Quick link building tip: This one comes from a friend of mine at PushON (@kieronhughes) and is one that i have become particularly fond of in the last few weeks. It came about with the recent updates to Google Image search and involves using your companies branding. The first thing you will need to do is go to Google Image search. Once you are here you will notice a new icon displaying in the search bar as shown below.

You then need to click on this and you will be asked to enter a URL. For this you should use the URL for your company logo or a particularly popular piece of imagery. Once you have done this simply click on the search images box. This will then bring up a list of images along with the sites you these are listed on. Once you have this you can go through each listing and see which ones use your logo or imagery but do not link back to you. You can then make an approach.

Ok, so this is hardly ground breaking but it is effective. There also likely to be much quicker ways to achieve this but i find often the simplest techniques are the most effective. After all if these blogs and websites are already talking about you in terms of using your imagery then they are likely to be willing to link to you.

… or at least fans. Fans can have huge impact on the performance of a business. You only have to look at Apple and see how effective it has become in getting its fans to promote its products. For smaller businesses or lesser known brands this is more difficult to achieve but there are ways to get happy customers to endorse you online. These include:

Ask for Feedback and Reviews Directly

This where many of us struggle but you have already done the hard part. You have essentially asked someone to buy your product or service so why not ask them to review it? People are often more than happy to do this as long as the process is easy to complete and short. Some thought should also be given as to what stage you will ask your customers for these. A friendly note on an invoice, a follow up email or on the telephone or all popular methods.

Provide a Platform

This is the crucial part. You need to decide on the right platforms for which to get your customers to leave reviews. Certain platforms will be more suitable than others for your target audience. Think about their needs and where you will get the best coverage.

Make it Easy

You need to make it as easy as possibly for people to access your profiles. Provide people with the links they need and with several options. They may already have an account on certain review sites which in turn will make it easier for them to leave a review. You don’t want to have to make customers manually search for your company profiles.

Connect with People

Ok so you have asked for reviews and had numerous responses. What do you do now? I hate this word (engage) but anyway engage with your reviewers. Respond to their reviews and make open and honest responses. Don’t be offended if you are criticized in some way. Learn from it and offer an incentive to the user.

These are some of the basics methods you could instill into your everyday business practices. The great thing about this is that it has an added benefit in terms of local search. Google uses reviews and citations to rank businesses in its local search results. This can be great for driving good volumes of traffic to your site. If you haven’t already claimed your business listing i would highly recommend doing so.

It’s been a while, ok a long while since my last post but today i wanted to share with you a really thought provoking video that i came across while browsing TED. For those of you who have not come across TED (where have you been) it is a collection of videos/presentation on everything from architecture to Oysters. It’s truly amazing and i can only describe it as the Discovery Channel on steroids.

Anyway back to today video, entitled ‘Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work’. It is Jason Fried’s (as the title suggests) take on why work doesn’t actually happen in work. For me many of the things he discusses ring true and i particularly like his statement about Twitter being the new fag break. His points on meetings and liberal work methods are particularly interesting. Its often apparent, for example, how much more liberal working methods are in our industry compared to others. This is one of the things i love about working in the SEO industry.

If you haven’t come across Jason’s work before he is the co-founder of 37 Signals who of course make products such as Basecamp. He has a great passion for sharing his thoughts on working practices and callobration and often blogs on the 37 Signals site. Anyway if you have 20 minutes to spare i would thoroughly recommend watching his talk, video embed below.

Infographics are the in thing at the moment and its not hard to see why. They summarise a process or complex data in a fun, more meaningful and attractive way than your standard graph or graphic. Like many new internet related things they have become extremely popular in the SEO field. In this post i thought i would share some of the infographics that help explain the SEO process.

SEO vs PPC

Which will provide the most value or should you in fact be exploiting both channels.

source: DIY SEO

SEO Overview

A guide to SEO FAQ’s. An extremely popular infographic.

source: Data Dial

Keyword Research

A vital step in any SEO campaign. There are 3 infographics for this process. Follow the link for the others.

source: Elliance

Link Building

A core part of any SEO campaign. Probably my favourite one.

source: Vertical Measures

Google Analytics

A slightly sinister view of Google Analytics.

source: Smashing Crunch

ROI from SEO

Its all about return on investment.

source: DIY SEO

Ok, so there’s a few steps missing but im sure you will agree that they are pretty cool infographics. If you come across or have created any other SEO related infographics let us know through the comments section.

