As the second part of the Twitter series here on Holistic, I thought I would suggest some of the people I am, and would recommend following on Twitter, and being a SEO in the UK, obviously all these are UK based.

Dave Naylor (DaveN)

Company: Bronco

WHO?: One of the ‘big dogs’ of UK search marketing, Dave started working in the SEO industry over 10 years ago.

WHY: Hugely popular, highly respected and well worth following

WHERE: http://twitter.com/DaveNaylor

Company: MediaVest/MVi

WHO?: Head of Search at MediaVest. Industry veteran (sorry Jon)

WHY: Widely respected and a regular speaker on both the SMX and SES speaking circuits. Amongst other things - he’s my boss.

WHERE: http://twitter.com/JonDMyers

Company: BigmouthMedia

WHO?: Head of Search at Bigmouthmedia.

WHY: Hardcore Search Marketeer - and ‘face’ of Bigmouthmedia (erm :)). Passionate about all things search, and if that bores you, theres always his gaming.

WHERE: http://twitter.com/AndrewGirdwood

Company: Blogstorm/Branded3

WHO?: Director of Search at Branded3.

WHY: Been a magic year for Patrick and the Blogstorm blog.

WHERE: http://twitter.com/patrickaltoft

Company:

WHO?: Marketing Expert @ jimsmarketingblog.com

WHY: Hugely experienced marketeer and VERY well connected (Over 16000 followers on Twitter)

WHERE: http://twitter.com/Jimconnolly

Company: Altogether Digital

WHO?: SEO and Social Media Director at Altogether Digital

WHY: Entertaining blogger, and if that fails theres always the music commentary.

WHERE: http://twitter.com/ciaranj

Company: SEOptimise

WHO?: Director of Search at SEOptimise

WHY: Some great posts coming out of SEOptimise at the moment. Worth following for that alone.

WHERE: http://twitter.com/kevgibbo

Company: Microsoft/MSN

WHO?: Microsoft Adcentre’s Community Manager

WHY: Works for Microsoft apart from anything else (Who would turn down the chance of winning an ‘I’m a PC tshirt). Apart from that his regular commentary is hugely entertaining

WHERE: http://twitter.com/MelCarson

Company: Distilled

WHO?: Founder of Distilled with Duncan Morris

WHY: His involvement with SEOMoz is well known, however the site itself is a wealth of information.

WHERE: http://twitter.com/willcritchlow

Company: Ayima Search Marketing

WHO?: One of the Ayima Gang

WHY: Entertaining Blogger, and hugely entertaining twitter read not just in terms of latest on hangovers….

WHERE: http://twitter.com/evilgreenmonkey

Matt Sawyer - DataDial -Online Marketeer, SEO and Social Media Junkie - http://twitter.com/mattuk

Rob Watts - Latitude - SEO - Stephen Pavlovich - Bonytoad - http://twitter.com/bonytoad

Jane Copland - SEOMoz/Ayima - Only here as she isn’t 100% in the UK yet- http://twitter.com/coplandmj

Judith Lewis - I-Level - Search Director at I-Level - http://twitter.com/JudithLewis

Lisa Ditlefsen - Base One - Head of Search at BaseOne - http://twitter.com/LisaDitlefsen

George Hopkin - Johnston Press - SEO Evangelist - http://twitter.com/GeorgeHopkin

Paul Walsh - Various - http://twitter.com/PaulWalsh

Nikki Pilkington - http://twitter.com/nikkipilkington

Dave Davis - RedFly Marketing - http://twitter.com/daveredfly

Dan Alderson - Amaze PLC - http://twitter.com/pinje

and the final one

Peter Young

Company: MediaVest / Holistic Search

WHO?: SEO Manager at MediaVest.

WHY: Why not?

WHERE: http://twitter.com/peteyoung

Thats just some of my recommendations, Please feel free to add yours…

Much like 2008, 2009 is forecast to be another difficult year for businesses. In the UK, we have seen the demise of many established bricks and mortar retailers, household names such as MFI and Woolworths. It is no surprise therefore that advertisers are demanding that their advertising and marketing activities are as effective as possible, and this can only mean that agencies will have to ensure their campaigns are water tight.

