theEweekly Wrap - Paid links, Facebook and Apple

Pay war

Google got its war paint on this week in response to the news that a major UK newspaper was offering to sell links. Speaking to a search engine optimisation blog, Matt Cutts, Google's head of webspam, said the search engine took a dim view of sites offering to trade cash for links. He was referring to a leaked memo from the Express Newspaper group, owner of the Daily Express, which offered to provide links for those with a spare £1,000. "Google’s quality guidelines are clear on this point: paid links shouldn’t pass PageRank," he stated. "Whether the paid links are in an 'advertorial' or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations." In a related story, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation launched the paywalls behind The Times and its sister paper, The Sunday Times. Articles on the sites are available for free to registered users for a further eight weeks. After this point, members will have to fork over £1 per day to view the articles.

Private parts

Facebook announced it would simplify its privacy settings this week in an effort to quell growing criticism over its complicated security features. A statement by founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the site would begin to roll out new privacy options in the coming weeks. The new feature will allow users to choose between four different security levels. "People think that we don't care about privacy, but that's not true," he said in a statement. "There's a balance. More and more people want to share information, and as long as they have good controls over that, I think that's where the world is going." Despite the announcement, campaign groups were quick to dismiss the new settings. UK group Privacy International said the changes did not go far enough. "The latest changes merely correct some of the most unacceptable privacy settings on the site. Very little has changed in terms of the overall privacy challenge that Facebook and its users need to navigate," read the company's statement.

Gala Apple

Apple popped open the champagne corks this week after a spate of good news. On Thursday, mere hours before the launch of its iPad tablet computer in the UK, it was announced that the firm snatched the title of the world's largest technology company from Microsoft. The honour, which was calculated off market capitalisation data, came Apple's way after the organisation recorded an estimated value of £154 billion. Microsoft meanwhile notched up a total of £151 billion. Speaking about the honour, Apple honcho said the success was down to the firm's innovative products. "Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets," he commented. One such product, the iPad, went on general sale in the UK this morning. Early reports suggest the new device is, as Jobs predicted, energising thousands to loosen up their purse strings.

Meet the team - Natalie Booth, online marketing assistant

Last week saw the arrival of Natalie Booth to theEword in the role of online marketing assistant. Here, Natalie chats to theEword SEO blog about advertising, her new role and karate chops.

Hi Natalie

Hello.

You've been at theEword for a week now. How are you finding it?

Really great. Everyone is very friendly and I'm fitting in really well.

Well, we try. What are you doing for us here at the company?

I'm the new online marketing assistant. I'm helping Mark Baker and Rachel Holce with a variety of PPC campaigns. I'm also assisting with the link building for a number of clients.

Excellent. Do you have a background in marketing?

Yep. I've been working in-house for three-or-so years. I wanted to work with an agency for quite some time, so I was delighted when theEword invited me to become part of the team.

What do you want to take from the role?

The amount of PPC and online marketing knowledge Mark [Baker] has in his head is quite intimidating, so really, I want to learn as much from him as possible.

What do you think the best thing about working in online marketing is?

I enjoy the real-time statistics. I always want to see how a campaign is progressing over time – it's not something that can easily be judged if you're doing an offline promotion.

We've heard you're quite good at karate. Should we be scared of you?

I'm a black belt; I've been training since I was three. My love for the Karate Kid was my inspiration.

Right. But can you catch a fly in a pair of chopsticks?

I haven't so far.

theEweekly Wrap - this week at theEword

SEO on video

This week saw the release of theEword video channel on YouTube. The inaugural clips saw online marketing manager Mark Baker and managing editor Dan Nolan introduce themselves to the two billion users who visit YouTube daily. Speaking to theEweekly Wrap, Dan Nolan said: "It really was a great experience. I'm keen to emphasise the importance of content in an overall SEO strategy and these video blogs are a great way to get the message out there. "These video blogs give us the opportunity to reveal the team members responsible for SEO strategy at theEword; it lets prospective clients discover who is working on the campaigns." Look out for more video blogs from theEword in the future. We'll have clips with the key members of the team, as well as lots of other SEO-related content.

Charity book

On Monday, theEword client Buckingham Bingo launched an ambitious charity drive on Facebook. The campaign aims to raise £5,000 for the Breakthrough Breast Cancer organisation by giving £1 to the charity for every new Facebook user to 'like' the page. The charity push immediately garnered attention from fellow Facebook users. Indeed, Facebook UK mentioned the campaign on their official feed on Thursday. The status read: "Do you play bingo? Bucky Bingo in Manchester has pledged to donate £1 to Breakthrough Breast Cancer for every new Facebook fan that likes its Page. Help smash the £5000 target and try your luck at some of the games!"