[nggallery id=1]

for the more detailed images checkout my Flickr set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markmayne/sets/72157623833066505/

Like most website owners i get a fair few emails each week from companies trying to sell me SEO services. These emails usually go straight into the trash but this one that i received today stunned me. I thought it deserved a bit of attention so im going to share it with you.

SEO Services

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal

There are so many things wrong with this but let me start by stating that im not being kind by not mentioning the company name. They simply didn’t give one. Not sure how they would expect someone to buy services from a company they didn’t know the name of. Odd…

The first thing that is apparent from the email is that it is a generic email that has been sent out to a database of email addresses. I suspect it is probably a paid one too. Personalising an approach by email is essential and these guys have made no attempt what so ever.

Moving to the detail…

I guess my main problem with the content is that so little thought has been put into it. It doesn’t give any information on what they would like to do for you and the mention of penalisation puts a negative slant on things. Theres no real need to mention this. A better approach might be to show where improvements could be made to the site and highlight what benefits they will try and bring to your business.

The most telling thing about the whole approach is that they have not even bothered to check the recipients site. If they had they would know it is already being optimised by someone.

They are not the only company out there who use such approaches but the frustration is that these people give our industry a bad name.

Rant over….

Its just over a month away and some great speakers have been lined up for the event including:

Fantomaster
Joost De Valk
Jon Myers
Tom Critchlow
Bas Van Den Beld

There are too many to mention but it really is an impressive set of people.

Event details:

Date: 28th of April 2010

Venue: The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

Early Bird Tickets: £225 + VAT
Early Bird SEMPO / Manchester Digital Member Tickets: £195 + VAT

So if you have not got your ticket check out the official SAScon ticket page:
http://www.sascon.co.uk/conference/registration/

So far I have managed to attend all three Think Visibility events and this year was without doubt one of the best. I don’t get to go to many conferences but of the ones I do go to this is probably the one I enjoy the most. This year featured some really great speakers and I was particularly excited to see that Tom Critchlow would be making an appearance.

There have already been some great roundups of the event so I won’t try to emulate those posts. In this post I wanted to share with you some of the point that I found most interesting about the event.

Tom Critchlow on Local Search

So I think we have all played with and succeeded with Google local to some degree but Tom was able to bring a level of detail to it that I had not seen before. He started by discussing the core elements of ranking well in Google local listings before delving into more detail on reviews and citations. These are becoming more and more crucial in ranking and he was able to highlight some great places to get reviews and citations.

What impressed me most were the comparisons he drew between the companies that ranked well for certain keyterms. He was able to draw up tables comparing the number of reviews and citations in comparison to where companies ranked for certain terms. Of course companies with good reviews and good numbers of citations ranked well. He went on to say that his methods had shown that numbers do matter in terms of reviews and citations.

In all he was a great speaker and reminded me about the bulk upload options for large businesses. This was handy as we recently started working with a fairly major brand. The best practices he outlined were a handy refresher for when tackling the submission task this week.

Patrick Moogan on Link Building

I had not really come across much of Patricks work before but someone in the office had been following him on Twitter and said he was pretty well clued up. He wasn’t wrong and delivered an excellent talk on link building.

In his presentation Patrick talked briefly about the way in which agencies work and maximizing your link building time. I could relate to a lot of what he was saying as he talked about making the best use of limited time. For example on clients who pay for one day a month where can your time be best spent. He in fact showed a chart, which suggested the types of links you should go for depending on the amount of time you had.

The biggest thing I took away from his talk was the need to have a list of central resources and organize your link building efforts more effectively. He suggested listing all the ways in which you could generate links and include possible sources for those links. It’s straightforward but with the mad rush we often forget or don’t get time to do such basic tasks.

Presentation Link: http://www.pindigital.com/blog/post/2010/03/15/Think-Visibility-e28093-13th-March-2010.aspx

In all it was a great event and a good day out. I was able to learn a few things and it was nice to meet some new faces. I still think the first one was the best and of course SAScon is just around the corner. It should be interesting to see how it compares.

Blue Daniel
Probably one of the best examples i have come across. The moving train and sliding elements add real depth to it.

