I’m going to start with a confession, the post I had originally planned for today was a recap of the flurry of features that AdWords released last month, noting some of the good changes but also talking about the bad (near phrase & exact match anyone?) It was pretty much written & ready to go first thing this morning.

This all changed last night thought when I saw the following tweet in my timeline…

My first (if slightly naïve/hopeful) reaction to this was “oh, have they improved the accuracy of the rotation so that it was more even?” and then “have they released more details on how advertisers can take advantage of ad rotation?” After clicking through to the Inside AdWords post my heart sank.

“Starting next week, the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change. Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days.”

I’m sorry? Could you repeat that? I thought for a moment you said that the rotate setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days? Oh wait… You did…

I like many other (good) advertisers run various landing page and ad copy tests in our AdWords campaigns and although because of the conditions of the landscape they will never be perfect, one of the basics of ad testing has always been evenly rotate your creatives, this really is PPC 101 and now to find out that Google are taking this control away from us, or at least making even more difficult for us to manage our tests, it feels like we are not only having to battle against other advertisers on the SERPs but also the platform we run our ads on and that cannot be good for anyone.

The cynical side of me knows exactly why they are making this change (and it’s not “…to provide users with the most relevant ad experience”). Managing PPC campaigns is a constant juggling act of optimising campaigns, running tests and improving ROI and many, if not all, PPC managers already find that there are not enough hours in the day to do everything that we would want. By forcing us to manually go back after 30 days and re-rotate our ads in our longer running tests they are not only stopping us from improving our campaigns but also in an indirect way stopping us from spending more with them.

After looking through my twitter stream at what other PPC’ers are saying I know that I’m not alone in my concerns regarding this change, and I can only hope that the guys at AdWords are listening and that they re-consider making this change…

…and pigs might fly…

image sources:
https://twitter.com/adwords
http://www.ppcmemes.com

Real life Angry Birds, aggressive moths, a Street Fighter face off and of course some top notch talks and discussions. The Screaming Frogs were there to witness it all, and we’ve done the hard bit of picking out the best bits of BrightonSEO 2012 for your reading pleasure.

“SEO is not a checklist” – Pierre Far

BrightonSEO kicked off with a lively discussion panel, dubbed “Ask the Engines”, which put Pierre Far (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google UK), Dave Coplin (Director of Search at Microsoft UK), Martin McDonald (SEO Strategy Director for Expedia EAN) and Rishi Lakhani (Freelance Online Marketing Consultant) in the spotlight.

Some great questions were asked overall, with Pierre understandably being the main focus. He touched on how SEO is not a checklist, with Google and Bing both using 200 ranking signals, ticking the boxes will come naturally to high quality, regular content. Some sighs of relief were heard when Pierre stated that “SEO is not dying, it’s simply evolving”. He also spoke about the Unnatural Link Warnings that have been hitting many people over the last few weeks, and how important it is to be honest when submitting a re-inclusion request. Be sure to attach spreadsheets and screenshots as evidence that you have made a genuine effort to get rid of your iffy links.

Dave Coplin talked about the influence of social as a ranking factor in Bing. He highlighted that it’s not so much about quantity of shares/likes, but how it flows and how fast it’s being shared that’s important. Bing currently use Twitter and Facebook for ranking signals (obviously not Google+). Bing also tried to win some brownie points by changing the Bing homepage picture to Brighton Pier.

Rishi also raised some good points about the industry and how it’s still very much so in its infancy, as it’s still unknown by many people/businesses what SEO is. How many times have you tried to explain your job to someone, for them to stare at you with a blank expression and say “So you work for Google?” Rishi stated that when compared to other established industries SEO lacks core elements such as governing bodies, which are required for it to mature into a recognisable field.

“Big Data. Big Info. Big Knowledge” – Philip Sheldrake

Phillip Sheldrake in Future SEO Vistas provided a very abstract view of the World Wide Web. In his talk he went over the semantic web, Tim Berners-Lee, the internet of things. With various Google updates such as Panda, breaking down the ranking of small sites, he talked about what he likes to call “digital detritus”. All this gave a very interesting look on the web, and how Google’s algorithm is the ecosystem of the internet, controlling the conditions of search. Again, as SEO’s, we should be ethical and responsible with our power to influence the search world.