Team news

It's been a big week at theEword. On Monday, the online marketing team welcomed Natalie Booth as the latest addition to the department. Natalie, who comes onboard as a marketing assistant, joins theEword after three years' experience in the industry. Speaking to theEweekly Wrap, online marketing manager Mark Baker said he was pleased to welcome Natalie to the team. “Natalie has excellent experience in online marketing and I'm excited to have her on the staff. Her knowledge and skills will be an asset to the department and I'm looking forward to working with her on a number of different accounts” In other team news, after a period of recent expansion, the SEO copywriting department relocated to a dedicated office in theEword building. Managing editor of the team, Dan Nolan, described the move as 'exciting'.

YouTube for SEO conversions

According to Alexa, YouTube is the third most popular website on the planet, closely behind Google and Facebook. The main difference is that people will pay tens of thousands to advertise on Google and Facebook but often forget about the opportunity YouTube can offer for SEO.

Personally, I have always been a fan of YouTube, mainly because it is so easily overlooked as an SEO alternative. Anyone can use it and it's a totally free source of fun advertising.

Uploading a video takes only a few minutes, it's completely free and as long as it doesn't break any of the site's rules it can stay there indefinitely gaining traffic. There are a few ways to gain traffic from a YouTube video, one of the most popular of which is adding a link in the video description along with adjacent text.

Adding annotations to a video is also a good way of converting viewers to visitors, the pop-up can be a bit annoying but with the right timing you can capture the viewer's attention just when they want to know more.

Last September, I started an experiment and have had some great results from what started as a five-minute video upload to something that has had over half a million views worldwide.



On to the SEO science

Over a nine-month period, my video has generated 557,000 views, which has converted the five minutes it took me to upload into 6,625 visits to my site. Each visit has also turned into 2.52 page visits per user with an average time of 1.47 minutes; 96% are visits I otherwise would have missed.

At peak, a video reaching over 34,000 page views a day has turned into only 600 visits per day. Although the initial conversion from YouTube to the site is low, it is still 600 visits a day I could have missed.

Since YouTube has been bought by Google it has also seen a rise in traffic. Plus, with the new-look Google, a YouTube video will often be the first link visible at the top of some SERPs. This also means YouTube is the cheapest and one of the easiest ways to get to the first page of Google.



Six top tips for YouTube SEO

1. Make your video something people will want to watch but still relate it to your site or product
2. Make sure your site is linked clearly in the description
3. Encourage comments on your video - YouTube likes popular videos and lists search results on regulary viewed videos
4. Make your account as active as possible, even if it means you just comment on similar videos, this will encourage more visits and relate your video to others
5. Make friends on YouTube – people notice when someone subscribes to them on YouTube and again it creates a link from your account to theirs
6. Embed your video not only on your site but as many others as you can, it's a great way to encourage people to share your video

Conclusion

You can't argue with the stats and when it's really this easy to make something generate visitors to your site at a minimal one-off cost - it's well worth giving it a try.

theEweekly Wrap - theEword video diary, PPC jobs and Facebook

Diary of an SEO company

This week theEword team started work on its very own video diary series. The clips, which will be available from next week, see members of staff from the online marketing, SEO copywriting, web design and social media departments talk openly about their roles and responsibilities. theEword's online marketing manager Mark Baker was first in front of the camera, while creative director Tom Glass took a starring role later in the day. Social media marketer Tom Mason was the final staff member to film his contribution to the series. The video diaries are set to be launched next week. Follow us on Twitter (@theEword) to get the very latest developments.

PPC position

Online marketing and PPC campaigns have been used to sell all manner of services although the following story is probably one of the most creative to have come to the attention of theEword Weekly Wrap. New Yorker Alex Brownsteing utilised his knowledge of PPC campaigns to place a sponsored link on SERPs for the names of the top four advertising executives in the area. The move, inspired by the fact that 'everyone Googles their own name', saw the intrepid copywriter gain four interviews from the individuals in question. The campaign, which cost just $6 (£4.12), eventually resulted in a full-time position for Brownstein; he now works as a senior copywriter at advertising legends Young & Rubican New York. You can read more about this fascinating bit of personal marketing in Richard Frost's article over at theEword News.

Face the news

Facebook dominated the news cycle this week for a number of different reasons. Initially, it was revealed the social networking site had become the largest deliverer of banner ads in the US. New research from stat-fiends comScore found that the site broadcast 176.3 billion banner ads over the first quarter in 2010. For the record, Yahoo delivered 31.6 billion, while Microsoft notched up 60.2 billion. Still, the week's headlines weren't all great for Mark Zuckerberg's company; the site had to quash rumours over a 'crisis meeting' to respond to growing criticism over the site's privacy policy. Recent privacy changes, which allows third parties to access user's personal information without consent, were described as 'unacceptable' by European data protection chiefs.

