Online PR UK & Expert SEO

As a SEO’er you constantly hear about how easy it is to get demoted on the search rankings.

The ususal story is:

• Don’t put your links into irrelevant directories
• Don’t suddenly show up with 20,000 new links overnight
• Keep away from link farms
• Dont submit to 50,000 search engines
• Keep the link text relevant to the site

So if you do this, you will get demoted. Since link farms are cheap to link from, crap irrelevant sites with footer links are cheap to get links from and of course putting in the ‘wrong’ link text is easy, you can see how simple it is to do warfare on a given site.

Some interesting further reading from Forbes

Hmmm…. all a bit ugly really.

The good news…IE 7 sticks to the CSS rules pretty well as does firefox. The bad news, IE6 is a dog on CSS compatability.

Having looked through my logs its clear that users arent migrating the new imporved IE7 like they should. So when you build a site, annoyingly , you have to factor in the laggers.

Stats from: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

To help you get around this pain in the neck situation, you need to see your site in development on IE6 - the problem is that Microsoft don’t let you run the ie7 +6 side by side unless…. you have a standalone version of IE6

check evolt.org for standalone ‘old school’ IE browsers 

or use this online browser compatability tool if you cant be bothered to download and install a new browser on you PC

I have heard about this before - the trick where you can see the previous sites a user has been on, before coming to your site.  But now I see there is a tool which can organise this information in a coherent way.

By the way, in case you get upset and scream privacy ! ! ! bear in mind companies like hitwise, comscore and nielson net ratings, sell this data for an absurd amount of money to businesses so they can work out ‘user site pathways’.

I hav’nt tried this tool yet, but I will (not here) but on a big’ish commercial site I work on. My understanding where users have been before my site, I can then either target them from an SEO point of view i.e. rank where they do, or get some advertising on these sites

The tool in question is Spyjax

SEO and Online PR are part of the same discipline. If you are promoting a particular agenda or product, then getting the right kind of visability is core to your PR strategy. Here are my 4 big points on doing well on the search engines:

1. Neilson Net ratings said that 36% of online users think that 1st result in the search rankings means that company is the BEST company.

2. You may remember the accidential release of AOL’s user data? these were the amazing results from Jim Boykin’s analysis:n (the big number is volume of clicks on the data sample) 42% if users click No1 result, 11% No2 and 8.5% No3. It pays to be No1.

% of clicks
Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%

1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%

3. We assume natural search listings are neutral i.e. they are the most relevant they can be. Therefore asking a search engine a question is like asking a friend ‘what is your opinion’ - if you can influence this process, you are influencing the ‘friend to friend’ interactions of millions of people.

4. Where do journalists & Bloggers go for information? Yes, the internet. Be 1st in the right key phrase territories and you get into their mind space.

That is why i really believe SEO is simply a subset of online PR both here in the UK and internationally.

I’ve been setting up a big’ish SEO campaign and ive been doing some planning. Part of that is to get a good keyword list that is profitable. So on the basis that affiliates are the most commercially agressive, ive been looking for a tool which shows me the footprint of any given affiliate.

The footprint is the keywords they rank for.

So ive been looking through SEOBook.com and in this post, I found:

 SEODigger.com (find the keywords competitors rank on)

urltrends.com  (get a handle on how competitor site are building links etc over time)

Having looked at several sites, SEODigger looks really useful. Why? because it means I can pick off certain targets and keywords I hadn’t thought of before. Interestingly, if i run the info through my copy of TheDowser, which uses yahoo search volume data and through google adwords keyword finder, i can get my head around the search volumes and relative competitiveness of certain keywords.

The main point is that when you come across a very aggressive competitor who you know has a ton of SEO resource, by using SEODigger, you can see their footprint very easily. Assuming they are in the same space as you, you can be fairly sure those keywords are worth money.

Once you have a target, its easier to hit it !

Huuuuggggeeee rainstorm with hail, (in pic) making the streets look like there has been a fresh dump of snow. See video. and BBC slideshow Bizzarre.