Warren Knight

This blog post gives some quick tips and advice for SEO-newbies into how blogging can be used to optimise the SEO of your website.

Some SEO basics

• – Google loves content

• – Google loves relevant content

• – Google loves well-structured content

• – Google loves very focused content

• – Google loves content that is loved by other people (i.e. content that is linked to)

• – Google loves content that is loved by popular people

• – Google loves content that is connected to other popular people

What this means when you blog – 11 tips on optimising for SEO

• 1) Write content that is very focused and relevant.

• 2) Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title – always thinking “what terms / question / phrase would someone search for?”  For example, if you’re wanting to target keen bloggers, then they’re always interested in finding out “how to optimise the seo of my blog” – so give it as the title of your post!

• 3) Make sure that the link of the blog post (which is often auto-generated from the title of the blog post) contains the relevant search terms.

• 4) Make sure the opening paragraph repeats those key phrases – as the opening 30 or so words are the ones are judged as being particularly important.

• 5) Make sure you you link key words / phrases in your blog, to key pages in your site.  For example if you write “Viral seeding is an effective way to gain brand awareness“.  Link the words “Viral seeding” to the relevant page in your site you’re trying to optimise.

• 6) Keep repeating key phrases and terms throughout the blog post, and remember to do the relevant linking.  Don’t go over board though – as this may look like SPAM to Google’s bots.

• 7) Include other relevant content in your blog posting – so maybe include a relevant YouTube video, or post a relevant (and tagged) image.  This all adds to the richness and relevance of the blog.

• To show your blog post is connected and influential, drop is some links to other more influential sites.  e.g. You may link to the Brand Republic site, if you’re talking about advertising – to indicate that you’re connected to other sites.

• 9) Once you’ve written your blog, make sure it’s linked to by other sites.  N.B. the more influential the site linking to you, the better.  So for example, Digg the blog via Digg.com, or link to the blog from another blog – e.g. the Team Rubber blog.  To do this you might do a weekly blog round up of the best Team Rubber postings.  You should also obviously Tweet the post – to optimise the opportunity for the blog being picked up by others.

• 10) Finally – remember to write interestingly and well.  After all, much of the success of your blog post will be down to the how people enjoy and share your blog / content.  If people think it’s great, then they’ll do the link sharing for you!

• 11) Finally #2 – consider how someone might find your post out of context, and make sure it ends with the right kind of call to action – e.g. you might write an end line along the lines of “If you’re interested in this, then you may be interested in the Social Commerce, which provides great fun ads for the best blogs and sites.

Warren Knight thanks http://www.viraladnetwork.ne

A first look behind the registration screen of Snappy Tuna, a sleek new private shopping club which is planned to go live in April:

More on this exciting startup concept after the launch.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo

Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment in the IT industry and is viewed by companies as a viable, cost-efficient way to address some of their most important needs. But what can it do for you?

Document management, security or knowledge sharing, the cloud seems to be the Holy Grail to IT professionals. But one word that’s rarely associated with cloud computing is marketing, and as a marketer, you might be questioning the relevance to you. What have technical infrastructure and architecture got to do with marketing?

Marketing is one of the last functional areas within large organisations to adopt technology and leverage its benefits. But at the same time, marketing is under ever increasing pressure to fulfil a more strategic role in delivering the company’s success: driving revenues, decreasing costs (do more with less) and being accountable. It’s ripe for marketing automation, and while traditionally marketing organisations have spent less than 1 per cent of their budget on technology, today that figure is closer to 3 per cent and growing rapidly.

And this brings us back to cloud computing. Marketing automation software is no longer a nice to have, and for organisations that plan to remain competitive as we head into the future, it’s an absolute must.

What is the ‘cloud’?

Simply put, the ‘cloud’ is just another word for the internet. Cloud computing comprises services and applications that are hosted and accessed through the internet. All the computing infrastructure and intelligence (software applications, data and servers) are owned and managed by a third party remotely and accessed via the internet using a web browser. Google Mail is a good example of cloud computing. You access your email via your web browser. Email is stored ‘in the cloud’ and you don’t need to download any software.