A (broad) match made in heaven: Google lends another helping hand to marketers

Always keen to work with online advertisers to improve its search engine, Google has announced yet another modification to AdWords. The new broad match modifier is a targeting feature which provides a happy medium between broad match and phrase match, allowing keywords a far greater reach than was previously possible.

Google’s AdWords offers four keyword matching options, the set of criteria that determines which search terms bring up ads. Negative match allows clients to highlight words that they don’t want to associate with their ad, the somewhat self-explanatory Exact match only makes ads eligible for display when the keyword exactly matches the search term and Phrase match displays an ad when the keyword appears in a phrase. Broad match, the default setting, matches an ad to a search term if the keyword appears in any order, with other terms, as a synonym or in a singular/plural form.



The new broad match modification goes a step further, displaying ads only when the keyword appears in a Google search exactly or as a ‘close variant’. These still include singular and plural variations but the feature has been modified to now include abbreviations, acronyms, stemming and misspelled search terms while synonyms and related searches no longer qualify for ad eligibility.

The modified broad feature can also be used on any amount of keywords depending on how general or targeted the client wants their ad. The more it is implemented, the more specifically matched a keyword has to be. The new feature then earns its place as a broader than phrase search, more targeted than broad search and completely customisable between these two boundaries as per the advertiser’s needs.



Google’s new feature not only offers marketers a new level of control over keywords but ultimately provides more relevant ads for their users, which the search giant promises will significantly increase the success of online marketing campaigns. "Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI," said Dan Friedman, one of the Inside AdWords blog team. "During initial tests, advertisers who mainly used phrase and exact match found that adding modified broad match keywords increased campaign clicks and conversions, while providing more precise control than with broad match."

theEword produce first in Hubbub video diary series

As part of its partnership with Hubbub, the Spinningfields-based media, marketing and creative event, theEword has released the first in a new YouTube diary series for the conference.

The video, embedded below, sees David Holt, event manager for Hubbub, give an introduction to the conference.

theEword is providing social media coverage for Hubbub, managing its presence on a number of channels including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

There'll be several more YouTube videos for Hubbub planned for the coming months, including a chat with theEword's MD, Al Mackin. We'll let you know once it's live.

theEweekly Wrap - Google changes, UK election, browser changes

Spring SERPs

Google continued its spring clean by revealing a host of new features on its SERPs and Analytics program. A new-look search engine results page, complete with Bing-esque icons on the left-hand-side was rolled out this week, while Analytics introduced a collection of new applications. The new Google Analytics applications – 32 in total – give users the opportunities to asses SEO performance in a host of new ways. One such implementation, Excellent Analytics, offers site masters the opportunity to transfer data into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. It's worth pointing out that many of the new applications were designed by third parties or Google users, not by the search engine giant itself. Still, many have already received a positive reaction, so maybe we can expect to see Google reaching out to the SEO community again in the future.

Polling social

Thursday's general election played out on social media as users on Facebook and Twitter added their thoughts to the evening's media coverage. Throughout polling day, Facebook gave users the opportunity to tell their friends and colleagues that they'd cast their ballot, while later, UK Twitter users shared their thoughts, hopes and fears during the morning count. Indeed, at its peak, all ten of the UK trending topics were election-related. For those interested, the most popular hashtag of the evening was #ge2010. The national news also played their part with the BBC integrating Twitter updates from politicians and analysts into their live news coverage, while the Guardian asked users to tweet their postcode with the hashtag #ukvote as it attempted to calculate the number of voters using the social media service.

Market woes

The battle for browser supremacy took a new turn this week after research showed Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser suffered a slow but steady decline over the past seven years. Statistics from measurement gurus NetApplications revealed that IE's share of the market has dropped by 35 per cent – from 95 per cent to 59.9 per cent – since 2003. While the news shouldn't be particularly surprising to anyone who follows the battle of the browsers, the stat probably did little to calm Microsoft's fears of a continuing decline (particularly in light of recent EU regulations requiring users be presented with alternatives to IE). "There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple's Safari," said industry analyst Jeffrey Mann. For those interested, IE enjoys a 15 per cent market share in theEword office.

Ten Downing Tweets: General Election 2010 goes online

The Digital Debate, The Online Battleground... this is the year that search, social media and sharing became power players in politics.