A cool tool to play around with that Philip highlighted is
Relfinder http://www.visualdataweb.org/relfinder/relfinder.php

“A Brand isn’t what YOU say it is, it’s what THEY say it is” – Sam Noble

Koozai’s Sam Noble gave a talk on how to launch or re-launch a brand or product online effectively. First off, we have never seen someone remain so composed while being persistently attacked by a big moth. The little fella was so determined that it even got its own twitter account.

Sam opened up with the above quote, highlighting the fact that brands are what people perceive it to be, not what you (as a brand) think it is. The presentation was packed with great tips, such as the importance of registering any domain names you like straight away to avoid disappointment, and how domain names you are interested in may mysteriously get registered if you keep checking their availability.

Keeping the project on a “need to know basis” avoids unwanted leaks, and cementing a launch date is vital to success. Be sure to avoid Friday launches, if something goes wrong you will be working through the weekend trying to rectify it. Using a service such as Knowem (www.knowem.com) is a great way to register (all 600) social network personas, and be sure to set up Google Alerts for your old brand name to keep an eye on who is still referring to your previous identity.

“Create Personas to find out what people are talking about” – Adam Lee

Adam gave some good pointers towards market research on a tight budget. Create personas to engage in different verticals/areas to see what all the talk is about. Use the same question twice in questionnaire catch out false reviewers who are quickly answering. Engage in social media, this is great from a feedback point of view in this day and age and engaged brands tend to have more engaged custom.

Microformats and SEO… and Yorkshire Puddings – Glen Jones

Glenn Jones’s talk was all about various marking up data in Microformats and Microdata/RDFa. They are similar to rel=author rich snippets, and gave an interesting insight into methods of providing a better user experience. This is something we’re sure we will all see crop up more, as Google’s algorithm keeps evolving to incorporate greater trust and more aesthetic snippets as opposed to text based results.

Pierre Far contributed at the end to highlight the fact that Google will punish any websites abusing rich snippets, by disabling their ability to use them.

“Use server log files to determine what a search engine bot is looking at”- Roland Dunn

Roland took a look at the characteristics of search bots, and what they see when visiting your website. He mentioned how server log files are hard to examine as they tend to get pretty huge, but he took the time to take on this task and found some interesting results. He took a look at a website with 200k+ monthly visits, and found that only two URL’s were being crawled by Google’s search bot.

Are search bots lost children or hungry psychopaths? Neither, they are simply distracted teenagers.

“We’re going to need a bigger checkbox”- Charlie Peverett

Content Is King, how many times have you heard that phrase? It was obvious that this was the message Charlie was trying to portray throughout this talk. He highlighted his annoyance at a white hat SEO company he encountered that spent time on ‘fluffy’ things such as Social Sharing buttons, without putting enough resources into great content. He stated that content takes on many forms, such as words, pictures and video, audio and tools, and are essentially “the assets which we communicate with our users”.

“Have two espressos and eat a bag of Haribo” – Lexi Mills

Lexi, the head of PR at Distilled, gave up some great tips on getting big links from big media sites. The most interesting one definitely being the above quote, a tried and tested technique of hers to get riled up and come across as energetic and excited about a story when pitching it over the phone.

“It’s not all about relationships” was a bold statement, as Lexi claimed some of her best links were obtained where she had no previous relationship with the website/journalist. It’s all about pitching the right story, to the right person, at the right time. “Any response is a potential link”, positive or negative, Lexi highlighted the importance of not passing up on these opportunities if a reply looks bleak.

She stressed throughout how much more effective picking up the phone can be when compared to email, as you can try passing the buck, i.e. “My boss has asked me to try and get a link in the story”. That way they don’t feel pressured to turn you down directly or may feel sorry for you.

