Online Marketing | Search Engine Marketing | SEO | PushON blog

Internal Link Building Presentation

Kieron Hughes — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:41:54 +0000

Last week I did a basic link building presentation internally to our team here at PushON, as a little refresher and to help some of our newly acquired staff. The presentation covers the basics of link building, including some methods, tools and instances where link building can benefit a website (both traffic-wise and via improved search engine rankings).

Link Building Training by Kieron Hughes (PushON)

View more presentations from PushON Ltd.

Some of the information from the slides can be found below.

What is Link Building?

The process of improving the number of external links to a given website, from relevant and authoritative domains.

Links are seen in the eyes of the search engines as ‘votes’ – the better the links you have, the bigger the opportunity for a website to gain increased search engine visibility (dependant on other factors).

Link building usually accounts for the majority of work carried out on an on-going search marketing campaign (along with CRO, reporting/analysis and on-page optimisation).

Links represent around 67% of what drives search engine rankings.
(2010 SEOmoz survey)

Why Links Matter

Although not ideal, it is one of the many contributing factors that is difficult for people to exploit (effectively) – bar some time-consuming exceptions such as content networks.

Establishing a link on a relevant and popular page could mean more than just search engine benefit, as it is likely to send potentially converting traffic to your website.

Having great content is useless if it isn’t being found in search, so external links can be an effective means of improving indexation and visibility for pages which may struggle to perform without.

What Makes a Good Link?

Non-Existance of Nofollow Attribute
Relevance of Linking Domain/Page
Age of Linking Domain
TLD of Linking Domain(.ac.uk <> .tk)
Authority of Linking Page
Destination URL (inc canonicalisation)
Anchor Text
Link Positioning (on page)
Google PageRank
Potential Traffic Gained

If you have any suggestions on how this could be improved then please feel free to add them in the comments.

PushON nominated twice for the Fresh Awards 2010

Jordan — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:17:23 +0000

Continuing on from our success at this year’s Big Chip Awards where we won Best Use of Search for the second year running, as well as playing a part in the winning entry for Best On-line Brand Development, we have been nominated twice at this year’s Fresh Awards.

The first nomination is in the e-Targeting & Marketing category for our work in conjunction with Brazen on the Hyundai 30 Beats campaign. The second is, yes you guessed it, in the Sites & Search category for our work for CreativeTourist.

Hopefully, we can continue our successful year in terms of awards and bring back some silverware for our ever-growing trophy cabinet.

Social Media Policies & their importance for us all…

Ned — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:33:54 +0000

As we embrace the ever-changing environment of web 2.0, and come into contact with it more and more during our day-to-day lives, one thing that stands out is that social networks are proliferating. Not only in the number of them that exist but with the user base that exists on them. According to a study by Nielsen in April 2010:

22% of all time spent on the Internet worldwide is on a social network
75% of Internet users visit a social network or blog when they go online (24% increase from last year)
The average worldwide user now spends 6 hours using social networks a month, this was only 3 and a half hours last year (66% increase)

I’ve noticed this change, 3 years ago I would have never thought that I would have to one day explain to my [rather upset] mother why I ‘ignored’ her friend request on Facebook…

With this proliferation, comes the extent to which these social networks are encroaching on peoples lives. One question that business leaders are asking themselves nowadays is, whether or not they should seek to stop their employees using their social networks (which has happened increasingly with the rise in smartphone penetrations) or embrace it.

One area where this becomes apparent is when you recognise that many of the world’s largest multinational corporations have embraced these networks and empowered their employee base on them, to use them to greater effect. Many times embracing these networks have shown positive changes in the way that they conduct business. There are numerous examples of this, many of which are recorded on the Social Media Governance Database. Some of the companies have social media policies to steal from these, plus others, are summarised below:

Dell – Have invested large amounts of money into building a cross-platform community, this includes: Numerous Twitter usernames (for each country, as well as for different areas of business), a very active presence on Facebook, and host a growing network of blogs.