It is also a time when advertisers will be looking at trimming wastage from their marketing budgets. We have already seen a number of traditional channels seeing significant falls in spend, areas such as radio in particular. Online is not immune from this, and there is evidence of significant reductions of paid search campaigns and display, affiliate and SEO budgets.

However despite these reductions we are still seeing increasing numbers of advertisers shifting budget allocation from traditional channels to online marketing. These are new and interesting waters for everyone. The last time, many people experienced a recession was in the last century, and many organisations such as Google, Yahoo et all were either in their infancy, or not even thought of. For this reason it is difficult for marketeers to draw directly on any previous experience, however that is not to say, previous experiences should not be discounted.

In particular, during previous recessions - there were examples of many organisations that decided the ‘bunker’ approach. That is - they decided to wait it out, until the recession ends cutting back on assets and investment - including marketing. This often results in an inability to react when market conditions improve - and thus a loss to faster, more nimble competitors. Recessions often see periods of real innovation, and we only have to look at the boom of e-commerce & as a result of search following the dot-com bubble bursting to see how a potential negative can become a positive very, very quickly.

With many downturns, two things often go hand in hand. Accountability on the one , and innovation on the other.  For this reason, I would suggest the winners from this recession are going to be those that innovate during this period - offering clients extra value for their money, and those that invest and provide quality service to their clients.

Accountability is not a difficult thing to cover. In times such as this clients want their money to work even harder. Channels which do not perform will either see reductions in budget, or alternatively the chop altogether. Display for example is seeing falls in budget as marketeers struggle to determine effectiveness.It is therefore imperative, the tools in place to measure effectively - thereby allowing you as the marketeer to make educated decisions based on fact rather than guesswork.  Simple Clickthroughs and traffic are not enough. Conversions and ROI are going to play (and are already playing) a more and more important part - and branding exercises are likely to become more and more scarce.

Spending through a recession may seem like a daft idea, however Dave Morgan of AOL makes an interesting point

“The financial pressure will be severe,” …”When you take out big chunks of money, it’s not just the spend that disappears but also the competition.”

This is likely to mean that two potential scenarios could develop. Areas where ROI cannot be easily determined are likely to see slowdowns in spend (if not reductions) - with channels which deliver on spend seeing increased spend - albeit this comparitively. Expert analysis would suggest channels such as Search (SEO and PPC) are likely to see stability in spend, with other areas such as social media still remaining high on many peoples agendas. Whilst social media has been a bit of a hit and miss channel for many marketeers, there are becoming an ever increasing number of success stories such as Comcast - who have seen successful campaigns on social media platforms such as Twitter, and I would expect the number of success stories to continue to increase in 2009.

Reductions in spend however are reflected in industry figures - E-Marketer have forecast an increase of 8.9% in 2009, from $23.6 billion to $25.7 billion - down from an initial forecast of 14% back in August 2008.  As an agency, we are going to have to work harder to make campaigns work - advertisers are going to be scrutinising all aspects of campaigns, and as a result, I would suggest we are going to see greater movement between agencies over the coming months. It is therefore essential that you get your house in order now - before it is too late.

This is the first post in the Digital Marketing and the Recession series.

There is no doubt Twitter has been one of the success stories of 2008 - and I have to admire the way many organisations are embracing it. In the latest example, Matt Cutts the Head of WebSpam at Google confirmed the news regarding a Google Page Rank update this morning (Dec 31st UK, Dec 30th US).

Below is the snapshot of the twitter post

http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/1087531183

Browing the SERPs this morning whilst searching for some bargains for the Wii, I noticed a more widespread use of extended snippets, within many of the results presented.

Exended Snippets within SERPS

Two things strike me, firstly this may indicate a move a shift from Google’s perspective, perhaps away from the usage of the description tag for descriptions on results pages. Google tends to take its description for the results pages from three main sources namely:

1. The Meta Description Tag - many sites optimise this for circa 160 characters
2. Content from the page itself
3. DMoz Directory - however this practise appears much less common if not obselete.

Certainly as mentioned above, the further utilisation of page content for the results snippet may not be beyond the realms of possibility given that Google already determines importance and priority for the usage on Sitelinks. However there is no doubting that the top two (namely the meta description and the page content), hold higher traction in terms of usage.