“Maximizing your SEO Agencies”- James Owen

The SEO Manager for Hotels.com, James Owen, touched on the various phases you should go through with your SEO Strategy, such as building relationships with your agencies and the importance of efficient reporting.

“Be the turkey farmer not the turkey” – Stefan Hull

Using the Black Swan Theory, Stefan expressed his wonder for why us SEO’s are surprised when Google releases updates. If you want to foresee the future, put yourself in the shoes of Google, who are striving to provide users with the best and most relevant search results. He also touched on bad links, if something looks bad/you know something is bad but you do nothing about it, you may regret it in the future.

The last session was in a 20/20 where each speaker had 20 slides, that auto forwarded after 20 seconds.

“Sell the Sizzle…” – Chelsea Blacker

Chelsea Blacker left us with some quick-fire tips in the 20×20’s section. Using peoples name in conversation, smiling and using open questions are all tactics which can be used to build rapport as well as links. Think about your audience and use language that your target can understand. Don’t do all the talking, it is about your ‘mark’ and this will reveal more information about them. The receptionist/secretary is your key contact for weaselling information out too, so use them to your advantage and make friends!

“SEO Tools, Tips and Techniques”- Tony King

Tony perked up the afternoon with his SEO Titties (tools, tips and techniques). Tony told us to define objectives clearly, rankings are again, not everything and how group brainstorming will involve the whole team, and richer ideas.

“I believe authors are the future”- James Carson

James talked about creating content and engaging in social that Rel=author can add authority/familiarity in a given vertical, and the importance of social as a ranking factor.

Mobile Serendipity: How Google Plans to Send Search Results to Users, Before You’ve Even Thought to Look – Nichola Stott

Nicola gave a great presentation on mobile serendipity. Her vision of what the future may be like made me think of a cross between George Orwell’s 1984 and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.

“Every company needs a winking squirrel” – Dom Hodgson

Dom spoke about launching his online Sweet Shop, ClicknMix, and the problems he had, and ended the talk by launching EmberAds live on stage.

The day was nicely rounded off with a trip to a pub on Brighton Pier, where we indulged in some well-earned beer and discussed the day’s presentations. Here’s to the next one!

You can find all our Brighton SEO 2012 pictures on our Flickr.

Kelvin mentioned that videos of all the talks will be added to the Brighton SEO website, and true to his word they are to be found under a section called Brighton SEO Videos.
We also found this handy Delicious Stack of all the talks, compiled by Yasir.

Screaming Frog are very pleased to announce that we are a blog partner of this year’s event and so we will be covering everything that goes on over the two days.

As a partner we’re also able to treat for our Frog fans by offering 15% discount off the ticket price for those of you who haven’t yet registered!

I would hope that you wouldn’t need too many more reasons to attend an event that can boast about having Amit Singhal, Danny Sullivan and a whole host of other great speakers participating but just in case, you can now add a healthy discount to your list when you go & convince your employer why you should be there.

To get your 15% discount just enter the code SCREAMINGFROG012 when you register for the event.

SMX London takes place on May 15 & 16 at Chelsea Football Club, Stamford Bridge

Last Friday the Screaming Frog SEO team ventured out of our comfortable setting of sunny Henley-on-Thames, to head into the Big Smoke to attend Distilled’s much lauded LinkLove conference. Distilled have been running successful SEO events on both sides of the Atlantic (LinkLove Boston is happening right now) for a couple of years now, and it was time that we checked one out to see what all the fuss was about. Having recently grown the team to bring in @SEOJackReid and @markcporter we couldn’t think of a better way than to pop their conference cherries than to take them along to a conference focused exclusively on link building. Be sure to check out the speakers’ decks (I’ve made best efforts to find them all, please send me links if I’ve missed any!), there are some crazy good tips to be found. Here’s what WE found…