Intel - Like Dell, have fully embraced social media usage across their company. The foundations of this started with the creation of Intelpedia, a team based collaboration in the form of a wiki which now holds some 15,000 articles. The development of this eventually led to the establishment of the Social Media Guidelines (now, impressively, available in over 35 languages). And most interestingly the creation of the Social Media Center of Excellence demonstrated the impact of social media on Intel, where a multi-disciplined team with knowledge spanning legal, marketing, PR and web-based communications was formed in order to establish protocols and strategies for Intel employees and their use of social media tools. Furthermore, Intel’s benefits from using social media has been proved by the introduction of the Digital IQ certificate offered to their employees, the content of this course is explained in more detail here. One key learning here is their views on moderation and their Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly framework – simply put, if content is good or bad then it is approved (you should not dissaprove negative content, it could lead to vital learnings about your company) however, if content is ‘ugly’ offensive or discriminatory then dissaprove it.

Kodak – If you’re looking for a concise introduction to social media from the perspective of a global brand, whilst also gaining tips and insights into how they approach it as a corporation then the most all encompassing guide would be Kodak’s.

And, (rather bizarrely) the US Air Force – Where some companies have detailed their policies through practice and the development of schemes, others, such as the US Air Force (of all people!), have formalized their practices in a framework widely referenced in the digital circuit. Their approach the social media as a whole should also be praised for their forward looking stance, especially when existing as an entirely different organisation as the others listed here. Their reason for the adoption of social media protocols can be understood by Colonel Caldwell’s (acting Director of Public Affairs) realisation that ’75% of Airmen use Myspace, 70% use Youtube and 50% use Facebook’ (a number that has no doubt grown since that interview) and his wish to have “330,000 people [the entirety of the US Air Force] to be in Public Affairs”.

I know what you’re thinking, “knowing all this is great, but what does it mean for me?”. Well if, or more appropriately, when you embrace social media I would take away some of the common themes that arise in all social media engagement guidelines that I have come across, these are:

Be Yourself – When posting online ensure that you always name yourself (and job title/position, if appropriate) and are open about who you are. Remember, you are engaging people on a ‘social level’ – speak to them as you would in person. Hopefully it goes without saying that ‘gansta’ or ‘txt’ speak probably won’t be understood by all, so ‘avoid spkin n a wy ppl wnt undrstnd’…

Cite Your Sources – If you’ve gained the information/opinions that you’re writing about from somewhere then tell people where to find it by linking to it, give them the credit they deserve. It’s worth noting here that passing work/information off as your own is a big no no in social media, don’t do it – you will be found out!

Authorship – Take ownership of what you’re saying, the content you post is your own. Some of the major brands also say that when in doubt here post a disclaimer alongside your message,Intel’s suggest using this: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Intel’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

Don’t Denigrate – Avoid conflict with others and as with most professional conversations avoid politics and religion. Remember that in the digital realm it is very hard to remove what you publish once published, and sometimes simple deleting content can have even worse consequences. Be mindful that what you publish will be widely accessible, and will be around for a long time.

Add value – IBM are considered social media policy pioneers and their view on adding value is one to learn from. They state that if information: ‘Will help people do their jobs and solve problems, improve knowledge and skills, contributes to your companies products or services, promotes your companies values or builds a sense of community’, then it is ‘adding value’.

Sometimes Everybody is Wrong… – Did you post something that has since been disproved? If so, don’t be afraid to follow up a blog post explaining this and admitting that you were wrong. As it has been stated before, treat it as though you would in real life.

PushON’s Recommendations for starting out in Social Media are:

Get Involved – Like so many other aspects of online and digital marketing the best advice is to simply use it and learn as you go along, you’ll be surprised how quickly you pick it up.

Create Accounts (Even just to have a play) – My suggestions would be to create a Twitter and Facebook account (if you haven’t already then get with the times, I mean my mum is on it, come on!). If you want to get more adventurous then have a play with the newer social networks too such as Gowalla and FourSquare.