24-7 Media
This one grabs the users attention really well and i love the fly. Shame it doesn’t provide you with any navigational options though.

South Park
Come across this one a few times and it never seems to grow old.

Agens
The creative in this particular example is superb. Love the background.

B3ta
I love the fact that they provide endless changing examples of humerous pictures on there 404 page.

My New 404 Page
Its no where near as fancy as the others but i was playing around with it and thought i would share it with you guys.

There are many great examples out there but these are some of my favourite. Please feel free to share yours in the comments section.

Its a tool set i have been looking at for a while now and came across it during a presentation by Dave Naylor. A great presentation as always and i was completely captivated by the possibilities of the tool set. It could be summed up as an analytics tool kit for search engine marketer but it is so much more than this. It goes well beyond anything else that is out there. Whats even more exciting is that they have just joined forces with Majestic SEO, who of course have some great tools of their own.

Ok so like most decent tools in the market place Raven SEO Tools is a paid service, with prices starting from $79 a month for a pro package. Agency packages are also available and include a 6 user license. The agency account will set you back $199 a month with an additional $14 required for each extra user. Before committing to the service you can sign up for a 30 day trail which gives you full access. This is very much recommended.

The Tool Set

The Raven SEO Tool set is split into five main section and includes research, links, content manager, analytics, reports and admin. I will go on to explain each section in a minute but i wanted to quickly highlight the great Firefox plugin that they have made available. This plugin lets you access various parts of the tool set quick and easily. Anyway so on to the tools themselves.

Research:
As the title suggests the research section contains all the tools you will need to find out about your chosen market place. In this section users are provided with keyword research tools such as Word Tracker and SEMRush. Other tools include quality and design analysis. It essentially gives you the core background information about your site and provides you with the tools you will need to help decide on your keywords.

I personally like the SEMRush tool in this section. It gives me some really valuable information about my competitors and stores them all in one quick and easy place.

Links:
Link manager is arguably one of the best tools on here. Its sorting capabilities are incredible and gives you a great overview of your link building campaign. It lets you record basic information such as URL’s, anchor text, link type, etc. But it then goes much further by letting you record the status of the link. You can record whether it is paid for, declined or even inactive. Its just one of those things that makes life so much easier.

The other great tool in this section in contacts. I think this is ideal for some of the article marketing tactics i use. When i publish an article i like to track who re-syndicates it. I can then approach them with a unique follow up article. Being able to track these in the links contact section is perfect. I can record all of them, make the contact and then delete any that want no further participation. Then whenever i have a great article i can contact relevent and interested parties quickly using this list.

Content:
Its an area that i have not really used yet but i can see that it has a lot of potential. It contains a content manager and a blog manager. I would probably use the content manager for articles and new page copy. Makes sense as i could give a client access and we could both edit content from one location. Stops me having to save multiple versions and sending them back and forth.

The blog manager gives you a central location to add new content to your blogs. I think the concept is great however i think you would still need to login to Wordpress or blogger to be able to tweak the plugin and tag settings.

SERP Tracker:
I have been using Rank Tracker up until now for tracking keywords. Its much better than what i was using previously however the keyword tool tracker in Raven seems to be even better. I like the fact that it provides easy options to track competitors and gives you estimated traffic volumes next to your actual rankings.

Analytics:
I personally don’t like this feature. I can see why Raven would want to include it but its just not as intuitive or as flexible as the Google Analytics interface. Having said that it does give you all the basic data that Google Analytics does.

Admin:
The admin section of Raven lets you add new users and even has an option for white labeling. Could be useful for agencies. Not an area that needs using all that often but you should take the time to set the right permission rights.

Conclusions

After using the Raven SEO tool set for over a couple of weeks now i am convinced it is one of the best tool out there. What i like most is that it provides a central location to store all your essential items for every campaign. Another key benefit is you can give clients access to certain sections of it. This will give them an insight into just how much works goes in to an SEO campaign and what is involved. If like me you had been storing much of your data in spreadsheets it is difficult to not only keep them up to date but also share with clients.

There are parts of Raven tool set which i just wouldn’t use however the recent partnership with Majestic SEO should bring some fantastic additions. I would love to see the link back link discovery tool in there.

Why not give it a go!
http://raven-seo-tools.com