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7/20/2009 The golden rule when it comes to social media marketing, as espoused by hundreds of 'social media gurus' (you can tell when someone's a guru because it says so on their Twitter profile), is to "get to know your community". Inspired by The Tipping Point, they'll tell you that there's great gain to be had by "influencing the influencers". And they're ri...
8/14/2008 Earlier today I posted a Tweet encouraging people to 'follow' British tennis player Andy Murray. Andy is currently sending Twitter updates from Beijing where he will soon be competing. This prompted Kevin to blog about h...
6/17/2008 If you've been hanging out on Sphinn recently, or keeping up with the Twitterati, you'll no doubt have heard of Plurk. It's the latest Me 2.0 site, promising a whole new world of micro-blogging, despite sharing many features with Twitter (which, I guess is now officially SOOOO 2007). Muhamma...
5/28/2008 Last week saw the inaugural International Search Summit, organised by Andy Atkins-Kruger's WebCertain. It was hosted to, as the name probably gives away, look at search marketing outside of the US & UK, which so often get all the attention of the industry. It also saw my first assignment as...
2/22/2008 Due to an unavoidable client meeting I had to miss the first session on the final day of SES London 2008; from speaking to a few people it sounds like I missed some good ones, so here's hoping the rest of the day keeps up the quality. Session 2: Dynamic Websites: Beyond The BasicsIf there's such a think as an all-star team in SEO then the panel here p...
2/21/2008 You'll all be glad to know that following yesterday's rather disappointing lunch I went out today, and had calzone at an excellent Italian. The only negative aspect to this is that I'm feeling rather bloated due to all the carbs, and so really need some great presentations to grab my attention. ...
2/21/2008 The second day of SES London 2008 gets underway and with the number of sessions today I just hope that the visitors don't end up with heads as foggy as the weather outside. Whilst I realise that exhibition organisers want to give visitors as much time as possible to check out the exhibitors' stands, but having hours of breaks, and relatively few sessions on day 1, whilst day 2 is almost...
2/19/2008 I'm attending the first day of SES London as an unofficial SEOmoz correspondent. Rather than providing a live-blogging "he said; she said" commentary Rand has asked me to provide overviews & analytic commentary; I'll certainly do my best, but if I end up talking about what I had for my lunch you'll know that Rand got the wrong guy for the job. The day got off to...
2/19/2008 Following the, rather standard (read disappointing), lunch it's straight into an afternoon of high-profile speakers and big topics.All-Star Analytics PanelThe afternoon kicks off with a discussion panel on the subject of analytics and how it will change as mediums such as social media take more & more marketing share. Kevin Ryan puts the audience on side w...
1/30/2008 Here at Altogether Digital we have an SEO team made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and this means that the metaphors we use to explain how we think the search engines work can be very varied. In my case, it means that I often think of the algorithms as being the engines' attempts at replicating a human brain, in so much as they try to predict what a human is likely t...
1/10/2008 I'm sure that many of you will have seen the flurry of posts announcing the winners of Search Engine Journal's Search Industry Award (SEOmoz got an honourable mention in the Best SEO Blog category, which it won last year).Whilst this is obviously great news for all those named, ...
1/7/2008 The British consumer organisation Which? has released the results of an independent assessment which lead to it naming Bebo as the 'best social networking site'. The test was based on factors including:ease of setting up and using the site, the range of features, and the way the site...
11/29/2007 Following Gab's excellent post about must-read bloggers (which I feature on, making it no surprise I think it's excellent) I thought that it was about time that I added to my list of YouMoz posts. And because I had said in a comment that the reason I hadn't posted recently was that I found it easier to do q...
10/16/2007 In just over a week I will be making my speaking debut at an industry conference. I'll be speaking at the a4u Expo in London, which is aimed at affiliate marketers, but is also twinning with SES to cover search. My particular session is on social media/networks and how they are being used by brands to drive sales (my co-speaker will be looking...
7/23/2007 If you haven't heard of Sphinn by now there is a good chance that you've spent the last couple of weeks in a black hole. But whilst the new site is generating a lot of buzz, it could be said that it's also been getting a bit confusing. Why? Because every man and his dog have released Sphinn widgets, or feed flares, or something. So I've collected all the ones that I could...
7/23/2007 I’m on holiday at the moment (although my wife might argue with that, considering that I have written this blog post) and so I’ve had a lot of time to consider the conversation going on at, and about, Sphinn right now, and especially Rand’s opinion on it.In a post entitled “Sphinn.com is basically just a popularity contest” T...