Download Social Media Client[s] – There are lots out there so have a look around everybody has their own preferences, personally I use Tweetdeck which is the market share leader and is also used by the majority of PushON staff (there are versions for your PC, Mac, smartphone, iPad etc). This client can add columns from a variety of social media networks including: Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare amongst others…

Manage You Accounts - If you begin getting experienced with social media then you may find yourself using multiple accounts for each network. Please take my advice and be careful which account you are posting on. Nothing’s worse than accidently telling your entire corporate followbase that “you got so drunk you vommited on your neighbours cat last night…”

Post Frequently – The SEO’s reading this will know how important this helps to gain ranking, but think of it this way: If you’re going for a beer and looking for some company, are you more likely to invite the person that you go out with on a regular occasion and that will have stuff to talk about, or the one that you see rarely and that never replies to your texts? Catch my drift?…

Be Interesting – One of the best ways I’ve gained a good follower base on Twitter is by posting (and retweeting) stuff that I read and find interesting, whether this is on social media methods, riding your bike, or your collection of old crisp packets – you’d be surprised how many people there are out there interested in the same things.

Respond – Remember that one important thing about social media is that it’s ‘social’, so respond to people is they have questions, or strike up conversations with people that have posted something of interest to you.

Whilst in the bigger organisations social media governance has become a key area of consideration for the legal teams. Smaller organisations might not have quite such a rigorous approach, but that still doesn’t mean that you should disregard it. Being mindful of your own and your employees’ actions whilst in your business context is one of the oldest good management styles, and these days this expands into the social media realm.

By learning from these examples, following the guidelines set out above and by implementing your own Social Media Policy you could avoid any disastrous consequences developing from social media usage, and “who knows?” you could learn something…

How To: Make Data Presentable and Sexy using the Word Cloud tool Wordle…

Ned — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:51:58 +0000

Ever had the problem of presenting data to a client and struggling to explain it’s application or meaning? A more creative approach that we have recently adopted here at PushON is using a nifty new word cloud creation tool Wordle. Wordle is a great tool that lets you create randomly generated word clouds from the most prominent words either in a data set, any given URL or a del.icio.us username. This has become especially useful for presenting keyword research to clients, by creating a word cloud where the most popular terms (in terms of traffic volume) are the most prominent. In order to demonstrate this process I have done a step-by-step guide below:

Let’s imagine that we’re doing some rough keyword research around beer, suppose we plug in 5 terms into the Google Keyword Tool ‘beer, ale, pint, bitter, stout’ and export this data to Excel. The only data that we will need for this analysis is the ‘keyword’ and ‘local monthly searches’ so delete the rest. Now clean up the keyword term by removing the squared brackets by entering the formula =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2, “[", " "),"]“, ” “).

Then remove any spaces around the keywords by entering the formula =trim(A2) [presuming that your first keword is in cell A2].

After this we need to duplicate the keyword based upon the number of local monthly searches. To do this, number the coloumns above your keywords from 1-1000, as shown below:

Because some keywords are going to produce a large amount of terms (upwards of 10,000) lets reduce the results by entering a colomn ‘Volume in 100s’ with the formula =B2/100.

Then to populate the remaining cells insert this formula =IF(D$1<=$C2, $A2,”"), this formula will then paste the ‘keyword’ value into all cells relevant until the number from 1-1000 (running along the columns at the top) is less than or equal to the number in the ‘volume in 100s’ colomn. Essentially this will populate a number of cells relevant the the amount of local monthly searches.

Now we’re in a position to make the word clouds, we’ll do this using Wordle. Select all of the keywords (and the repeated versions) from your Excel document and past these into the ‘paste a bunch of text’ section on Wordle:

Now once you’ve clicked ‘go’, the tool will automatically generate a word cloud based on the number of repetitions of each keyword. From here you can make changes to the font, layout, or colours using the dropdown menus from the top.

