Why magazines are spot on with search

Magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping “are doing well” from Google and Yahoo, the companies most often accused of devaluing publishers’ content.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson reporting from New York for the FT tells us why

a rigorous approach to tagging its articles for search engine optimisation. If you type “hairstyles” or “gifts for women” into a Google search bar, a Marie Claire article should be among the first results served up.

That question-how do you measure social media?

How do you measure the impact of social media?

Some say it is very difficult,nigh on impossible but David Berkowitz reckons there are a hundred ways and just to prove the point he lists them out

Here are the first 10

1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts

2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions

3. Shift in buzz over time

4. Buzz by time of day / daypart

5. Seasonality of buzz

6. Competitive buzz

7. Buzz by category / topic

8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)

9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)

10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more)

We've listened to our fair share of SEO experts

Is SEO everything for web content? Well maybe not

Online news design relates the Daily Mirror’s associate editor Matt Kelly who spoke at WAN 2009 saying that a change from a SEO dominated approach, had started paying a rich dividend for the Mirror’s websites.

"We’ve listened to our fair share of SEO experts at Mirror Group, but when we relaunched Mirror.co.uk about eighteen months ago, we fought very hard to put SEO to one side and focus instead on trying to reinject some of the brand values that had served the newspaper so well for more than one hundred years. Some of that bold tabloid panache, the dynamism, the straight-talking, entertaining view of the world so familiar to readers of the Daily Mirror newspaper. And the relaunch was a great success."

The Beeb recognises SEO in its headlines

The BBC has decided to make its headlines more serach engine friendly.

Steve Herrmann explains all on the Editors Blog

our developers have done a bit of work to allow journalists the scope to create two headlines for a story if they want to - a short one which appears on the front page and our other website indexes, and a longer one which will appear on the story page itself and in search engine results.
The front page headlines will remain limited to between 31 and 33 characters and will continue to appear on Ceefax and Digital Text, as they do now, along with the top four paragraphs of each story.

A pulse on the feelings of the web

Welcome to the world of sentiment analysis.

As the New York Times reports

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression.

adding that

online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

As with many practices in the world of social media,the art is at an early stage but services are starting to appear including Scout Labs and Jodange

Both seek to provide services to enable decision makers to better understand who and what is influencing their customers, competitors, marketplace and therefore their company.

The FT has set up Newssift that

that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Human shoppers might be turned off by the tricks of Google rankings

Staying on the subject of online advertising,a study by Engine Ready, an Internet marketing company,suggests that

visitors who get to retail sites through sponsored links are more likely to buy than those who click on organic results. They also spend more; the average order of a paid linker was $11 higher, at $117.06.

It suggests that

human shoppers might be turned off by the tricks that make a site show up higher in Google rankings. In particular, Google’s Web trawling software is lured by pages with lots of material. “When we’re optimizing for search engines, content is king,” Mr. Smith said. “But less is more when engaging a visitor.”

via New York Times

The best use of twitter in search engine optimisation

Writing at Mashable,Mike Dobbs ,group director of SEO at digital marketing agency 360i, gives 10 top tips on how to use twitter to hit those search engines.

I make no apologies in listing them out

1.Be sure to pick an optimal handle that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember.

2.Optimize the Twitter account name to best reflect your brand. Your name is what appears next to your profile, which can be different than your handle/URL.

3.Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line so it includes the most important, mission-critical phrases for your brand.

4.integrate your Twitter URL into your website by placing a call to action on the site for your customers to follow you on Twitter.

5.In the account settings, be sure to add your website’s URL or perhaps use it to promote your presence on another social platform,

6.The “lead-in” of each tweet appears to be important for SEO as it will determine what appears in the tweet’s title tag when it shows up as a search result on Google.(The first 42 chractors are the most important)

7.Wherever possible, start your tweet with a primary keyword phrase to theme each message.

8.If you want a message to proliferate on Twitter, it’s ideal to keep it under 120 characters so your followers can easily add RT @YourHandle in front of the tweet.

9.Insert back links to redirect users back to your content. Twitter has proven to be a significant traffic driver for bloggers and others using the space to share links.

10.When providing Bit.ly links or any other URLs, make sure the redirection leads to pages which provide a richer content experience.

Social media and search engine optimisation

Yesterday I was priveleged to attend the Digital Editors Network at Uclan.

I will write more after I have got final year exams out of the way but in the meantime,take a look at thsi presentation from Patrick Altoft who is Director of Search at Branded3, on the tie up between Search engine optimisation and Social media

Digital Editors Network

View more presentations from guest38a088.