Then within cloud computing, you have software-as-a-service, or SaaS, where a software company provides an application to customers as a service (as opposed to a product), on demand, delivered via the cloud

Why should SaaS matter to marketers?

Many of the new CRM and marketing automation software vendors operate via a SaaS model of delivery. Aprimo is a perfect example. Its marketing studio software solution enables marketers to more effectively manage marketing workflows, assets, campaigns and suppliers. And this is delivered via the SaaS model, which make perfect sense for marketers. Here are four reasons why:

1. It’s cost-effective, flexible and easily accessible

You are no longer dependent on the annual capital spending plan to expand your digital technology capabilities. Nor are you hamstrung by the 18-month queue of IT projects. Today your strategies and tactics can be automated and enabled by selecting the right platform and tools in the cloud. The applications are subscription-based, allowing companies to pay only for what they need, and no licence fee means that initial costs are lower. The SaaS provider also manages the infrastructure, which decreases marketing’s reliance on an already over-extended IT department and it also means lower total cost of ownership.

2. It gets you to market fast

The speed with which SaaS solutions can be deployed is extremely useful to marketers. A SaaS deployment should be complete in weeks, not months or years as is standard for traditional software deployments. Time to productivity is fast, and the marketers see returns on short term horizons — months, not years.

3. It’s less risky

Compared to the fast pace with which marketers (and their customers) operate, traditional IT departments can often feel agonizingly slow to respond. IT departments tend to be cautious about entering into agreements with a ‘new’ vendor because of additional hardware costs, software license issues, etc. So lines of business must work hard to convince the powers that be that any new investment is worthwhile. And this could take some time and often, the one thing a marketer does not have is time. That’s why the SaaS model offers a lot of potential to marketers.

Because there’s no software to download, no software licensing to negotiate and the IT infrastructure is taken care of, it’s much easier for the marketer to make a business case to the IT guys for giving it a try. It’s flexible, easier to escape from, has a lower cost and, overall, is a lower risk option for the organisation.

4. It’s automatically updated

And when it comes to upgrades of the software it’s all managed by the provider. New releases and feature enhancements are deployed centrally which means that users of SaaS-based applications can always be certain that they are using the latest version of the software. No precious time needs to be wasted rolling out new versions.

Warren Knight thanks imediaconnection

Skittles has been anything but skittish toward social media marketing over the last year. The 35-year-old confectionary brand has been building its Facebook presence dramatically, exceeding 4 million “fans” earlier this month. That’s good for third place among all U.S. consumer brands, trailing only Starbucks’ 6 million and Coca Cola’s 5 million.

Just last year, Skittles made headlines for its plunge into social media on Twitter. In March 2009, the brand began using an unfiltered Twitter search as its homepage – abandoning its existing Web site – to appeal to young, social-media-minded consumers. Many in the industry characterized the move as either daring or intriguing, while others lamented that it was copying a similar ploy by ad agency Modernista.

At the time, offensive comments littered the Twitter feed, prompting Skittles to move its homepage over to Facebook. That location didn’t last long either, as the brand – owned by McLean, VA-based Mars Inc. – subsequently moved its homepage to other social sites.

The erratic activity actually helped build an ongoing buzz last year that surfaced on Facebook more than anywhere else. The brand increased its presence on the social site from around 600,000 fans, pre-Twitter-experiment, to 3.5 million by 2009′s end.

During the fourth quarter, Brooklyn, NY-based agency Big Spaceship was charged with building a new Skittles.com – which went live in December. The re-launched site, centered on the theme, “Experience the Rainbow,” includes an unusually long vertical scroll that features a stream of images against colorful backgrounds that reinforce the theme. Visitors are repeatedly encouraged to become a Facebook fan or Twitter follower. Big Spaceship also created a micro-site, ShareSkittles.com, that promotes YouTube video sharing as well as signing up for the brand at Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, Skittles only has around 900 Twitter followers.

But since January, 600,000 Facebook fans have been added, bringing the total to 4.1 million. While the social-minded Web site and micro-site likely deserve credit, promotions most definitely do. Skittles has run Facebook-only offers like giving fans a 2-for-1 voucher for the candy, helping the brand pick up an extra 100,000 fans in the last 10 days alone.