Distilled run LinkLove in partnership with the giants of our industry SEOmoz, so it was no surprise to see CEO Rand Fishkin kick things off with his great talk on Content Strategy (or to give the talk it’s official title, ‘F*$k Link Building. Content Marketing FTW’). I really enjoyed hearing Rand speak, he dropped some really cool stuff about customer acquisition cost ratio, and how to implement this when pitching for clients, and asked us to keep focusing on creating good content as it will always present multi-channel marketing opportunities. Mike King was up next and he began by revealing his new permanent position is the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAquire, congrats Mike! Out to debunk some myths and help improve email outreach, Mike studied 300,000 outreach emails to help us get more/better outreach responses – check his deck here. He smashed that myth that females receive more outreach success than males, his study showed that while they received a slightly better response rate, women actually received a slightly lower ‘close’ rate. And it’s all about conversion right?

Branko Rihtman of SEO Scientist schooled me on some science of the SEO and social game. Actually, it wasn’t just science that Branko talked about; there was plenty of maths in there too – how to work out who the ‘selfish’ Twitter users are, calculating what kinds of social sharing actually bring you links. It was unique and eye opening stuff from such a smart dude. Jane Copland was last up before lunch and she talked really well about ‘Getting Golden Links.’ We’d all love some links from the BBC, from large, trusted portals and of course from newspapers too, and Jane talked about how to put together a strategy to get these links. She sighted some great recent examples of link bait that were covered by the press and got tons of social shares and links online. It also brought up the link between SEO and PR and how to engage with journalists to write great content about your clients (and link to you ideally!), something which I wrote about last year in this blog post.

Lunch. Random little bowls of food started appearing from the kitchen, we stood around, ate them (the contents, not the bowls) and discussed the first half. The pasta was especially good, thanks for asking.

My joint favourite talk of the day was from Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive who I’ve seen several times via YouTube and Distilled conference videos, but was anxious to see him up close and personal. Hey, Wil did not disappoint. He gave a great talk on how to engage (or as he put it, ‘stalk’) powerful influencers within your vertical using iGoogle – see what they’re interested in and adapt to that, get them to notice you by ‘helping’ them, and then eventually get them to follow/G+ you with a view to building a long term relationship (which may or may not include getting great links, hehe). It really was fantastic, and his test worked too – Dharmesh Shah of OnStartups fame is now following Wil on G+, thanks to a couple of weeks of ‘stalking’. Tom Anthony from Distilled is a really smart guy. He’s clearly a talented developer and SEO, but also has time to fit in getting his PhD in Artificial Intelligence. Really. He gave a really great talk on ‘Putting The Love Back Into Links’, where he examined how the Google algorithm has viewed links and anchor text in the past, present and future. There was also some great stuff on the move towards rel=author and the weight that Google is placing behind trusted writers, as well as sites and domains. Dammit, I might actually have to start using Google+ for real. Oh, and I can’t wait to try that tool, Tom.

Martin MacDonald (now of Expedia) gave Wil a run for his money for my personal favourite talk, entitled ‘Tips, Tricks and Secrets From the Trenches.’ With a title like that (and a history of run-ins Google) you can probably predict the kind of things that Martin was talking about. I personally found him refreshingly honest, realistic and relevant, and his recent story/case study of getting his blog post to rank for ‘camper’ is worth a read alone. It was down to Distilled co-founder Will Critchlow to wrap things up with the first half of ‘The Critchlow Hierarchy of Needs’ talk (the second half of which is being given by brother Tom in Boston). While the talk was perhaps not aimed directly at me (a lowly link builder), I couldn’t help but be impressed with the amount of detail that Will went into, and the amount of tips and advice that oozed from his 60 minutes of slides. If you have a problem to de-bug, Will is your man.
And so to the debauchery of the after party – well, more like a few beers, some bowling, table tennis and table football (it was ALMOST like a triathlon). A few hands were shaken, backs were slapped and business cards were exchanged, which topped off a thoroughly satisfying and valuable day for the Screaming Frog team. Thanks Distilled for a quite brilliant event.

