Blog posts about: Social Media

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...

Pagination, a brief history of blogging & SEO

Pagination Pagination is a necessary evil! It’s a bit of a throwback to a day before pages load in extra content dynamically as you scroll. It allows users the ability to trawl back through time to read additional content in a chronological way. Chronological ordering is of no use to search engines however, and pagination is actually useful only to indexation, not categorisation. If a site/blog only used pagination to navigate archive content all the old articles/posts would be dropped, and sooner rather than later. The rise of blogging’s popularity and it’s usefulness has an interesting history. There are 2 main factors at play here and they’re both related to SEO: 1) Google started to crack down on the more underhand methods that some SEO’s used to use of adding links into the footer and/or the side bar of websites. In various algorithm updates it decided to give less priority to these parts of all web page. Instead, focussing on the main navigation and the main page content, Google cleaned up the SERPs for a while. 2) Another part of the algorithm became more prominent and understood by the SEO community – that of freshness (or more specifically QDF: Query Deserves Freshness). How do you keep adding fresh content to a website to keep the search engines coming back for more? Why through adding a blog of course. A brief history of blogging This left the SEO’s no choice but to come up with ways of getting links into the body copy of the web page – hence the rise of guest blogging. Links from other sites to yours from relevant content & context still hold a lot of clout. As a result, to some extent, blogs have become a bucket for content generated purely for the purpose of SEO. But there are of course good examples, and those writing great content are starting to win the war of attention – a much better metric to measure than most other SEO metrics (more on attention metrics here). …and SEO! There are also of course better ways to construct your blog that benefit SEO, and these are also, thankfully, primarily for users too: a) We’ve mentioned external contextual linking, and it’s equally important when linking through to content on your own site. Where it makes sense to do so always link through to other articles that you have written on your own...

Facebook News Feed Redesign is a Creative Heaven

In case you hadn’t heard Facebook (official link) is unleashing a new format/layout/design of it’s news feed. This is the screen that you, me and the rest of the world stare at daily (US adults average of 8 hours month). The change represents a big deal for all sorts of reasons. First it is much prettier and therefore nicer to look at and read; Secondly it’s cleaning and less demanding on the over-demanded eye; Thirdly it’s more of an opportunity for brands and individuals who want to grab your attention. Some time ago now Facebook changed their Edge Rank algorithm to favour it’s advertising model. Some brands noted a marked drop in engagement for their updates. To some it seemed like a merciless penny pinching exercise, but now we can see what all the fuss was about. The most obvious thing about the News Feed design is white space. In fact Facebook have gone as far as to heavily down play their own branding by replacing the old facebook logo (top-left) with a simple ‘f’ that reflects the smart phone app icon (i.e. the one we all recognise anyway). This huge new canvas, and the fact that there are new banner dimensions for brands to grab, means that the creative agencies of this world can really flex their muscles. This is both good and bad. Obviously there are great creative agencies, but there are also bad ones, so we can all look forward to ads that look as bad as the lol-cats videos that we still all suffer from. I’m all for the redesign. The current trend for white space and really clear layout is a good one that aso reflects the trend for responsive design for cross-platform usage, we’ll just have to see how it influences engagement, and more importantly for Facebook, how it helps drive brands to spend more on their advertising and drive up their share price. Further reading: What Facebook’s New News Feed Means for...

Facebook Social Search Engine

I’ve been a long time campaigner to get Facebook to fix their internal search engine, and it now finally looks like they’ve listened! Thanks in the most part to 2 ex-Googlers Facebook are to start rolling out what’s being called “Graph Search” (with more than a hat tip to the ‘Open Graph‘ protocol). Previous results were always primarily contextual to your own preferences, returning friends and pages where they matched your query, and backed up by Bing web search results when unmatched. The result of the upgrade is still constrained to the Facebook world – it’s walled garden – but there are apparently noises about expanding to include the wider web – nirvana. Utilising the following facets – People, Photos, Places, and Interests – people can ‘vertical search’ their friends for advice. So an example would be searching a location for recommendations for something to do e.g. “mexican restaurant recommendations in San Francisco”. Not having experienced this there is no doubt that these fantastic new results listings will not only change how we use the output but also how we consider our inputs, and also who we connect with in a wider context. Good for us – no doubt; good for Facebook – inevitably; good for advertisers and big data collectors – certainly. But most importantly for the social web it gives those of us who’ve been on Facebook for a few years now some reason to want to keep using it rather than losing it thanks to it’s fading patina. Here’s Chango’s Dax Hamman’s thoughts on monetisation: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/dax-hamman/monetizing-facebook-graph-search_b_2504959.html Here’s John Batelle (author of The Search) on his take on Facebook Graph Search: http://battellemedia.com/archives/2013/01/facebook-is-no-longer-flat.php  ...

Facebook Edgerank Algorithm Explained

Facebook’s Edgerank is probably now the second most used search algorithm. Google’s (natural) search engine  algorithm is the first… Bing & Yahoo used to have a look in, and until recently it’s been Apple and Amazon but thanks to Facebook’s ‘always-on‘ nature the Edgerank algorithm is hard at work in the background. Technically it’s not a search algorithm – it’s more like a measurement tool for reach and impact. But understanding what it is and how it works no doubt helps you understand how to lay out your stall better to ensure your marketing is maximised within the Facebook marketplace. Simply put the algorithm determines what appears in Facebooks users’ news feeds. Here’s the basic principle: Facebook looks at whether or not you’ve previously interacted with an author’s posts or whether or not your friends are engaging around those posts If content is or isn’t engaged by your friends and the network at large, affects what you see and what you don’t see EdgeRank also examines whether or not your have interacted with similar types of posts in the past, i.e. photos, videos, polls, etc. If content or page hosts have received complaints by other users, chances are that you will not see it. This is all stacked up against time – engagement very quickly drops off after an update post. As Mark Lock on Business Insider noted in 2011 the half life of the average Facebook update post is 1hr 20mins! The algorithm itself looks like the below, but here is a brief definition from Techcrunch: …every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments. Affinity Affinity is a score based on the proximity or how “friendly” you are with someone. You’ve probably seen this in action. Comment on someone’s photos and you’ll find them appearing in your feed more often. As Kelvin Newman points out in his definitive Econsultancy article “…affinity is one-way. This means you visiting a forgotten friends profile doesn’t increase the likelihood of you appearing in their newsfeed.” So you can’t dupe the algorithm this way! Edge Weight This is a formula which decides which pieces of content are more likely to appear in news feeds than others....