The ’socialisation’ of the internet

Posted by: Alex Erasmus

SEO and SEM specialist First Rate recently pointed out how data from Hitwise (the online data monitor) shows that Facebook has overtaken TradeMe as New Zealand’s second most popular website (after Google, of course).

With the rising popularity of other social media such as Twitter and Flickr and the further news that Facebook has just signed a deal with market research company Nielsen to boost its credentials as a genuine advertising platform, businesses in NZ need to be aware of how these events are changing the way they need to work. This ’socialisation’ of the internet is not simply a way for people to stay in touch; it’s bigger than that. The use of social media tools to speak to potential and existing customers has broken down the traditional barriers between businesses and the man on the street.

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Corporate blogging; why New Zealand companies should blog

Posted by: Nicholas O'Flaherty

I gave a presentation on online public relations last week to the Sales and Marketing Institute of New Zealand, which included the topic of corporate blogging. As a result of a number of questions following the presentation, I have compiled a list of key benefits, which are in no particular order of importance:

• Cost: it?s cheap to set up with little ongoing costs except your time
• Online makes sense: A lot of people now have broadband at work and at home, and they are with this as a communications channel
• Ease: online publishing is easy; posting blogs becomes second nature
• Content: Most companies are sitting on a mountain of content. One post minimum on average per week is respectable
• Media relations: the blog can help enormously in strengthening your relationships with key journalists.
• Blogger relations: a blog makes it much easier to start to attract the attention of influential bloggers; they provide links to your posts, driving traffic to you
• Connecting with customers: this can become a real cost effective direct channel to let your customers know what to look forward to
• Research/polling capability: the direct relationship ultimately may allow you to do this
• Gain better insights of your customers: find out what they want, get greater detail, demographics etc
• Providing an online community for customers: the comments capability will allow feedback and discussion; strengthening your customer relationships, and making isolated customers feel together
• Attracting prospects: the blog can drag in prospects virally and show them what they?re missing out on.
• Strengthens your brand: makes key influencers sit up and take notice; a blog shows that you are progressive, dynamic, 21st century, customer ?centric, etc
• Risk: comments are moderated which deflects unsavoury content or spam
• Potential advertising revenue: yes, why not? If you build your readership, you may end up with an attractive advertising target

And in particular, here are some important Search Engine Benefits of blogging

• Create inbound links to your blog: having a blog at yoursite.co.nz/blog means that these links benefit the ranking of your main site
• Create niche content: By blogging about niche subjects you are able to create highly optimised content, increasing your rankings for key terms as well as the ?the long tail?
• Fresh content: Search engines love fresh relevant content; regular posting will benefit search rankings
• Social media: By submitting each blog post to relevant social media sites like Scoopit, Digg & Reddit you not only allow content to spread virally, you can create a lot of incoming links

Search Engine Optimisation Basics for Public Relations Practitioners (1)

Posted by: Thomas Rowley

As public relations embraces online communications, PR practitioners need to understand the fundamental importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). With so much information out there about optimising web pages for Google it can be hard to know where to start.

Here is what I consider the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimisation,

The Basics:

1. Page Titles
2. Headings
3. Content / Copy
4. Links

1. Both the page title & the file name are important, try to start with relevant words. ie. If your page is about “computer chairs” Then name your file “computer-chairs.html”. Your title should be something like “Computer Chairs - Your Business Name”.

2. Headings have a lot of weight when Google determines what your content is related to. Your main heading should be surrounded in heading tags (H1, H2 for subheadings etc.) and contain the same keywords as your title & file name.

3. The most important aspect of your page is quality content. The content of your page should be related to and contain the keywords that you used in the first 2 steps. Don’t overdo the keywords though, a good rule is it should contain the keywords but not seem obviously ‘keyword stuffed’ when a user reads the page.

4. Inbound links make all the difference to where your page will show in the Google results. As a general rule the more websites linking to your page or website, the higher up the results your site will show. This is because Google counts each link as a vote for your website and the better the linking / voting site the better the value of the link.

My next post will discuss different methods for acquiring links so stay tuned.

SEO PR and leveraging Social Media

Posted by: Thomas Rowley

With the rapid growth of user generated media, managing online reputations has become critical. In New Zealand, Google is the search engine of choice in approx 95% of all searches. Each Google page shows 10 results, and in an ideal world you would fill all 10 spots on the hugely important first page with positive brand affirming content. Today, social media provides you with an opportunity to create relevant, compelling content beyond your own website.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, for instance:

• Create a YouTube profile page & upload related videos. Content on YouTube frequently obtains high rankings in Google results.
• Create a Myspace page for your corporate identity / brand.
• Facebook - Create a public group.
• Create a Digg profile page and Digg your content.
• LinkedIn - which allows you to create an individual profile page.

(And let?s not forget Blogging, which we will discuss in detail on the Bullet Points blog.)

Remember, relevance is the key! Each of these locations must contain good solid relevant content which makes for useful viewing.