Then once you are ready to use this image click ‘open in window, make it fullscreen and then printscreen and save as the desired picture format (.jpg, .gif etc), so you can import into any file you want…

Quick Fire Marketing Tips for Linkedin

Mark — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 09:10:31 +0000

I will start with an infographic, mainly because I love them but also because this infographic helps demonstrate the raw power of Linkedin. With over 70 million users in over 200 countries it’s hard to ignore.

source: Hubspot

So if like many, you are underutilizing your Linkedin profile, here are some quick fire tips to boost your profile and promote your business.

Optimise Your Profile

You should treat your Linkedin page a bit like a landing page and optimize it for search. You will want to try and related keywords within your profile copy and add links to your website. Linkedin allows you to add three links to your profile. You should optimize the display text and make sure you make use of all three-link opportunities. Finally you should ensure that you provide a complete profile.

Test Linkedin Advertising

I have yet to see a truly successful Linkedin advertising campaign (If you know of any drop us a comment) however its potential is clear to see. The targeting features are reasonably good and you can achieve some good brand exposure for your company. For some campaigns it is worth testing.

Join and Contribute to Groups

Obvious yet extremely powerful. Linkedin is full of extremely active groups, which share knowledge and insights on a range of topics and industries. The Manchester SEO group is a prime example of this. This approach helps get your name out there and lets you speak directly to your peers and colleagues.

Share Your Blog Feed

Very simple to setup and helps show that you know what you are talking about. Linkedin can drive steady volumes of traffic to your blog and help create awareness. There are also some other great applications you can add to your profile through Linkedin.

Ask for Recommendations

This can be a great way to attract more clients. Linkedin has this great feature that allows others to write recommendations. This can help show potential clients that your work is well received amongst your peers and other clients. You should ask for recommendations where appropriate.

Promote Your Profile

To expand your Linkedin marketing efforts you will need to promote your profile elsewhere. There are some really quick and easy ways to do this. These include adding links to your profile in your email signatures and to your website/blog. Other good places include business cards and forum signatures.

These are some of the ways you can help build your presence on Linkedin. I find it to be a really useful networking tool and particularly enjoy some of the topics on the SEO related groups. If you have any tips you think we have missed please feel free to share them in our comments section.

Microsoft Office 2007 Excel Customised Toolbars and Optimisation

Ned — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:31:29 +0000

Some people, geeky people I’ll admit, have a real problem with the addition of Microsoft’s Fluent User Interface in the Office 2007 package. Now personally I got used to it in Word and I actually quite like it in Powerpoint, but in Excel it simply hides everything and makes it incredibly difficult to use efficiently. Therefore this guide takes you through customising your Excel toolbars and using relevant hotkeys to optimise your Excel-based ability.

Excel is a massive piece of software that includes a multitude of functions; and people use it for a wide variety of purposes. Because of this, everyone will have a slightly different set of ‘everday functions’. I will be showing you the set up I have as a Junior Web Analyst and an SEO, the features which I use most often and therefore add to my Quick Access Toolbar and will then describe why I find these useful additions. The features you add to your Quick Access Toolbar may differ greatly, but this guide should still be useful to you…
First things first, let’s get rid of the horrible Fluent User Interface ‘Ribbon’, do this by right-clicking in the header and selecting ‘Minimize the Ribbon’.