“There’s an overall sense of velocity in the digital space that this brand has, as a result of the activities we have collaborated on,” said Michael Lebowitz, CEO for Big Spaceship.

By “we,” Lebowitz was also referring to agencies Evolution Bureau and Firstborn. The three boutiques took over digital advertising after Skittles decided to replace Omnicom agencies Agency.com and Tribal DDB, as well as Publicis Worldwide’s Digitas last fall.

Collectively, Lebowitz suggested, the trio has been charged with keeping the ever-increasing number of fans engaged. To that end, the Skittles team authors posts every day, which usually produce several comments from fans each hour.

Sometimes, the posts have a transparent marketing purpose. A new product was introduced on its fan page on March 22, while reading: “The new Skittles have spoken! They call themselves Fizzl’d Fruits. And they do that fizzy, tingly thing to your tongue. Have you seen them?” Around 600 fans responded with comments in the following 24 hours, while 1,300 more tapped the “like” button.

Yet the brand appears to be better served, at times, by fun-oriented engagement posts. Playing off its “Experience the Rainbow,” theme, one post reads: “Writing a bluegrass hip hop song. What rhymes with Rainbow?” It produced 1,600 comments and more than 650 “likes” over a few days last week.

As brands get more sophisticated on Facebook, though, daily engagement posts and special offers may not be enough to keep people’s attention, suggested Daniel Stein, CEO of Evolution Bureau in San Francisco. He said that’s why the brand has been trying to engage fans by taking social media offline with Facebook-exclusive videos called “Mob The Rainbow.”

The first video (3-minutes long) ran the day after Valentine’s Day, when a production crew snuck up on an unsuspecting meter maid with Valentine’s Day cards and, of course, Skittles. The meter maid was selected after the brand asked fans to send in supposedly lonely-hearted candidates for the video. Once the person was chosen, “fans” were asked to mail in actual Valentine’s Day cards for the event.

“We had 45,000 people sign up to be part of the event in a couple of days,” Stein said. “On Valentine’s Day, we went out and found the [selected] woman with a van that was decked out with Skittles stickers all over it. We had a team of merry pranksters who jumped out of the van and delivered the Valentine’s Day cards to the meter maid. We edited the video and got it up the next day…We plan to do [the video series] for another six months to a year.”

How important is video to a brand’s social media strategy? Two brands with a comparable number of fans to Skittles have not relied on video to build their followings. Photos – and not videos – have been consistently uploaded by the Facebook fans of Nutella, a hazelnut spread with 3.7 million fans on its official page. And potato chips brand Pringles, which has nearly 3.1 million fans, has sporadically used videos to engage its audience on the social site. It has posted six videos so far this year – but didn’t add one during the last five months of 2009.

Warren Knight says You can follow Christopher Heine on Twitter at @ChrisClickZ. www.clickz.com

Lastminute.com co-founder Fox is calling on brands to promote the Pass IT On campaign, which encourages those already online to convince someone they know to get on the web through initiatives such as local help centres.

The drive comes after a PricewaterhouseCoopers report said the economic benefit of the entire UK population being online would be £22bn.

Fox said, “The companies are coming together to help get all those not currently using the internet online, specifically people who are the most hard to reach and the most socially and economically disadvantaged.”

Moneysupermarket will provide help and guidance for first-time users near its North Wales offices, including running training programmes for people in the local community.

Fox added companies must be more basic in their approach to how they promote the benefits of online, with many people still nervous about using the web.

“Saying ’Talk to friends for free’ or ’See TV shows after they’ve be on telly’ simply explains the benefits,” she said.

Moneysupermarket CEO Peter Plumb agreed that simplifying messages was an important approach. “We’re making access to the Pass IT On content highly visible on the site as well as working locally,” he said. “If we can support getting new people online that can only be a good thing for the industry.”

Last year Ofcom’s UK Adults Media Literacy interim report found 41% of households with adults aged 65 and over had internet access, compared with 26% in 2007 (nma.co.uk 15 October 2009).

More information can be found at Race Online 2012.

Warren Knight thanks www.nma.co.uk