Finally, I thought I’d place on record how surprised (pleasantly!), humbled and thankful we were to hear all the shout outs and the love for the Screaming Frog SEO Spider – before, during and after the conference. I think we were mentioned in 2 or 3 of the talks, a couple of times in between talks and also during the secretive ‘Give It Up’ section of the day. We like to think that the tool was built by SEOs, for SEOs, so to hear that so many talented and smart people in our industry are finding value from it was just gravy for us. Thanks guys!

@patlangridge

Image sources:

https://twitter.com/#!/danclarkie/status/185672000210079744/photo/1

https://twitter.com/#!/BrittanBright/status/185659918882320384/photo/1

http://foliovision.com/2012/03/30/linklove-london-30-march-2012

http://www.alextanner.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Linklove-London-20121.jpg

Alongside the Ubuntu release we have also updated the SEO spider to version 1.90. There are not many feature updates in 1.90, but there has been a lot of work behind the scenes improving the product and fixing a few technical issues. These include -

• Include follow true/false at link level in our bulk link exports. This will allow you to find use of internal ‘nofollow’ instantly.
• The SEO spider now crawls .swf (flash) files.
• You can now export all alt text via the bulk export.
• When you’re saving files, if you rename it so that it doesn’t include the file extension, it is now automatically added. This applies to both .seospider and .csv files.
• The SEO spider now has exit warnings when you have unsaved data and provides an option to file save at that point. We have also added a warning when exiting the spider when it’s still crawling.
• We fixed a relative linking crawling issue.
• We fixed a case sensitivity issue in our crawling.
• There were some reported issues of difficulty allocating memory above 1,024mb on 64-bit machines. This update should solve these!
• We now ignore newlines in anchor tags.

If you already have a licence, you will be able to use your current licence in the Ubuntu version of the tool. As always, if you spot any problems, please contact us via the support page with the details.

To download the new version 1.90 of the Screaming Frog SEO spider, simply navigate to ‘help’ and ‘check for updates’ in the interface or download it here.

One of the first things to do when this conversation rears its head is to obviously chat through the issues with the client and get a full picture as to what’s happening and then offer your suggestions as to how your SEM efforts can best help the client through what is no doubt a difficult and stressful time. One of the great things about PPC is that budgets are flexible and can change whenever they need to and as long as you have a good structure in place you can control spend quite tightly ensuring that money is only spent in those areas that provide a return for the client.

With this in mind I thought I’d share some other tips and tricks to help get as much out of your budget as possible.


1.) Prioritise The Networks – Yes, AdWords does drive the majority of traffic but YSM & Bing traffic is often cheaper and conversion rates can be just as strong if not stronger.

2.) Analyse Your Google Search & Search Partners’ Data (If you do decide to go with AdWords) – Are the search partners spending a lot of your budget without driving any conversions? If this is the case, opt out and concentrate solely on Google Search.

3.) Investigate the Google Display (content) Network – Recent changes to this network have meant that performance is better than a few years back and the network can be used to great effect. How are your display campaigns doing? Is the network is performing well for you? Hopefully you will have followed best practice and separated your search & display campaigns in which case you should be able to quickly identify if either campaign is bringing overall performance down.

4.) Ad Scheduling – If you’ve got the data use it! Are there days of the week or hours in the day letting the side down in terms of conversion? You are spending money at midnight advertising to people who aren’t going on to convert? Are you predominantly a B2B advertiser who’s spending a lot of money at the weekends when your target audience isn’t online? Cut out this spend, it might not be vast amounts of money but as Tesco keep telling us “every little helps”.

5.) Look at Device targeting – Again, as with day parting data. Take a look in your analytics package and identify the value of mobile visitors. In an ideal world, you would obviously like to target as much of the market as possible, however, during these difficult times you really need to focus on those areas that give you a return. Are mobile/ tablet visitors converting? Is your site as mobile friendly as it could be? If the answers are no, then in the short term there really is little point targeting and spending your limited budget on these areas if they aren’t bringing the customers in through the door (metaphorically speaking).