It should now look like this (nice and neat):

Now by right-clicking the header again and select ‘Customize Quick Access Toolbar’:

In the new window select the drop-down to “Choose commands from:” ‘All Commands’:

From here you can add any of the commands to store them in your new toolbar, below is a list and description of the commands that I have on my toolbar:

Align Text Left – Simple but very useful for formatting data.
All Borders – An easy way to make certain data stand out, by putting it in a table!
Conditional Formatting – As a data analyst, it is very useful to add conditions (rules) to data sets in order to find what you are looking for quicker. Conditional formatting allows you to do this e.g. a basic use would be to sort the top 25 out of a list of, say 100, conditional formatting would allow you to apply this rule and highlight those that met the condition i.e. the top 25.
Decrease Decimal – A simple tool to remove (and round) a decimal point.
E-mail – Need to send your data to a client/agency? This sticks the Excel sheet straight into an e-mail for you to send on.
Fill Colour – Fills the selected cell[s] with a selected colour. Useful when combined with sorting according to colour!
Filter – One of the most useful tools as a data analyst, allows you to filter based on pretty much whatever you want.
Font Colour – Changes the selected cell[s] font colour.
Increase Decimal – A simple tool to add (and round) a decimal point.
Insert Chart – Plots and creates a chart based on the data that you have selected. A useful tool as a data analyst to present to clients/agencies.
Insert or Remove Page Break – Needing to print your data? This will display the breaks where your data will run on to other pages.
Insert SmartArt Graphic – A new addition (well, that actually works) to Office 2007, very useful for making data more attractive to those that will simply not pay attention to it during presenting. I often use this to create venn diagram when relating search terms to different brands in the same SEO campaign. Or (arguably it’s most useful purpose to me) creating visual and thematic sitemaps.
Line Colour – Changes the selected cell[s] line colour.
More Borders – Opens up the borders menu, an overlooked tool that helps break up data to make it more readable.
Paste Formatting – Pastes the formatting chosen for other cells in order to make them the same. Note: This doesn’t change the data within the cell – just the way that it looks.
Paste Formulas – Pastes the formulas applied in a cell to other selected cells.
Paste Special – Allows you to perform a variety of paste functions (including values and formulas, already mentioned) and also to combine these in clever ways. For instance, to paste ‘transposed’ and ‘as values’.
Paste Values – If a formula has been applied to a cell/series of cells then sometimes it is hard to move and manipulate this data without getting the dreaded ‘#value’ appearing, paste values does exactly what it says on the tin and pastes the values produced by the formula enabling you to manipulate the data further. This is probably one of my most used functions in Excel as a data analyst (hence why it is on the far left-hand side of my toolbar).
PivotTable – Creating PivotTable’s is an incredibly powerful way of looking at data in detail, however this could take an entire blog post in itself, so I’ll leave it at this for the sake of this guide.
Print Titles – Ever printed an Excel spreadsheet and never known what order the pages should go in? Print Titles repeats a defined row (usually the header row) at the top of each page.
Remove Duplicates – A simple but useful tool that removes all duplicated cells based on what define as a ‘duplicate’ this could be just a single primary key field/column (e.g. keyword in a list of keywords for SEO) or all columns. Becuase of this, it is a very useful tool when creating spreadsheets for Keyword Research in SEO.
Save As – Although save is ‘control + s’, if you use Excel in a professional context, it is always useful to save multiple versions.
Save As Other Format – As above, but this allows you to save your document in other formats [obviously...].
Sort – Another very useful tool as an analyst, allows you to quickly sort your data based on your desired condition.
Sort Ascending – The same as the above, however I use this more for SEO and quickly sorting the low traffic terms.
Sort Descending – The same as the above, however I use this more for SEO and quickly sorting those high traffic terms.
Top Align – Not useful for much more than making your data more readable, but still used a lot by me.
Wrap Text – Have you typed too much in a column and now can’t read it without adjusting the format? Just wrap the text and you won’t have to go resizing all your columns.

I prefer to have the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon, to do this select the check box on the bottom left of the window before pressing OK.

Also, now is when I take the time to arrange the Toolbar positioning the commands next to other relevant commands and ordering them based on how regularly I use each of them, below is the outline of how I assign my commands [I advise you take some time adjusting these according to your preferences]:

As I stated before, customising your toolbar is a very personal thing most probably based on your level of expertise and use of Excel but hopefully this guide has opened up your eyes to some of the powerful features it can be used for and made your life a bit easier…

PushON Acquires a New Junior Data Analyst

Ned — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:22:01 +0000

Hi! I am the newest recruit at PushON and have joined under the role of Junior Data Analyst.

