is concerned with the search engines themselves. It is very difficult to quantify to what degree fresh content specifically aids search engine rankings. However, it is generally accepted that search engines favour sites where content is dynamic and fresh over those sites where content is 'stale' and added to very rarely.

Saying all of this, for many small businesses, finding the time to regularly add fresh content to your website can be difficult. However, there are tools and companies out there that can help.

We have recently begun partnering with SelectNews from PA Business (part of the The Press Association) to offer our clients a tailored newsfeed service. PA Business work with our clients in defining their specific requirements and in devising a tailored news brief. This in-depth brief is taken by a group of dedicated PA editors who write bespoke news articles which are then fed to a clients site at regular intervals throughout the day by ftp or email. By sharing our expertise in SEO, and in particular keyword research, PA can tag content by topic or keyword and incorporate links to internal or external site pages.

The vast majority of news content across the Internet is syndicated; in other words it is replicated across hundreds, perhaps thousands of other sites. The beauty of the service from SelectNews is that the content is unique to each clients site.

This dynamic service ensures sites remain fresh and unique, furthermore increasing the number of new visitors and encouraging repeat visits. In turn, the service aids online brand development as customers come to know and trust that the latest industry developments can be obtained by visiting the site.

This is just one way (and I would like to add a pretty cost-effective way) of regularly adding new content to your website. For most SME's participating in these activities comes down to two factors; time and money. Either there is not enough internal resource to research and write content on a regular basis or budget means that only the most essential of online tactics can be adopted. However, regularly updated content, in its many forms, will only become more and more integral in differentiating the good sites from the ordinary ones.

Therefore, consider finding the time or resource to dedicate to the holy grail of search; content. It could be a key factor in you surviving growing online competition.

P.S. You can read more about our partnership with SelectNews in the recent press release.