6.) Geo-Targeting – This could be classed as one of the more basic settings, but if you are only able to fulfil orders in certain regions (e.g. mainland Britain) then you should only be targeting that area. You’d be surprised how many accounts I have taken management of and found that the campaigns were targeting areas that the business didn’t cover.

7.) Keyword Match Types & Negative keywords – Use Search Term Reports. Find those search queries that are converting for you and target them, spot those occasions that Google has matched your ad against irrelevant queries and negatively match them out. If you’re running a lot of broad match terms (heaven forbid) what variations are converting? Get them in… Whilst you’re there stop using broad match and use modified broad & phrase match more ;)

8.) Be ruthless with your keyword inventory – If it doesn’t convert and spends a lot, get rid of it. Simple as that. Also make sure you take into account your current keyword Quality Scores, if it is really low on some terms – delete them! (If you’re using Google Analytics, make use of Multi Channel funnels to ensure you’re not removing something higher up the sales funnel). If the reduced budget is likely to be temporary (which you would always hope it is) and the terms could be classed as seasonal, pause them until such a time as performance kicks in.

9.) Don’t Test Too Much – This sounds counter intuitive I know but I’m not saying don’t test at all just don’t be impatient and run loads of tests at once. Run a simple A/B test with couple of ads and then when you’ve got enough data to make a statistically valid decision (and only then) find your winner… Don’t fiddle with it until then.

10.) Optimise ad copy – We know that CTR helps improve quality score which will help reduce CPCs so go back to basics and optimise the copy as much as possible. Make sure the keywords are in the ad titles and description lines; include a strong call to action as well as any other USP that you may have (a lot to fit in 95 characters I know). This will help make your ad(s) stand out against the crowd and drive visitors to your site, which then brings me nicely onto my next point…

11.) Utilise Highly Relevant/Strong Landing Pages – I don’t usually like typing in all caps but my next point needs to be as clear as possible. DON’T SEND EVERYONE TO YOUR HOMEPAGE!! If someone is looking for Nike running shoes then send them to a Nike running shoe page, they’ll be much more likely to convert.

12.)Take Advantage of Ad Extensions – OK, like previous points this is probably more tailored to those of you running on AdWords as you’re not likely going to be offered the YSM rich ads at this level of budget but Sitelinks, Product extensions & listings, seller reviews they’ve all had great effects on CTR which is going to prove very useful in your current predicament (see point 10).

13.) Don’t Go For Position 1 – Being top is great but if it’s costing you more to appear there than the money coming in, you’re not going to be around for long. Find your optimal position and CPC and run from there. As long as your revenue or profit per click is higher than your actual cost per click you’re in a good place.

14.) Set expectations – If the cut in budget has come from an advertiser used to spending big then make sure they know that their performance may change. On a smaller budget they are unlikely to get those 1m visitors a month that they may be used to and so as long as they know this at the start there shouldn’t be any surprises later down the line when they compare data to previous timeframes.

I’m not going to pretend that this list covers off all the ways that you can get creative when working with small budgets, however, I think it covers off quite a few of the big things as well as covering a lot of the points we should be looking at when optimising any campaign regardless of budget size. If there are some things that you do that I haven’t included by all means please share them in the comments so that we can all learn from your greatness…

The last 12-months have been fantastic, both in terms of development of the SEO spider but also our growth as a search marketing agency. The tool itself feels much older to us (probably because we had it in development and used it internally before releasing it publically), but it has come a long way in a fairly short period of time. We have had 8 new versions of the SEO spider in the last 12-months, each with new updates and features as well as releasing a Mac version.

The success of the tool would not of been possible without the support of the SEO community. We have been completely overawed with how it has been received and the feedback the SEO community has provided. I have been genuinely humbled by the continued support of many of those in the industry who have helped us develop it further. You guys rock.

We have even bigger plans for the tool (as well as other projects in the pipeline) for the following 12-months, so there is a lot more to come.

Now it’s time to eat some cake.