These changes albeit small could however impact significantly on user behaviour. I remember seeing a panel moderated by Jon Myers at SES 2008 - where an organisation called BunnyFoot were presenting their findings (based on eye-tracking) on the blended search pages (which were reasonably new at the time) and it was suggested that these blended search pages were acting as landing pages in their own right, with people spending longer on the SERP’s page, prior to clickthrough. Such actions mean browsers are spending more time assessing their results prior to choosing a site, and thus any signals to a potential customer at these early stages are important.

I would suggest a similar example is the case here. Certainly the extended snippets give SEO marketeers/webmasters more resource in terms of provoking interest and encouraging clickthrough beyond the previous remit of circa 160 characters - particular as these results become more optimised in their own right - which the vast majority currently aren’t.

Certainly the use of longer snippets still appears to be in testing phase - with results sporadic. However given Google’s recent flurry of new ‘improvements’ , one can’t discount that this may become more mainstream in the coming months.

71% of people are unaware of how Internet search engine results are compiled - thats the figure that has come from a study from Fasthosts called “Online Search Matters.”. Interesting for many search marketeers particularly those actively employing SEO or PPC campaigns.

Search Page Overview

The study went on to say that the majority of UK browsers either have no idea or an inaccurate view of how online search results are generated perhaps indicative of the level of understanding regarding SEO within the general public. Of the 97 percent of respondants who said that they frequently use search engines, only 29 percent are aware that search results are generated based on the search terms and optimisation techniques used by the individual website owners.

Further to this 24 percent of respondents believe that the search results cannot be affected, while 22 percent suspect that results are ordered entirely according to how much has been paid by the websites listed. The report also stated that:

• 19% say they have no idea at all how results are compiled
• 5% believe that search listings are arranged completely at random.

Staggering…..

Further to this, browsers continued to favour organic search rankings over that of its sponsored partners - with 38% of respondants saying they typically ignore sponsored listings. I personally would caveat such a statement by suggesting this figure is likely to change significantly the more brand or product focussed the search term is - and you would typically see clickthroughs on PPC increase significantly in these circumstances.

However the survery highlighted that 33% of respondents believe the sponsored listings to be ‘less worthy’ and ‘less useful’ than main search results, whilst to other 66% report that they always pay attention first to main results. In terms of demographic breakdown, there was also a significant slant with:

• 40% of women vs 34 % of men will ignore sponsored links whenever they appear as standard
• East England seemed to be the most sceptical towards sponsored listings with 45% of Norwich residents and 43% of Nottingham residents not clicking on them - compared against just 12% from Northern Ireland.

Whilst it should be highlighted this was quite  a small study, with only 1636 people surveyed - it does give us an indication as to the level of awareness out there in relation to search - and in particular the importance of an integrated search marketing approach comprising both SEO and Paid Search.

According to a recent Specific Media study using Comscore data, Display Advertising and Search Marketing are directly correlated. In particular brand and segment related searches jumped by over 100% in a number of areas where consumers were exposed to both display ads and search ads.

The impact of display ads on search - emarketer.com

The report went on to say that search clickers exposed to brand advertising were 22% more likely to produce a sale than those that did not view a display ad. It should be noted that such increases in performance are not merely limited to areas where just display and search are used. The recent Enquiro/Google study suggested that where priority visibility on both paid and organic search were occupied - brand association and purchase intent increased by circa 16%.

Further to this Microsoft’s Young-Bean Song said in a recent article on Clickz that the study results highlighted that search alone was not a standalone solution to customer acquisition

“The issue we have with navigational search is that it completely obliterates the value we’re creating from other digital marketing we’re doing,” Mr. Song told ClickZ. “The idea that search is this magical fountain of customer acquisition—in many cases it’s not.”

There is no doubting that search is reliant on other forms of advertising, one only has to look at other bits of research published over the last couple of years, such as the iProspect Search influencers study, which highlighted that two-thirds (67%) of search engine users are driven to search by an offline channel (37% of them because of TV advertising), and 39% of those offline-influenced search users ultimately make a purchase from the company that prompted their initial search - to see how much more effective search is as part of a multichannel marketing mix.

As budgets become tighter, marketing spends will have to work far harder - however online does have a significant advantage in terms of accountability, key in an environment where ever bit counts. That doesn’t mean however that other channels should be ignored…

Every now and then you read a fantastic post, that you just want to tell people about - and today is just one of those days - particularly given my recent flurry of interactions with robots protocols over the last couple of weeks.