I hail from the Midlands, a little place called Leamington Spa (you’ve probably been through it on the train, everyone always tells me that…). Although I loved growing up there, I realised that I was born for city living (and the North!) when I moved to Manchester to start my degree in International Business. I graduated earlier this month and during my degree spent a years work placement working as the Marketing Assistant in the European Theatrical Department at Warner Bros in London. My role at WB involved in a variety of campaigns involving traditional media and new media including display advertising, Mobile advertising, Xbox 360 based advertising, Twitter integration and helping to introduce SEO into their marketing campaigns; most of which were on a pan-European basis. I didn’t realise that marketing was the career path that I was going to pursue (I actually went for the job because I’m a big film geek) but after getting immersed into the marketing world I realised that it was for me. Being pretty techy and having been a geek for quite a while, the natural progression for me was into SEO and digital marketing.

I’m really excited about starting at PushON and learning everything that I can from a great award winning agency. The guys have done everything to make me fit right in and have been really welcoming already, thanks! If you want to get in contact with me or simply listen to me ramble about digital marketing, and whatever I’m feeling like that day, you can find me on LinkedIn here, follow me on Twitter @NedPoulter, or chase me around Manchester on FourSquare here.

SEO and PPC Diagrams

Katrina Gallagher — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:50:30 +0000

I was asked a couple of questions about SEO and PPC Marketing, and put together some diagrams to explain the pros and cons, differences and the process.

Here are the resulting diagrams, the presentation and the PowerPoint source file.

Feel free to re-use/re-brand.

(Click to enlarge)

Search engine results

SEO versus PPC

SEO Breakdown

SEO process

SEO Example tasks

Reasons to work on ongoing SEO

PPC process

PPC structure

Making the most of PPC

Contact Form 7: Redirect to a Thank You (Success) Page in WordPress 3

Kieron Hughes — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:01:25 +0000

Just a quick blog post today – but it’s probably very useful for people having issues with contact form 7 no longer redirecting properly to a ‘thank you’ page. The previous method of redirecting to a thank you page in the contact form 7 WordPress plugin was to add a line of code to the ‘Additional Settings’ section in the plugin settings – but this method no longer appears to work while using WordPress 3. The solution, however, is relatively simple:

Firstly, make sure you have gone through the process of upgrading your website/blog to WordPress 3 (including all plugins).

Now, download the BETA version of contact form 7 that is currently in development, found here:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/contact-form-7.zip
(note: use beta versions of software at your own risk)

Backup the current contact form 7 plugin files in the plugins folder (located at /wp-content/plugins), and install the BETA version of the plugin.

Finally, in the contact form 7 settings, replace any previous code you had in the ‘Additional Settings’ field with the following:

on_sent_ok: "location = 'http://www.example.com/thank-you/';"

Obviously replace the ‘example.com’ website URL with a link to your desired thank you (success) page.

That should do it – feel free to leave a comment below if you are having trouble getting it to work.

PackNet Launch New Website with Help From PushON

Kieron Hughes — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:44:10 +0000

We’re today happy to announce our friends over at PackNet have launched their brand new website – developed by Webpraxis with the help of PushON in terms of SEO and marketing.

The website itself has been built utilising the Textpattern content management system, including a news/blog section and specific enquiry functionality.

PushON worked with Webpraxis and the PackNet team from the initial concept stages to help map the structure of the website, input on SEO-specific implementations and act as an ongoing online marketing consultancy regarding the development of the website.

The PackNet managing directory, Patrick Byrnes, commented on the new build, saying: “The new PackNet website brings together a focused message about what we do and how we do it”.

PackNet work throughout the North West to deliver VoIP phone systems to small-to-medium sized businesses, and they also provide VoIP reseller solutions.