The following new features are included in the update -

• Crawl Speed Control – The ability to control the speed of the crawl is something we have wanted to release for a long time. We have had some requests for throttle control due to the SEO spider crawling too fast for some older servers. Hence, we have introduced a ‘speed’ feature which allows you to limit the number of threads or the number of URI requests per second. This feature also allows you to significantly increase the speed of the SEO spider at the same time, which we just ask everyone uses responsibly :-).
• XML Sitemaps – We have included the ability to create XML sitemaps in the SEO spider under the top level menu ‘export’ option. Currently this feature is only for HTML pages, so it does not include images, videos etc (which we will be introducing at a later date). We conform to the standards outlined in sitemaps.org protocol. If you have over 49,999 urls the SEO spider will automatically create additional sitemap files and create a sitemap index file referencing the sitemap locations.
• Exclude Is Now Regex – Much like the ‘include’ feature, the ‘exclude’ option in the SEO spider is now regex. In previously versions it was robots.txt syntax, but regex provides more control and better balance.
• Bulk Export Missing Alt Text URI – We have included the ability to bulk export all images with missing alt text and the URI that reference them.
• List Mode Accepts XML Sitemap Files – We added the ability in ‘list’ mode to be able to upload and crawl .xml files. Hence, if you already have an XML sitemap and wish to audit it, simply switch to ‘list’ mode, change the filetype to ‘.xml’ and upload it. We will discover all the URLs automatically and crawl them.

We also fixed up a couple of bugs -

• Level – We did not always find the shortest path. Now we do.
• Https – There was a bug crawling secure pages in version 1.70. This has been fixed!

So, what are you waiting for? Go and download it now!

As always, please just let us know if anyone has any queries or feedback about the above. I will be updating the user guide this week (so please bare with me!).

Thanks again to everyone for all their support of the tool!

Now I know Halloween isn’t technically until Monday but everyone loves a distraction on a Friday and with this in mind, let me please introduce you to the newest geeky pumpkin, The Screaming Frog Jack O Lantern…

Happy Halloween!

p.s. As an extra treat (see what I did there) here’s a cool video of a Halloween light show. Enjoy…

‘You don’t know what you’re doing…You don’t….’

image - http://mcsportscheapseats.blogspot.com

What I didn’t realise at the time (probably partly due to my ignorance of the subject, partly due to the relative infancy of the industry) was that I was actually doing some of the job of an SEO. Alright, I didn’t have the foggiest what ‘page rank’ was but I was getting the content live and getting a link to the client which is the basis of link building. However, I wasn’t aware of the affect that this would have from an SEO perspective (we’ve already established that I knew little about SEO at this stage!) and how that would in turn effect SERPs. If I had known even a little about how anchor text worked and how valuable the links I was getting could be, I would have been in a great position to improve rankings for our clients.

To a PR Exec, the most important thing in any press coverage is the content – they want it to be as interesting and favourable towards their client as possible to grab as much attention, create great brand awareness and potentially leading to huge rewards for the client. To an SEO, perhaps it’s less about some of those aspects and more focused on getting the link, but the best SEOs understand it’s not just about the link, as they think more like a marketer and a PR exec.

Content is King

image - http://www.flickr.com/photos/developer71/

If you’re working in PR then you’ll be producing content every day, whether it’s a press release, an interview or research for a prospective article. Doesn’t that sound like exactly what SEOs are now doing day in day out? (And if you’re not, perhaps you should be!). We may have to consider some technical details that PR’s don’t, but then again we’re not thinking about circulation figures or publication demographics in the way in which they do.

Can PR Affect SEO?

A lot of times a good bit of press coverage will either be syndicated on the publication’s own website, or better still it may generate its own debate amongst the Twitterati, and you know what that means? Mmm yes, links, lovely juicy links. Granted, you can’t do any CTR analysis or examine the conversion rate of an actual physical newspaper article, but think about the last time you read something interesting in the paper and tell me that this isn’t a realistic thought process – ‘Hey that article on ‘XYZ’ was really interesting, maybe I’ll follow up on that, learn a bit more about that subject…right, Google that bad boy….ah right, interesting…maybe I’ll write about that on my own blog, and tweet it to my 65 followers…maybe I’ll even buy something from their online store.’ It happens.