The post in question: Vanessa Fox’s on ‘Managing Robot’s Access To Your Website‘ post over at Jane and Robot - very information and well worth a read (albeit over 5 months old):

Enjoy!

Brand Reputation is becoming a big word in marketing circles. Warfare is taken place on the search engine results pages for many brands, and is becoming an important part of the Search Marketing professionals armoury. However what should you have in your brand reputation toolkit.

1) Know where you stand

It is very difficult to understand how and where to react to an issue if you do not know what is being said about you, and there is really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to setup even the simplest of monitoring tools without spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on brand reputation software.

Simply implementing a Google Alert on your brand will give you some sort of idea of who, what and where your brand is being talked about. I would add however there are some fantastic brand reputation monitoring tools out there that do pick up a wide variety of content, across a range of different channels, and if you are considering some of these tools some of the better ones are:

• Magpie Brandwatch
• Radian 6
• Market Sentinel
• Sentiment Metrics
• Asomo
• and even Trackur from Andy Beal.

2) Dominate your brand search.

Thomas Cook - Dominating brand

There are various ways of doing this, however it is imperative you make it as difficult for a potential brand detractor to influence any searcher, by reducing visibility below the fold. The example above shows an organisation that does this very well by utilising a mixture of subdomains and domains to dominate the top 10 of searches for ‘Thomas Cook’.

3) Use your paid search tactically

Often a lot of brand reputation issues will arise in public forums such as blogs and forums. A large proportion of these sites will carry various forms of online advertising such as Google Adsense advertising, or other forms of online advertising as a way of monetising their sites.

Use of sponsored search for brand reputation

Where particular issues may arise on a suitable site, it is possible to tailor adverts to particular sites - such as Google Adwords - site placement. These ads may carry creative developed particularly for a particular issue advising browsers of where they may be able to find more applicable factual data.

4) Use your offline channels online

Modern day search pages allow search marketeers to influence a far greater proportion of the search engine results page than ever before including

• Video
• PR
• Product Feeds
• Local Listings
• and Images

Blended search allows greater brand infiltration than ever before

Using the example above, for the iPhone, advertisers are able to use a variety of channels to attract potential custom, including

• the traditional organic listings - where Apple (as you would expect dominate)
• the Paid Listings - allowing advertisers such as Carphone Warehouse and Vodaphone to advertise on these terms

but also

• PR - Taken from Google trusted news sources
• Products - taken from advertisers who have submitted Google Base Feeds.

All these channels allow a far wider variety of usage outside of pure search results, for example the video used above is obviously pulled from Youtube - and has already received nearly 6 million views since it went live.

They also tend to dominate key areas of the page, for example

• Google Products - often visible between positions 1-4 (above the fold of the screen)
• Local - Generally the first result - and highly prominent in terms of eye catchment
• PR - Often within positions 1-5
• Video - Depends but normally anywhere between 1-10

They are in many cases ‘eyeline breakers’, often breaking the natural browse of a results page, and meaning users spend more time on search pages - something Enquiro looked into recently.

5) Use Your affiliates

This is obviously going to be more pertinant to some advertisers more than others, however it is worth noting how much real estate can be taken up by affiliates. Whilst this may be a more expensive way of taking up search page real estate, it can result in some significant coverage, all of which is likely (as long as you treat them right) to result in good brand (and sales focussed) coverage.

The role of affiliates on brand searches

And more:

• Use social media (Will cover this in a later post)
• Is Wikipedia relevant - WHilst you aren’t likely to get any link juice - this does take up valuable real estate
• Create a Squidoo lens

One thing is for sure - don’t just ignore the problem. There are a number of high profile examples out there in, that highlight what happens if things are simply left to fester. Certainly people like Dell have developed a brand reputation response learned from the ‘Dell Hell’ days.

As part of our Guest Blogger series - Donna Fontenot, aka DazzlinDonna - founder of SEO-Scoop and well respected Internet Marketeer highlights her keys to creating ‘no-fail hot content’.

Would you like your site content to rank well? Would you like your content to draw links like nails to a magnet? There is one strategy you can use to make sure the content you create is almost guaranteed to be a hit - and in the process it gathers backlinks and ranks well. This strategy isn’t some secret ninja tactic that would get your site banned if the search engines found out about it either. In fact, it’s a tactic that the search engines would be happy to recommend to all site owners.
And while the actual creation of the content may take some time and effort, the concept is extremely simple. So what is this awesome strategy?

