It’s the latest social media craze that’s getting marketers excited – Vine, the 6-second video app. It’s done for video what Instagram did for photos, and like Instagram it has been bought by one of the biggest players in social – Twitter.
What we find absolutely brilliant about Vine (and similar apps) is that is gives marketers with limited budget and technical skill the chance to do something creative.
What you don’t need:
A massive marketing budget, full camera crew, expensive video editing software, the technical skill to operate camera equipment and software
What you do need:
A great idea, an iPhone or iPad (Vine isn’t on Android yet, but there are plenty of alternatives!)
You also need to be clued up on social media! Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as just posting some videos and watching the money roll in. Our social media courses will help you market your brand through social channels using tools such as Vine. Combined with content marketing training you will be ready to make the most of social video.
You may think that 6 seconds is restricting, but that restriction forces you to think – What can I fit in 6 seconds? Think of it as the video version of an elevator pitch.
In 2013, most businesses realise the importance of content. That’s why so many SEO agencies are repositioning themselves as content agencies, or at least offering it as a primary product. Our Content Marketing courses used to attract mainly bloggers, but since the Panda and Penguin Google updates we have seen a large increase in SEOs wanting to learn about content.
Yet this mass conversion to content brings up some issues – there is too much noise. Most businesses are still stuck in an outdated content strategy – regular, mediocre quality blog posts with little intent. The content is happening, but is it working?
With content at the forefront of so many marketing strategies, it seems at first glance that big businesses have a massive advantage. Whole in-house marketing teams as well as high profile agencies on hand to craft incredible content. How does a small business compete against this with a 1-3 person marketing team?
Big Evergreen Content
The idea for this post was sparked by Hannah Smith‘s talk at BrightonSEO ‘Go Big or Go Home’ (excellent write up on State of Search), which prompted me to revisit Dr. Pete’s SEOmoz post at the end of last year ‘Why Big Content Is Worth the Risk’. Both Hannah and Dr. Pete explain why big content is necessary and how it can help your business stand out in a very crowded world of below par blog posts:
“We all want the low-hanging fruit, but let’s be honest – the low-hanging fruit is rotten, bruised, and covered with the grubby fingerprints of all the other spoiled brats pawing at it.”
The consensus of both the talk and the post is that big content takes around 40 hours to produce. Hannah compared this to an average 12 hours for ‘small content’ but I think that’s a huge overestimation for the majority of businesses. James Carson recently alerted Twitter to the existence of a job ad for an agency looking for a Marketing Executive who for £18,000 a year had to write 25 blog posts a day. That’s well over 6,000 articles a year on a range of topics, written by somebody with little knowledge about the subject and obviously no research.
With that much noise, it’s important to be different to break through, and that’s where big content comes in. But I’m going to go a step further and ask you to consider another element - sustainability. Another popular topic at BrightonSEO, and a common phrase in marketing blogs at the moment is Evergreen Content.
In the rest of this post I’m going to try and convince you why your content should be both big and evergreen for the holy grail of content marketing.
Good SEO is becoming less about code and more about people, but what’s the best way to impress people?
Good customer service.
Technical SEO will always be important, but it’s not enough to beat your competitors to those top spots in search engines.
As we have seen over the past few years, Google are going after sites to penalise webmasters who try and gain an advantage using techniques aimed at bots and not humans.
Google wants the web to be about people and will always go out of their way to favour businesses that recognise and embrace this. That’s why we believe social, content and trust signals are becoming ever more important – as we emphasise on our SEO courses.
The problem is that a lot of businesses are now trying to trick these signals instead with tactics like fan buying, low quality guest posts, content for content’s sake etc.
None of these spammy tactics are helping businesses in any way other maybe gaining higher SERP placement briefly. Fake fans won’t buy anything and not only do people not want to read bad content but it will actually turn them away from your brand. Do you want your brand to be associated with hastily botched together blog posts covering the same thing over and over again? Thought not.
In this post I’m going to discuss one tactic for increasing human signals that wouldn’t normally be considered as SEO – customer service.
Assuming you already have the perfect user experience on your site, an incredible content strategy and an award-winning social media team, what else can you do to show Google (and other search engines) how great your business is? Read the rest of "Good Customer Service = Good SEO"
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has been in the news a lot recently. Firstly he has a new book coming out, “The Digital Age”, from which The Wall Street Journal“leaked” the following quote:
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
Secondly, he’s announced that he is about to sell 42% of his Google stock (worth more than $2.5 billion).
As with any story about Google, the conspiracy theorists have come out in force to guess at what these two moves mean.
Marketing blog The Drumclaimed that Schmidt’s verification quote is ‘confirmation’ that Google+ is to become a ‘search priority’ in future and that this is part of Google’s on-going battle with other social networks.
They’ve made the assumption that what Schmidt calls verification is the same as Google verification. With Google products you can verify yourself as an author, a publisher, a business, a place.
It didn’t take long for certain SEO blog commenters to connect this to Schmidt’s stock sale, believing that the move towards ‘Google verification’ will force businesses to buy more ads, increasing the value of said stock.
Of course, as SEOs it is always important to listen to Google employees, especially those at the top. As one of the top dogs at Google, Schmidt’s personal views are always going to trickle down to those below him. The first piece of advice on our SEO courses is to go and read everything that Google has published about SEO!
Last night Facebook announcedFacebook Graph Search, putting to rest the many rumours surrounding the cryptic launch event in Los Angeles.
These rumours included Facebook Mobile & an external search engine, but the most popular rumour turned out to be spot on – Facebook has radically overhauled their internal search function in a move that should frighten other social networks, traditional search engines and privacy advocates alike.