A good friend of mine Tom Woods (@TWoods34), a senior account executive at Touchdown PR, was kind enough to give me some of his insight on the SEO/PR crossover:

“Although we don’t provide ‘online PR’ as such, a lot of what we create ends up syndicated on the web so we need to consider if the right links are included. We don’t have a formal SEO process either, but, as so many of our clients are emerging players who are focused on lead generation, we’re very aware of the value that well-optimised content can bring. The question is how to do it. I imagine there are some very easy ways to make online content more accessible and SEO friendly, and the potential for a strong mutual relationship between the two industries is vast.”

Although I’ve been told not obsess about getting links from really high authority domains, how much easier would it be if your PR team next door had a strong, working relationship with the feature editor at the Guardian?

Public Relations(hips)

The PR world is very much a ‘get on the phone, chase people down, and build relationships with journalists’ type of industry. You’re encouraged to take them out for a coffee, a bite to eat, chat about life, and do the usual ego stroking to lure them into a false sense of security, before BAM! – You demand a full feature on your client in the Sunday Times. I’ve found the online world to be much more email based and as I’m sure you know, ALL webmasters and bloggers are mysterious gargoyles that control the SEO world by operating out of their dark bedrooms, right? Not anymore. Blogging is now big business and some of the major players can make quite a tidy living off just producing content every day.

Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) from SEER Interactive gave a brilliant presentation on Link Building Mistakes at a recent Distilled ‘Link Love Conference’, where he emphasised the importance of interacting with (in particular) ‘mid-level bloggers’ to improve your link building. Start by following them, a couple of retweets here and there, the odd @ response to something they tweet, and before you know it they’re linking to an info graphic you’ve built and tweeting it to their 10k followers on Twitter. Not much difference to how the PR world works, right?

The Takeaways (God I HATE that phrase) In Conclusion (much better…)

SEOs: I’d encourage my colleagues who work in SEO to follow Wil’s advice and reach out to the key audiences in relation to your client. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of flattery, they’ll probably see it coming, but just be genuine and polite and try and build up those relationships. There aren’t many places left on the internet that you can go where webmasters don’t know what the value of a link from their site is (and I’m not talking about buying links, because no-one does that anymore, ahem) and they probably know what you’re after. If you can provide them with some interesting and interactive content then they won’t care where it’s come from or what your REAL motive is. Believe me, there are thousands of journalists/web editors sat on their arses, scrambling around for a story or an interesting piece of content. You are their saviour.

PRs: Get basic web-savvy. Get to know your Analytics from your Alexa Rank, your PageRank from your MozRank, because you already have the content in place, you just need to learn a bit about anchor text and backlink analysis and you’re golden. PR agencies are in a great position already to help and be part of the linking and social process. Kelvin Newman (@kelvinnewman) asks if it’s ‘too late for PRs to get in on SEO?’ in this Econsultancy article.

‘While the technical skills of SEO may be beyond the reach of most PR agencies, many of the tactics an SEO would describe as link building and development are starting to sound more and more like how PR would identify their own work.’

As an SEO, if you’re working alongside a PR team for the same client, it’s naturally important to communicate about your online content, and don’t fall into the traps that Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) cautions in his ‘9 Ways in Which PR Teams Fail SEO’ piece. My favourite of those has to be number 7 – ‘When a PR team gets a good link TAKEN OFF content. (trust me, it happens)’. Wow.

But it works both ways. If you’re a lazy SEO who is using highly dubious and clumsy link building techniques (comment spam, link farms, or worse still competitor sabotage), don’t you think that could potentially ruin your clients’ online reputation and undo all that good work that the PR team have done?

The bottom line is that the evolution of both SEO and PR is such that we’re using similar methods and creative skills to undertake our work – our ultimate intentions may be worlds apart, but when you break it down, we’re not that different.

Thanks for reading guys.

Patrick Langridge – Follow me on Twitter! @patlangridge