Blog posts about: Content

A PR’s Guide to Blogger Outreach for SEO

Table of Contents: Introduction Why smart PR pros talk to bloggers Blogs are important for link-building and SEO They’re connected They’re genuinely well-read and influential They’re interested in your client (sometimes) Finding blogs Google blog search for your most relevant keywords & search terms Followerwonk search Inkybee Following commenter links on other blogs Blog directories Other search tools Evaluating Blogs Not all blogs are created equal Metrics to evaluate blogs Publication frequency To pay or not to pay Competitions Building relationships with bloggers Blogger events Optimisation Measurement Conclusion Appendix: PR outreach tips An influential blogger is effectively an independent publisher who writes about a specific niche that they feel passionately about. PR agencies and brands overlook blogs at their peril. The most successful blogs in the UK have readership figures that eclipse many newsstand magazines, and have extremely loyal and engaged readers who trust the information they read on blogs. Working with an influential blog doesn’t just give brands access to the readers of that blog, it has many benefits for SEO and beyond. Topicality, relevance and link equity are all valuable SEO assets when it comes to your association with a blogger. It also provides a gateway to the blogger’s network. With 90% of bloggers being active on Facebook, and more than 80% also using Twitter (based on the Tots100 Technology Survey of parent blogs in 2011), a post on the right blog at the right time, can have enormous impact on a brand’s reputation. Identifying influential bloggers is only the first step in successful blogger outreach. Consideration for how to engage bloggers and what techniques are most effective in building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships are key PR facets too. Get blogger relations right, and you will become a part of authentic, influential conversations that are a cost-effective form of marketing and reap on-going SEO rewards. Get blogger relations wrong, and you might find yourself going viral on social networks for all the wrong reasons. Why smart PR pros talk to bloggers Whatever campaign you’re working on, adding bloggers to your media mix will probably be a good idea. Here are four great reasons for working with bloggers: 1) Blogs are important for link-building and SEO SEO and PR now go hand-in-hand for many brands. Working with the right blogs provides a great platform for link-building and SEO campaigns. As a rule, bloggers are much more willing to...

On-Site vs Off-Site SEO: Getting the Balance Right

It’s very often the case that the focus of SEO is too much on the technical aspects of on-site optimisation or too much on the content-based approach to off-site SEO so it’s worth spending time to dispel the myths and to help you build a plan for balancing both. What is On-Site SEO? On-site SEO is to do with getting your house in order; it’s optimising your ‘owned’ assets; it’s about maximising what you have easy control over and minimising missed opportunities from what could be called ‘quick wins’. On-site SEO is specifically to do with ensuring search terms – words, phrases, topics & themes – are included in the various tags and content on your site. It’s not about keyword stuffing, doorway pages and hidden text as was the case way back when, but it reflects your opportunity to respond to the queries that your potential customers use in search engines by organising your content in a way that reflects this intention. On-site SEO can be seen as a prioritised checklist as there are certain factors that are more important than others, but it’s important to understand how clever search engines are trying to be and organise your content based on great user experience. A site that has no consideration for breaking content up to make it readable and manageable is unlikely to succeed when it comes to both humans and machine readers understanding that content. On-site SEO should follow an ordered process of research. ThinkSearch always follow the following plan: Technical SEO Audit – what impediments are there to SEO success Search Term Research – what are those words, phrases, themes & topics relevant to your audience? Page Allocation – which pages do you have relevant to these topics (and which are missing)? Meta Data Inventory – apply latest, best practice optimisation to Page Titles & Meta Descriptions Site-Wide Optimisation – a guide to optimising the rest of the content, links, images & other assets on the site The general order of priorities for optimisation of each page on the website is as follows: Page Titles – the 70 character blue hyperlink in Google and the test in the tab in the browser chrome Headings – H1, H2 & H3 should be used if the page content can be structured this way Body copy – is it clear, concise and well structured to represent the themes and topics of the page Links...

Parallax Scrolling and SEO

A recent web trend in the space of online story telling is ‘parallax scrolling’ – the art of animated additional assets on a long form page of text (that’s my definition, here’s Wikipedia’s. It’s a very cool and more immersive way of rendering the story and associated assets for the reader whilst enjoying an in depth story or article. To me it feels like the next step on from the hyperlink – it allows the assets previously linked to to be embedded in a way that is not only less disruptive but more creative, presenting a richer experience. The originator was this, still gorgeous read – Snow Fall – in the New York times. There are plenty of examples of great parallax scrolling story telling, and even an a Google Doc with a definitive list of all sites created this way to help you get your creative juices flowing (link – opens in Google Drive). However, in some cases, the implementation of parallax scrolling can cause SEO issues unless SEO is considered early enough in the build phase. Such is an SEO’s lot that often clients come knocking on the door with their brand new shiny website an want it to work with SEO after the fact and this seems to have been the root of many issues and confusion around whether parallax scrolling is a step back for visibility. Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of how to request a funky new website with parallax scrolling without jeopardising your hard fought SEO rankings. The first thing to bear in mind that one page isn’t a great way to structure any online content as the search engines will struggle for relevance when the entire topic is stretched over one page. That’s why there’s oft been published an optimum number of words, and if you want to get really geeky an optimum keyword density for the 2 or 3 primary search terms for each page (please don’t get hung up on this!). So structuring your content over separate URLs is key. The second thing to bear in mind is that duplicating your content is also a no-no for SEO. So one long page with all your content on and then other pages with the same content on but chunked down is also less preferable. So telling the search engines which piece of content to view is key. So what...

Creative Content Marketing & Blog Auditing

Content was king. That is until it started to become poorly curated. Whilst marketers realise the importance of content they completely misunderstand the principles of curation. The very nature of relevance and visibility means that there’s a constant need for new content, but this is at the cost of engagement and longevity. ThinkSearch have a slightly different view of the world. While we appreciate the needs of the algorithms we also see a bigger picture – one where the value of content can be extended, and one where the depth of knowledge of content is more greatly appreciated.  The practice of SEO these days can quite heavily be one of content marketing. A good SEO strategy will involve research and auditing to determine the needs of those users that may be more willing to link to you and share your content, but this content, just with any content you publish on your website needs to be seen as part of your network and curated as such. How often do you review what you’ve written over the months and years and refer back to it via citation? Strengthening your offering, as the publisher that brands are having to become, is not the only aspect of this brave new world. Another big consideration is authorship. To layer on top of it’s automated technical link-based algorithm Google is also now starting to look at who has written which articles and bias it’s results based on criteria to do with this association. In the future the more well published you are the more visibility your content will receive over your peers and competitors. In an article today that AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong backs up this fact with his observation on how their bet on content strategy would save AOL, and it appears to be working. A video-based creative content marketing strategy might not be accessible to all but ThinkSearch would certainly suggest starting with blog auditing. Do you know what content you’ve published has been working better and why? Do you know who it reached and how? Even a simple WordPress plug in can help breath life back into a blog that has become a dumping ground for content on the advice of your SEO agency. Content can be king again, but not until it receives the contextual associations it needs to keep on receiving, both from citations (internal and external) but also...

If It Doesn’t Spread It’s Dead

Henry Jenkins, the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, has written an eight post serialisation of a white paper which was developed last year for the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic of Spreadable media. Luckily for us there’s an hour long video summary of the 8 posts, and it’s well worth a listen as it backs up Antony’s latest Connect post....