7/6/2007 Those of you who don't know me may be suprised than I'm a big of an ego searcher (no sniggering Rebecca & Lisa). This isn't due to any serious God complex or anything, it's just fact that blogging still gives me the childish thrill of seeing my name at the top of a published article. Which is quite somethi...
6/24/2007 Brian Clark's copyblogger blog is always packed full of useful information. And one of his best ever posts was his Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb. He lists them as:Your vs. You'reIt's vs. ItsThere vs. TheirAffect vs. Effect...
6/8/2007 This post will be short, and depending on the feedback it generates, so too could be my career in SEO. I mean seriously, questioning Danny Sullivan? The guy who has been around longer than Google? And is better liked too? It must be the jet-lag stopping me from thinking straight. Anyway..With his first show since splitting from SES and the company he sold it too, Incisive Media, Danny pr...
5/17/2007 Like most people who have featured on YOUmoz, for me blogging is a pleasure. It allows me to play at being a journalist, as well as giving me a platform to talk about a subject that fascinates me, and hopefully even lets me spread some learning.However, for many people journalism is a very serious issue indeed. The reason I say this is that today (May 17th) is the 45th birthday of a man ...
5/2/2007 Due to the nature of search engines, and the weight that they put on the authority of a site or page, a simple news article, with few if any links pointing at it, will often struggle to rank against some of the high traffic phrases which RBI are aiming to take ownership of. A landing page (which is in many ways the online equivalent of a print feature) allows you to aggregate ...
4/26/2007 Web 2.0 is a buzz word like no other – many people aren't sure what it means, and a lot of people are struggling to work out how it can be used by more ‘normal’ businesses. But as a publishing company there is one particular aspect of Web 2.0 which offers RBI great opportunities, and that is the sites that come under the broad heading of social media....
4/19/2007 Sir Tim Berners Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, once said of writing online without offering links to other related content that it: [is] like speaking but with a paper bag over your head...
4/13/2007 We’ve now seen how writing for online is different to writing for print, and the importance of choosing the right words to use. Next we’ll see how a good headline or intro can make all the difference to whether your article will be read or not. 1) Headlines on many editorial sites get turned into title tags (the blue bar at the top of your browser...
4/13/2007 Introduction When told that writing for the Web is different to writing for print publications, the understandable reaction of many journalists is that it shouldn’t make any difference; we’re writing for people, not machines, they say. But there is a need to write differently for the Web and the reasons for this are quite simple: the ...
4/11/2007 I'm now less than a week from starting my new job as the SEO Director of a search marketing agency, and it got me thinking about what I've learnt from my time as part of an (initially very small) in-house SEO team. There have been a lot of pros & cons to my time her, and in true blog style, I thought I'd try to summarise these in a snappy little list.Bad Thing...
3/26/2007 Last week Seth Godin wrote a raging post about emails he’d received requesting links from his blog. The emails were from employees of Reed Elsevier, the publishers of titles such as Variety & LexisNexis, and what really angered Seth is not so much the fact that he received multiple reque...
3/20/2007 Rand's recent post about the (not so) secret to getting high rankings in the SERPS got me thinking as to whether there are any other secrets in SEM that should really be common knowledge. And then one struck me. In fact I'd argue that it's the biggest secret about searc...
3/12/2007 When the lovely people at SEOmoz launched YOUmoz all those weeks ago, one of the things that most excited me (being a notorious attentention junkie) was not just the ability to be able to rant to a group of like-minded people on aspects of search and the wider internet that interest me, but the fact that I could then judge the eff...
2/14/2007 Except for those lucky few who use SEO to make huge amounts of money for themselves on a daily basis, most of us have to deal with clients - either internal & extarnel. And a large part of dealing with those clients is about managing their expectations. Often people who ...
2/13/2007 I was doing a bit of work from home this weekend when I noticed Google's next move in it's ongoing battle to take over the world (or at least that part of it which resides on computers). Checking an email in my Gmail account from a colleague who had sent me a Word document I had a new choice about how I wished to view this document....
2/12/2007 The more keen-eyed of you may have noticed that, if my profile picture is to be believed, I most closely resemble the sort of person only ever seen on Saturday morning kids' TV. A Cartoon if you will. So why is it that I choose to represent myself to a community of like-minded people whom I respect, with something that suggests I'm the supporting actor in a Japanese anime film?Th...
2/8/2007 As a music lover I'm obviously excited about the fact that it will soon be possible to donwload The Beatles' back catalogue on iTunes (although I have to worry about anyone who doesn't own most of it already). But what would really please me is if it was possible to download lots more stuff too....
2/8/2007 Back in April of last year, the New York Times published an article titled "This Boring Headline Was Written For Google." In the article, Steve Lohr described how journalists have to take search engines into account when composing their titles.