Online PR UK & Expert SEO

These links are stuff I come across as I cruse the internet looking or knowledge!

Bridging the Designer-User Gap (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
“If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “
The point? Never over estimate intelligence!

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites:
Get into the top 5 or you’re in the wilderness

Public Relations: The Other Important PR In Link Development
Yes for those of you who in the link building business, who have been hiding under a rock… its about PR these days (mixed in with good SEO) and link begging doesn’t work anymore. So this article goes into some basic ideas on PR’ing your link building

The ultimate open source SEO tool
Its good - perhaps not ultimate. I’ve asked my SEO crew to check it out and they didn’t go crazy. However for me the interesting bit is how they leverage the Yahoo API. I wantto initiate a project where we use the API to do help usget related pages ‘from a search engine perspective’

Microsoft Discovers You Are Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon
If you have read ‘6 degrees of separation’ then you will be into the whole social interconnectivity thing on the internet. In essence, the world is a small place and sites like linked in, facebook, bebo and so on demonstrate this well. Its use? probably in hiring well connected online PR guys to dig into their networks to get links !

15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks
Some good stuff here. I just go around in circles on this stuff. I don’t know how to make money out of it.The core issue is the lack of commercial intent with the vast majority of this traffic. I guess the relevant part for me is keeing in touch with the cultural shift this has initiated. Its all a little like cluretrain V2 playing out

12 Reputations Every Company Should Monitor Online
Reputation management is a growing tide on the internet. If you’re in a sector where online matters, then keeping your ear to the internet wire make sense. The problen with reputation management online is that there are very few filters between an idiot with a grudge and a well informed opinion. its easy for the idiot to make noise in the right place and BANG - you have a problem. And I haven’t touched on negative PR using SEO!

Study: 80-Percent Of Searches Are Informational, 10% Are Navigational
What does this mean commercially? well 80% of the time users are building a background picture of you. 10% of the time they want to transact once they are confidant about you. (the other 10% is where they know where they are going i.e. looking for a regularly visited site/brand search)

This is why a strategy I employ for my lovely employers works soooooo well. have a really good informational site, where there is no pressure to ‘CLICK HERE NOW, JOIN NOW, FREE MONEY NOW’ - you read, understand we care about what we do and when you’re ready, join and we will give you some free money. It works beautifully and this article endorses this principle.

Psychographically Targeted Web Advertising - ClickZ
Whats ‘psychographic’? (from wikipedia) psycho graphic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), and behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty).
I’m sure youve heard about demographic targeting? i.e. pick a social group and assume certain behavioral tendencies. its a nice idea for broadcast media, however for online its really difficult to do demographic targeting. hence this behavioral stuff. By building pathways around user behaviours, you are morelikly to get better conversion rates. Its a huge subject which I won’t get into here, but suffice to say this article gives a small insight into it.

Yahoo’s Quality Score Change Effective Next Week
So Yahoo are stepping in line with Google on PPC quality scoring on ads. Nice idea but I always wonder how you define the ‘quality’ in the scoring. I hate this subjectivity.

Your turn: Readers choose their 10 favorite Windows programs | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
Some old classics like winrar!

11 Tips For Recognizing A Bad SEO Firm | WebProNews
I get asked a lot about microsites…i.e. building them up and getting them to rank. For some reason the idea that they can work persists. So this article just goes through some of the idiocy people actually believe.

Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips
I agree - they are good. Written by a pro in the game, these tips are useful. I particularly like the nofollow comment!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
Another day and another interesting post from Rand. some good pointers on what really counts when it comes to anchor text

http://sphinn.com/story/36595
Yup DaveN keeping the internet clean! He picked up on a campaign by Dell I happen to have been following. I kind of figured it there would be tears in the end - an there were !

http://www.247wallst.com/2008/03/the-twenty-five.html
Does blogging pay? it seems so for a few. I hang out with a couple of big’ish bloggers and they are always moaning about how they can monetize their sites. Usually they default to advertising, which is ok, but inherently does not align well with users about 99.4% of the time. (the click through rate on an ad is about 0.06% typically) I’ve been trying to persuade them to look carefully at affiliate marketing, since in thory it pays better ten ads.

Logo Can Make You ‘Think Different’
evil laugh - HA HA HA HA HA
I’ve always felt that subliminal advertising was very powerful and shrouded in misinformation, so its great to see a useful report on the subject. Does it work? yes but not in the way you think.

YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
More stats to help you feel like you know whats going on.

Link Buying Replaced With Bartering
As this article points out, when you otlaw something and there is a desire to carry on the practice (alcoloh prohibition in the 30’s) all sorts of unforseen things happen. In this case Google’s PR assault on link buying as caused all sorts of interesting activities to emerge, amongst them is impersonating google ad sense ads !
The root of this is that if the liks are placed in the right part of a page (not in header / footer / sidebar) and in ‘context’ then the ‘Algo’ cant see them - so tis down to human judgement, hence this trick with adsense. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing linkbuilding.

18 Or Older To Use Google?
What do gambling porn and horror movies have in common with google? you guessed it - you have to be 18 and over. or in other words to use google, you have to be of an age where you can enter into a legally binding contract!

Hackers and Spammers, How will the industry survive
I have had the pleasure of dealing personally with DaveN and I found him charming and knowledgeable. However i do feel his skills at gaming the engines are becoming less and less effective as the engines get more capable at dealing with spammers. Still he has done well out of it and I hope he continues with his successes in this arena.