There are already tons of posts about the new search function and very few people have access yet (you can sign up for beta here), so instead we are going to focus on how brands (and individuals) can optimise to appear higher and more frequently in search results. One of those lucky few to get early access was Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, so head over there for a full run down of how Facebook Graph Search works.
It’s very interesting that Facebook is the first social network to bring out a search engine like this. On our SEO courses and social media workshops we emphasise how you can use social media to help rank better in search engines, maybe now we’ll have to include a section on using SEO to rank better in social networks!
How Does Visibility Work with Facebook Graph Search?
Mark Zuckerberg may claim that Graph Search isn’t a direct competitor to Google, but it’s still a search engine and so there will always be ways to rank higher. Facebook have managed to produce something that Google have been working on for a while – an Internet of Things. Instead of a database of web pages, they have a database of information on things – likes, photos, businesses, people, jobs, locations and many more – and can distinguish between these items.
Your visibility rests on how your business is connected to searchers – the more of their friends have connected with you, the more visible you are in their search results. But this can be just one of many factors affecting your visibility, including:
Total number of likes
Total number of check-ins
The level of engagement on your page
How often people talk about your business
The frequency that people check in/ engage
The recency of check-ins/ engagement
Your location
Your potential reach (are your likes/check-ins just local or are people coming from further afield?)
There are likely to be many more I haven’t thought of, and the impact of each is determined by the type of search performed.
If a searcher is looking for businesses their friends like, then that will be the major factor. If they’re looking for businesses in their area then total likes and of course location will have more of an impact.
But it’s not just friends! You can search using an overwhelming number of factors. My favourite example of this is again from Danny Sullivan – “Search for Restaurants run by employees of a particular cooking school”. So it’s not just about number of connections, but about the type and value of those connections. Read the rest of "Optimising Business Pages for Facebook Graph Search"
With a new year comes a new course, and one we hope you’re excited about! Today we launch eBook Training with InDesign, a course we have developed to meet the demand for guidance on creating eBooks from scratch and publishing them – ideal for writers and marketers alike who want to self-publish digital content that meets the industry guidelines.
Our InDesign eBook Training Course is a 1 day course and costs £295 + vat. To cover everything you need to create eBooks in 1 day we assume prior knowledge and experience with Adobe InDesign. If you’re an InDesign beginner but still want to come on the course then you can also book our 2-day InDesign course as a package for just £595 + vat (normally £740 + vat)!
InDesign eBook Training Course Dates
Our upcoming Brighton dates for the eBook course are:
25th March 2013
10th May 2013
19th June 2013
If you can’t make those dates or wish to arrange in-company training then don’t hesitate to ring 01273 622272 to arrange a quote for a private course.
Why InDesign & ePub?
On our eBook training course you will be using Adobe InDesign to create eBooks in the ePub format. While there are a number of free tools to use to quickly create eBooks, nothing gives you the freedom of control over your work that InDesign is capable of. As well as being the industry standard tool for document layout, the latest versions of InDesign (this course runs on CS6) are full of features for making sure your eBooks meet the best practice guidelines for digital publishing. Read the rest of "New InDesign eBook Training Course"
We hope you had a great 2012 and are looking forward to 2013 – we certainly are!
That’s it for this year, we close today (Friday 21st December) at 5.30pm but don’t worry, we’re back shortly on Wednesday 2nd January.
In the mean time, if you need to get hold of us please email info@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk which we will be checking. Or you can leave a message on 01273 622272 and we will ring you back in the new year.
Google have just announced an incredible new Data Highlighter in Webmaster Tools which allows you to mark up events on your site with simple point-and-click actions.
This is a life saver for webmasters who want to add structured data to their sites but don’t have the skills to implement microdata, microformats or RDFa on their site.
For those unfamiliar with structured data markup, it is code added to a site, page or page element that makes content more understandable to search engines and other crawlers which is then translated into Rich Snippets – extra information shown in SERPs with your result. Previously, this would involve marking up elements individually using tags like schemas but now with Google’s new Data Highlighter even those with no understanding of HTML can markup certain elements.
The idea behind Structured Data is to take the internet beyond just an archive of ‘pages’ and instead becomes an ‘internet of things’ – something that search engines are racing to be the best at. It’s something Facebook does – recognising people, relationships, faces and interests. Google are on the right track with authors, publishers, knowledge graph and semantic search but they need the help of webmasters to take this a step further.
Structured data is vital for SEO – something we’re looking to add to our SEO courses – not only does it help search engines understand your content but also gives you more visibility in SERPs. Likewise it’s a must for content marketers – not so much for blog posts but for other content that needs clear labelling.
Currently the Data Highlighter tool just for events, but we believe that if this test is successful then other elements will be supported. Google made a similar move by making authorship markup (rel=author) easier to implement using email verification rather than tags.
How to Use Google Data Highlighter
The main point of Google’s new Data Highlighter tool is that it is dead simple to use. It just requires a Webmaster Tools account and (of course) events on your website.
Disclaimer: If you’re thinking “I love the sound of extra real estate in SERPs, but I don’t have events, I had better set some up!” then please stop right there. Tools like these only work if they’re not abused. If you must, think hard about what real event you could put on – it could be a talk, a free session or a demonstration – just don’t set up fake events.
It’s the latest social media craze that’s getting marketers excited – Vine, the 6-second video app. It’s done for video what Instagram did for photos, and like Instagram it has been bought by one of the biggest players in social – Twitter.
Good SEO is becoming less about code and more about people, but what’s the best way to impress people?
The main point of Google’s new Data Highlighter tool is that it is dead simple to use. It just requires a Webmaster Tools account and (of course) events on your website.