Give users something they’ve asked for that no one else has provided (or can’t be easily found).

Here’s the process I like to use.

Step One: Monitor your niche. This might mean joining forums and communities within your niche, setting up Google alerts, listening for relevant tweets, or monitoring Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers to see who is talking about what within your niche.

The Goal of Step One: Discover what people want to know about your niche. What questions are being asked?

Step Two: Search for answers to the questions discovered in Step One. Act like a normal user, and search the search engines and answer sites for content that answers the users’ questions.

The Goal of Step Two: You’ll learn three things. a) Does an answer exist within a reasonable search analysis (first 30 search results)? b) If answers do exist, are they comprehensive? Can they be improved upon? c) What’s missing?

Step Three: Create your new content strategy. After determining which questions need answers, create an outline that groups them into logical sections.

The Goal of Step Three: Having a solid plan to determine what content needs to be created, and how they will be logically grouped together.

Step Four: Create the content that answers the users’ questions.
Some articles will need to be researched. Some will require fancy graphs or charts or other visual aids to make the content stand out as an improvement upon the competitions’ content. Your own research is required to determine what form each piece of content must take.

The Goal of Step Four: Supply UNIQUE content that hasn’t been done before that specifically addresses questions users have had in the past about your niche.

By supplying this unique content, you are almost guaranteed to accomplish the following:

1. Give users exactly what they want, because you are answering the very questions they’ve had.
2. Give search engines UNIQUE content that practically guarantees a good ranking since the competition doesn’t exist.
3. Give other related sites great reasons to link to your site.

Just in case you’ve already forgotten the secret sauce to creating hot content, it was this:

Give users something they’ve asked for that no one else has provided (or can’t be easily found).

About Donna Fontenot:

Donna Fontenot, aka DazzlinDonna, is an Internet Entrepreneur and SEO, who has long utilized search engine optimization and affiliate marketing to create a successful online business. Her goal as an ebusiness coach is to help others make a living online from the comfort of their homes (and in their pajamas). Her motto is “You’ll never shine if you don’t glow.”

SEO in any ones book, seems to be in a purple patch. Certainly in the UK it appears to have gained traction into many mainstream organisations, and is now part of my FTSE 250 and Fortune 500 organisations marketing strategies. However it unfortunately is still tainted by a dark undercurrent of black hat SEO’s and link spammers which continue to create some negative association with the profession - whether that is justified or not justified is another question.

However it is a couple of posts that have been made that have got me thinking, namely Rand Fishkin’s 8 ways to buy links without ‘buying links’ and Chris Hart’s ‘What if SEO was spelled TSA’

Indeed Rand’s post is indicative of just what a different beast SEO has become. ‘Traditional’ forms of marketing such as Online PR play a far more important role in SEO than ever before - not just from a linkage perspective, but also in terms of branding and standalone traffic acquisition tools - with social media bringing a facet of marketing not previously available to marketeers (either online or offline) to the table.

Just look at metrics for measurment these days. Gone are the days when rankings were the only way to measure SEO success. Blended search has certainly created food for thought here - as well as new channels for savvy marketeers to exploit. ‘SEO’ is far more tactical than ever. Online Brand Reputation for example should have ‘SEO’ at its heart, with brand exposure and coverage more important and high profile than ever.

Surely we (as search marketeers) have evolved from merely optimising for search engine rankings alone. Is search engine optimisation therefore the best term to describe what we do?  The term ’search engine optimisation’ appears to have been around for around 11 years or so now (one of the earliest references I can find is fom David Stoddard from Frontiernet in August 1997) - however Danny Sullivan gives a great breakdown of this on the Search Engine Watch Forums. I would suggest SEO has changed significantly since then - lets face it Google was nowhere near the beast it has become, search marketing industry still in its infancy and social media just a glimmer on the horizon.

In the absence of any suitable replacements, bar ‘digital asset optimisation’ (coined by Lee Odden in 2007) it appears it is still here for a while, however one can’t help thinking whether SEO 3.0 could see a new beginning, and potentially a new name?

[ This post from Peter Young's blog contains only his personal opinions. ]