If there’s one thing that distinguishes this general election from any that have gone before, it must surely be the astounding role that the internet and social media have had to play. While newspapers, public appearances and party political broadcasts still have their place, nowadays you could be forgiven for thinking that, if a politician’s not tweeting about it, nobody’s listening. Not that long ago many would have found it hard to believe that ‘Clegg ahead in Facebook leader race’ was a serious headline, yet with not only politicians but much of the media jumping on the bandwagon, social media has never seemed so important.

Never one to miss a trend, Google has made the most of the ever-flowing online debate by creating UK Election search trends, a new service which presents an analysis concerning all aspects of the election and shows who, or what, is garnering the most searches.


The search data can be filtered by a number of different categories: the leaders, Chancellors and parties. Google then presents a table of search percentages and a line graph allowing the user to track the trends over a certain period of time. Of course there is the danger here of getting search trends confused with the actual election outcome. People searching Gordon Brown online are just as likely searching for YouTube videos of him calling someone a ‘bigot’ as they are researching his policies. The last tab is, then, perhaps the most interesting of the four. ‘Topics’ presents the data for searches on the main subjects of political debate such as economy, crime and education. This makes it possible to see exactly which topics the online community is most concerned about or interested in, certainly food for thought for any politician.


Google also provides readers with up-to-date information about the current MP and candidates in their constituency along with the results from the last election in that area. In another tab, a link to YouTube’s Digital Debate offers a series of videos in which the three main leaders answer questions submitted through Facebook. Users are then able to vote on who they think answered the question best.

Google’s ‘General Election: 2010’ is just a drop in the ocean, however. Almost every news and media website has up-to-date election coverage, politicians have pages on Facebook and Tories have Twitter. If the success of Barack Obama’s online campaign is anything to go by, UK politics is on to something and it just remains to be seen if social media in the UK will have as much influence on the outcome of the election as it did in the USA. If Facebook and Twitter are clamouring for Clegg, will he be the new PM? And with so much of the political debate held on the web, how long will it be until we’re voting online?

Keep up with the election coverage tonight on Twitter using hashtags #ge2010, #electionday, #ukvote and #ukelection.

Meet the team - Rachel Shillcock, junior designer

Meet Rachel Shilllcock, theEword's latest recruit and the newest member of the web design team. Here, she chats to our SEO blog about life in Manchester, tasty websites and an obsession with Twitter.

Hello Rachel. How are you?

Hello theEword blog. I'm good thank you.


How is your second day going at theEword?

Very well thanks. Everyone seems super nice and it's great to finally be getting started.

Good to hear it. What are you looking forward to the most during your tenure here?

Well, you have a completely unique range of clients, so I'm keen to get involved on some varied projects over the next few months. It's going to be an interesting and exciting experience.

You sound very keen. We like that. What's your motivation?

I aim to create simple, yet functional site designs. I love starting with a blank page and aiming to produce a fully functional website.

Well, we look forward to seeing what you come up with.

2010 has been a year for clean and simplistic web design. It's gradually becoming more accepted that a website can be professional without being too bossy.

Away from web design, what do you do for fun?

I like to read. I also sing a lot.

Professionally?

Not really.

Us too. We noticed that you were a big Twitter user. What do you use the service for?

I wanted to get to know more people in the industry. I also like to help people out with any design-related queries.

Aren't you nice? Finally, what's your favourite flavour of crisps?

I'm never too far away from a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.

Manchester Marketing honoured in RAR awards

Good news for Manchester based marketing companies as the city's finest made a good showing on the Recommended Agency Register's awards list for service excellence from marketing companies.

The awards are based entirely on client ratings with over 2000 ratings collected over the last 12 months from marketing professionals and brand owners. The companies that placed in the top ten in each of the various categories were then named as finalists and placed on a list which was published just a few days before the final winners were declared on April 21st. The RAR cited the importance of using clients to collect ratings saying: "What higher accolade could there be than an award based on what your clients think of you?"

After 350 recommendations, 1,100 agencies and 2000 ratings it's evident that clients do, in fact, think very highly of our marketing agencies with around 30 entries on the final awards list being Manchester-based companies. The RAR site provides the entire finalists list as well as two top ten lists for companies with up to 30 employees and those with more than 30 employees. Manchester can be proud as the city's marketing companies have made it on to all three lists.

Altrincham's The Foundry was one of the big successes of the night for companies with up to 30 employees. They placed in the RAR's top ten list as well as appearing frequently on the list as a finalist in several other categories. Similarly, Manchester-based companies Cuckoo design and The Refinery Marketing Communications Ltd made it to the finalist list in numerous categories with the latter placing in the top ten list of the overall best agencies with over 30 employees.

Winners can expect to receive a certificate of their achievement as well as a finalist or winner logo they can use in marketing. They will also be featured in full coverage of the awards in The Drum magazine as well as having their award noted on their RAR listing. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists who made the list.