Hi - I’m new to e-Channel’s blog so first a bit about me: I’m a journalist with a background that covers everything from Australian Women’s Weekly to The Australian newspaper’s Tuesday IT section, Vacations Magazine (travel writing - those were the days:-)) to Cosmopolitan to the Toronto Star.  I founded a service called NewsMaker last year to help marketers and PR dudes give their clients added value with every PR campaign - Google News Indexing, SEO, social media as well as traditional media distribution services.  Here are my favourite tips to help you get started in maximising every word in every press release while increasing your Google quality ranking:

Top Ten Tips for Successful Online Publicity

The following tips for writing online press releases will help generate buzz about your products and services across the web, driving traffic back to your website and creating a direct channel to journalists, media outlets and customers.

1. Use major keywords in your heading and first paragraph - these are often all that will be picked up by Google and other News Indexing services
2. Proactively share your news using the share and RSS buttons on press release websites
3. Don’t use “you” and “your” or “I”, “we” or “our”, unless it’s within a quote - your press release should be written in the third person so it doesn’t sound like an advertisement
4. Make your headline meaningful to media and search engines - don’t be too clever
5. Keep it short - Google will not index news item that are too long
6. Make your press release relevant to news or trends - get the message across succintly in headline and first par
7. Make sure you have good landing pages on your website relevant to your press release - otherwise you are missing an opportunity
8. Proofread your release and make sure it’s of a press-ready standard; your release could end up anywhere and you don’t want to spread an unprofessional image of your company (or yourself)
9. Use free online press release services tagged with relevant keywords to make it easy for people looking for your products/services to find them - this is the cheapest, easiest free publicity you will find
10. If you’re new to online press releases, post older material first then work your way up to the present so you have a good history online, driving incremental (long tail) traffic back to your website.

Cheers,

Little Miss Sunshine

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Posted in SEM Stuff, SEO, Social Media | 3 Comments »

In almost 10 years of working in advertising and marketing there is only one aspect that has caused the most arguments in the industry and that is the trade off between In-House and Agency for SEM and SEO. Every company has their own thoughts on the subject and all of them can hold forth with a reasonable argument for their choice. However no matter how effective their reasoning is all of them boil down to four simple points: Time, Cost, Results and Control.

Most companies feel that these four key points will determine the direction that they go when it comes to how they manage SEM and SEO and it is quite obvious why. Combined they will decide how effective the campaigns are and what the bottom line return will be at the end of the day.

More often than not a business that decides to manage their SEM or SEO themselves will have a simple reason for doing so and it will use a combination of all of the above points or the ones that are most important to them. But if you look into them a little deeper it simply does not make financial or rational sense to attempt to self manage an effective SEM campaign In-House if the business has a large number of keywords active in their campaigns.

Aside from the obvious fact that all Agency fees are a tax deduction as a Marketing Expense we need to look at the hidden costs of doing SEM and SEO In-House. Firstly you need to find an expert who is willing to manage it on your behalf and these do not come cheap, if you decide to manage the campaigns without a specialist in SEM or SEO then the person assigned to manage the campaign will have no time to do anything but monitor the campaigns therefore there is a loss of productivity from 1 staff member who is in effect learning on the job. Following on from this is the fact that an active campaign needs to be constantly checked, modified and updated to ensure that there is no wastage and that you are achieving the best possible results. Lastly if you are running a campaign with any number of Keywords over a thousand you need to maintain your quality score through effective Landing Page Management and multiple Creative’s for each keyword as consumers want to be hooked to click on the link rather than just see the same generic Creative for every search term.

When you add all of the above aspects together then it seems obvious that of the four key points highlighted at the start there is only one that stands up as to why a company would manage their SEM and SEO In-House, and that is Control. There is a demonstrated loss of staff time as they try to manage campaigns while doing their core role, results suffer as the Quality Score for the campaign will not be at an optimal level and the costs (both of the campaign and the staff costs) spiral as there is not going to be an effective system of management on what keywords are working and how to alter the Creatives to enhance Click Through Rates.

A good SEM and SEO Agency will manage all of the above on your behalf and consult with the client to ensure that they maintain complete control and understanding of what is going on, once a company has found the best Agency for them then the upfront cost of setting up the campaign and the ongoing Agency fees are actually going to save them money in the long term as a result of better campaign management, higher traffic levels, greater conversion rates and a better understanding of what is working for them now and will work for them in the future.

In short if you are running campaigns with more than a couple of thousand keywords then you are costing yourself money by attempting to manage your SEM and SEO campaigns In-House.

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Posted in Paid Search, SEM Stuff, SEO, Search Industry | 2 Comments »

This is more of a customer service story than an SEO story but the link juice, link bait and social medial buzz that resulted from this one act of great customer service resulted in page rank that money simply can’t buy.

Great work Zappo for providing great customer service. For the SEO freaks out there that measure success by the amount of Snot on the Google toolbar lets have a look at what this one remarkable act of service and compassion did for page rank.

First the Story

A lady purchased 7 pairs of shoes for her terminally ill mother from www.zappos.com of which only 2 pairs actually fitted.  Zappo have a free 15 day return policy.  They will pay for the shipping but the only condition is that you have to take the goods to a UPS depot.  The lady intended to take Zappo up on the return policy, however her mother had just been hospitalised and later died. When Zappos heard what happened they sent a UPS vehicle to pick up the shoes at no cost to the lady and the next day sent a bouquet of flowers. 

This lady just happened to be a prominent blogger who was so touched by this heart felt act of kindness that she wrote a blog called “I heart Zappo’s – I really do”

Here is what happened to links

First up – I liked it so much I linked to both Zappo’s and the Blog post.

The Blog Post links to Zappos with the text

“IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.”

She writes a cooking blog so I am tipping that she is not an SEO expert. Keywords near the link are “buy shoes online”

Zappo ranks number 1 in Google for the keyword “Buy Shoes Online” so this link only helps strengthen their position and reinforce their authority as a place to “buy shoes online”.

The blog post had 196 positive comments and 79 links from other prominent bloggers, news sites, social media analysts and people that just though it was a great story.

Who are the SEO winners here

1. the blog for receiving 79 links gets a page rank boost
2. zappo get the benefit of that page rank boost via the link from the blog but most importantly they get a positive PR story that money just can’t buy

There is a lesson in this for all of us. 

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Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »