Searching on the web for a great SEO agency is like walking down London’s Mecca for curry houses, Brick Lane, to choose a place to eat. Much like the curry house staff who stand on the street touting for your custom, lots of SEO agencies claim to be “the UK’s number 1!”. All promise a coveted position on the 1st page of the search engine results pages.

Conduct a search online for an ‘SEO Agency’ in the UK alone and you will be presented with over 2 million results. So who do you choose, as a business, to assist you in building and maintaining your online brand exposure within the ever changing landscape of search engine optimisation?

While still important, SEO is no longer simply about optimising your website meta data and on-site static content with keywords and phrases that have high search volumes. Google’s latest Panda and Penguin algorithm updates both talk about the importance of publishing fresh, regularly updated content if websites want those top positions in the search engine results pages.

This means that content will surely continue to be king throughout 2012 and into next year, which has big implications when choosing an agency to manage your SEO efforts. Every business should be asking the following questions:

Can the agency produce well written, keyword rich content?

More importantly, with respect to your brand reputation, can the agency write it with authority by utilising its own expertise and knowledge of the industry your business operates in? It’s not just about the keywords here. It’s about using this fresh content to demonstrate that your business is knowledgeable, reliable and trustworthy.

Does the agency have its ear to the ground?

Without this they will find it hard to produce content for you that is not just rich in keywords and phrases but also effective in communicating your knowledge, experience and trustworthiness. An agency that truly knows your industry will also know what topics are trending, which will ultimately increase engagement with your visitors and prospective customers.

Does the agency recognise social media’s significance to SEO campaigns?

Social media isn’t just a good medium for telling the world about your hangover or how many times you blink and breathe in a day. Its use as a channel to share relevant and informative news, reviews and updates means that Social Media is becoming an important part of any link-building campaign not to mention the associated increases in digital exposure for your brand.

How proactive is the agency when it comes to keyword research?

All SEO agencies will optimise your website for relevant current high volume search terms but how many make use of insight and trend reports to track breakout search terms? As the digital search market becomes more competitive those that will see lasting success from their optimisation efforts are those that stay ahead of the competition. An agency that utilises intuitive insight and real time trend reports as part of its keyword research strategy will ensure you do just that.

Will the agency integrate the SEO campaign into a broader digital marketing strategy that you’ve invested your brand and money into?

As fresh, interesting, user-focussed content grows further in importance for successful SEO it is essential that the content produced remains consistent with the overall brand message and image presented in your other digital marketing campaigns. Hiring an agency that is familiar with your industry and that can provide an integrated digital marketing and communications service that considers SEO, PPC, Social Media and PR should be at the top of every business’ list.

Peter Palmer is a Digital Account Manager at TopLine Communications

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According to Hubspot “60% of the sales cycle is over before a lead ever talks to a salesperson, it has never been more important for marketing to be involved early in the buying process”.

Ideally, marketing involvement needs to happen right at the beginning of the sales cycle; at the marketing content creation and dissemination stage. Here you can make sure that your valuable content gets picked up by, and found in, Google as well as the various social media platforms.

However, there are still many B2B marketers not using social media strategically and harnessing the power of Social Media Optimisation (SMO, but also called Social SEO). SMO, according to Brian Solis, is defined by the distribution of social objects and their ability to rise to the top of any related search query, where and when it is performed.

So the overall goal is to boost the visibility of the content created (such as blog posts, videos, images, comments, status updates etc.). Since the B2B company blog is one of the most important conversational hubs (and since most of them are on WordPress nowadays) I’d like to give some best practices for optimising the corresponding content.

Best practice SMO for WordPress #1: Find your niche

B2B blogs are often optimised to feed Google and get ranked for long tail keywords. This is a good way of getting ranked and demonstrating expertise, gaining traffic and thought leadership at the same time. Google’s keyword tool is perhaps the best way of getting any blog posts ranked. Choose at least 3 words long keywords and find relevant searches for it – sort the results by relevance and add 3-5 relevant keywords in the text of the post including meta tags (see below).

Best practice SMO for WordPress #2: Do what Google wants

HTML meta-tags are still a main source of social media optimisation juice, basically telling Google what the post is all about.

The main keyword (or phrase) needs to be in the tag page title, and it is best put it at the beginning. It is also worthwhile mentioning it 2-3 times in the body text, but try to avoid keyword stuffing. Place relevant keywords into the meta-tag header (h1, h2, etc.) or bold them, though for user experience it makes sense to use headers to make the whole post more readable.

The meta-tag description does not influence the ranking, but it does affect the click-through rate from within the search results a great deal. Hence, it needs to be written to motivate and convince the user to click on the link and get to your site. Additionally, image alt tags can and should be social media optimised.

Best practice SMO for WordPress #3: Spread the word

The goal of social media optimisation and social media marketing for B2B is simply to reach the right audience.

For posting with one-click to the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, we recommend Hootsuite, a social media management tool. You can also achieve good results through posting into LinkedIn groups or your profile. If you’re well prepared, you will have done a social media monitoring analysis and know where the targeted audience hangs out. For B2B social media marketing, lots of relevant reach can be achieved in niche forums and communities. Good content is always welcome there!

On top of the above outbound dissemination of content, every blog needs to have share buttons (Google+, Facebook, Twitter etc. There are plenty of WordPress plug-ins available that are easy to implement on your site.

Richard Buettner is Director of Weever Media, a leading social media and SEO agency.

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By Clare Third

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that small businesses had been ‘banging down their door for the last two years’ for access to advertising on Twitter – and finally Twitter and American Express have teamed up and provided a solution which they claim is ‘a piece of cake’.

Twitter connected with American Express in March to offer its new self-service advertising program to small businesses. Initially, Twitter is extending the new program to 10,000 US based American Express card holding small businesses but is expected to eventually roll the service out more widely. American Express has also offered $100 credit to be used on Twitter advertising to the first 10,000 businesses that signed up.

So, small businesses are now getting a slightly louder voice on Twitter – but how does it work? And how is it different to the big business ‘brand pages’ already on Twitter?

Twitter’s new ‘promoted products’ come in two forms of product for small businesses on Twitter.

1. Promoted Accounts – Twitter evaluates the current followers of your small business, and then searches for people with similar interests. If a match is found, Twitter recommends you in the ‘Who to Follow’ section.

1. Promoted Tweets – Twitter constantly monitors your engagement, and automatically promotes your best tweets. Twitter puts your best tweets in front of more of the right people, at the right time. It’s even possible to specify where you want to be promoted geographically.

Now here’s the good bit. Small businesses only have to pay when

a) Somebody follows their account or

b) Engages with a promoted tweet.

Unlike a lot of ordinary advertising, small businesses would never have to pay for just appearing on somebody’s page. In other words, with Twitter’s new scheme, small businesses will only pay for performance.

Here’s a great video from Twitter on how small businesses can use the service.

It’s been over a month since the program’s launch – what are the reviews? Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that based on tests, ‘small businesses are thrilled with results’, which is great news.

What are the pros?

1. Small businesses can get their messages in front of the right people.
2. Adverts can be geographically targeted.
3. No previous advertising experience required – the new service just uses small business’ tweets as their adverts.
4. Payment is manageable, with no monthly or minimum commitments.
5. Small businesses are promoted on the web and on mobile phones.

What are the cons?

1. The program is currently only available to US based American Express cardholders
2. When the service is rolled out more widely, there is the potential for abuse of the service by spammers linking advertised malware. Lets hope Twitter has preventative measures in place.

Ed Gilligan, American Express Vice Chairman calls the program ‘a big win for small businesses now that they have a new way of reaching customers in a timely authentic way’.

The big question is whether or not Twitter’s new self-service approach will revolutionise the way small businesses operate on Twitter, and the results they will get – presumably only time will tell.

If you are a US based small business and American Express member, it’s not too late to sign up – here is the link to get you on your way!

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By Jim Beckham (@jimbeckham)  

As the newest member of the team, I had been given the responsibility, and some would say privilege, of choosing the B2B Blog of the Week. However, being relatively new to pretty much everything we do here at TopLine, my initial endeavours at finding a suitable candidate were not very successful to say the least. What I really needed was a tool that compiled the best blogs on the web into categories and then would give me some indication of which ones were successful. Luckily my ever faithful “rule of the internet” came into play here as I soon found that something I had imagined had already been made by someone else. In this case, blogRank by Invesp.com.

Back in 2009, having been publishing their own blog regularly for three years already, Invesp, who apparently focus on “Conversion Rate Optimisation”, decided that they wanted to measure its success. However, they found that existing tools were not comprehensive enough in their ranking systems to satisfy their needs, as their website explains:

“we decided to examine different factors to measure each of these elements, such as how many people read a blog, how many people subscribe to the RSS feed, how many other blogs link to your blog and more. Our aim is to help readers find the best blogs possible in the area of their interest.”

Users can select from nine different categories, each with a number of subcategories contained within them, to bring up the top 100 relevant blogs. A rating is given to each blog, along with a direct link for ease of access. For example, we recently used this system to compare the top 100 blogs relating to small businesses. Ranking is updated daily, so if a new post suddenly draws a particular blog hundreds of followers, this will very quickly be reflected in the ranking system.

blogRank’s main competitor, Technorati, certainly has the edge over it in some aspects – specifically a more stylish interface, with a short synopsis and preview pictures for each blog on the ranking page – and as such is likely to be leading in this field for the foreseeable future. Yet I can’t help but feel a pang of affection for this little underdog tool which, if the difficulty I had in finding a link to it from the Invesp homepage is anything to go by, seems to have been left by the wayside to some extent, even perhaps by its creators.

But beneath its straightforward, no nonsense look lies a very powerful and complex tool that took over eight months to develop. The comprehensive system collects data on thousands of blogs, and categorises them based on over 20 different factors. Upon launch it had already looked at 20,000 blogs and sorted them into 50 different topics.

It is clear from blogRank’s website that it considers itself a superior tool compared to Technorati, for the following reasons:

“1) Technorati’s Authority ranking is not focused on listing the top 100 blogs in specific categories across the blogosphere.
2) Authority ranking relies solely on incoming links to a blog for its ranking. This is only one of the factors we use in ranking.
3) Most other ranking systems use only 8 or 9 factors to measure a blog’s success, while we use over 20.”

What I like most about blogRank is that it does not simply present the viewer with a single ranking table, but instead lets the results be sorted by a number of specific factors as well. This means that if you are looking for blogs that have the most unique monthly visitors, for example, you can rank them according to this regardless of their Alexa ranking or Google indexed pages.

So, despite this being a blog post about finding a blog to post about, I have a strong feeling that blogRank will be used here at TopLine in the future, especially because, despite the technical aspects behind it being quite complex, the front end of the product is so easy to use and straightforward. So, congratulations blogRank on being our B2B Blog of the Week!

In retrospect my earlier comment about blogRank not being highlighted on the main Invesp site doesn’t really matter. The majority of traffic I imagine will come from search engines, and in this respect the people behind the SEO probably couldn’t have been any more effective. Well, unless perhaps if they’d been led by Gordon Ramsey – “want to rank blogs? blogRank. DONE”.

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What is HTML 5?

HTML 5 essentially means that instead of having to worry about downloading flash plug-ins, you will be able to view videos and pictures on all media platforms from computers to mobile phones.

HTML or hypertext mark-up language is the code that determines how your website looks and functions. When it was first created in the early 1990s, HTML was fairly basic and uploaded multimedia content slowly. Macromedia’s Flash, however, came along in the mid-nineties and changed the way websites used animations, video and graphics.

Until now when companies have built websites they have had to rely on third parties like Flash or QuickTime if they want to include multimedia. HTML has never supported video natively so it isn’t surprising that HTML 5 is attracting a lot of attention.

Put simply, when you visit a website built using HTML 5, there will be a much smaller chance of you coming across a black hole in the middle of the page or getting those endless prompts to ‘download a plug-in’.

The biggest promise that HTML 5 brings with it is the potential for a cross platform experience: you will be able to load a website on a mobile device, a PC or a TV and it will look exactly the same and have the same functionality. As users of its products know only too well, Apple will not allow Flash to run on any of their iOS devices including the iPhone and iPad. The success of their products globally shows that companies cannot ignore the need to recode their websites in HTML 5.

Should you jump on the bandwagon?

Many big businesses have begun overhauling their websites and are not waiting for the HTML 5 specs to be finalised, using unofficial versions of the code. While HTML 5 will make it much easier for you to make your website more visually appealing, there is no need to rush.

For small companies, like us, it is worthwhile waiting for the HTML 5 standards to mature and for HTML 5 to be widely adopted. You do not have control over your client’s applications (browsers) and many of these still won’t be advanced enough to read HTML 5. If you adopt HTML 5 too early you could exclude some of your community from engagement.

The latest version of HTML can perform all kinds of dynamic tasks and visual tricks and promises plenty for the future, but for now it is best just to be aware of it and bide your time as its development progresses.

Natalie Price, Marketing, SilverDoor

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In the past, when we have built new websites for clients, part of the process has been to submit the new site’s URL to Google and other search engines so that they can index it and include it in search results as quickly as possible. It’s not that long ago when it could take several weeks before a site appeared within search result pages, a process that has speeded up thanks to links posted social media platforms.
As a social media junkie I’ve often wondered how quickly this could be done. Last week I had the chance to find out.
Revolution Public Relations recently agreed to merge with Cinnamon Communications to create a bigger business offering our clients a greater range of services. This brought a necessity of rebranding, and a major part of this exercise was the creation of a new website, giving me the opportunity to see how quickly the search engines would find the site simply by putting links to it on a few social media platforms. I was particularly interested to see how quickly a link on Google Plus would lead to the site being indexed by the search engine itself.

First things first, the finished site, www.the-flashbulb.com, went live for anyone to see on 28th April. The new business was to be officially launched two days later on Monday 30th, but I was keen to get on with my social media experiment!

On the same day that the website went live I amended the old Revolution PR Google Plus page, changing the name, logo and, more importantly the website’s URL on the profile. I also started Tweeting from a new Twitter account: @Ideas_Exposure, to start building up a following. Then I sat back and waited.
Nothing happened.

All over the weekend I was checking Google and searching for “Flashbulb PR and Marketing”.
Nothing.

Monday was the day of our big launch to the market and one of our priorities was the creation of a new “Flashbulb” profile page on LinkedIn and the altering all individual staff profiles on LinkedIn.

Monday afternoon came but still nothing was showing up on Google.

What had happened to Google Plus? I was sure that the main search engine would have found the website fairly quickly via its own social media platform. Meanwhile we were busy on Twitter @ideas_exposure and issued a news release regarding our merger, which quickly appeared on Features Exec later that afternoon.

Then the world’s favourite search engine threw up a search result that showed it had crawled LinkedIn and indexed our new profile page. I spotted this about nine hours after it had been created. Then later on Monday Microsoft’s Bing found our website and indexed it. I can’t be sure but suspected at the time that it had found its way there via LinkedIn.

The news story on FeaturesExec was also indexed and included in Google’s search results within 24 hours, highlighting the importance of getting news releases online and not just in the printed media.

Our Google Plus profile page started showing up in the Google search results on the Tuesday, it was another step in the right direction.

At about that time Google also found our Twitter feed and indexed it. This happened shortly after one of my co-directors had retweeted something from the company’s feed, which might tell us something about the importance of getting retweets.

About 72 hours after we announced the new business to the world, Google search results finally included pages from our website ñ it had taken five days.

Or had it?

A closer inspection Google’s cache showed that the search engine had actually crawled the site within 24 hours of it going live, i.e. on the Sunday morning. At that time the only link to the site had been on our new Google Plus profile page. It did however take a further four days before it was included in the search results.
I’m at a loss as to why it took so long for the pages to appear in search results, but am rather pleased that by posting on Google Plus I had confirmed what I had previously been telling people – that posting content on Google’s own social media platform is, in effect, placing it into the heart of the beast. It just took a while for it to appear!
So what have I learnt from my little experiment? A good deal about how frequently the search engines crawl the major social media platforms, underling how closely social media and search engine marketing have become entwined and the importance to businesses of integrating their website with a wider digital and social media strategy.

 
Andrew Barber (aka Paddy) has over twenty years experience of marketing and public relations in the commercial property sector, having started his career as an office and industrial surveyor. After twelve years he made the switch to a PR, media relations and marketing role and since 2001 has advised property investors, developers, surveyors and agents on corporate marketing, publicity and media strategies within the UK and European commercial property markets.
He established Revolution Public Relations with Kate Titchmarsh, as a specialist PR and media relations consultancy within the property sector and in 2012 merged the business with Cinnamon Communications to become Flashbulb.
Andrew contributes a regular blog for Property Weekís website regarding online search and social media and has lectured on Public Relations and the use of social media within PR at the University for the Creative Arts.
He can be followed on Twitter @PaddyTheDaddy.

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Are you new to social media? Not sure where to start, or why social media is so important? Here we’ve grabbed our 10 favourite and most useful posts to get you started.

1. What’s the point? The value of B2B Social Media Marketing

2. Planning part 1: Setting social media objectives

3. Ten questions you should ask when designing a b2b social media strategy (and how to answer them)

4. Organising social media management within the organisation

5. Why B2B social media campaigns fail

6. What is SaaS?

7. You heard it on Twitter first

8. How to Prove You’re a Social Media Amateur

9. Social Media In Demand Generation

10.467 Social media usage statistics

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by Hannah Stacey (@hanstacey)

 Do you love gambling? Or do you know someone who likes gambling? Maybe your cat is a poker enthusiast.  Perhaps you once unwittingly saw a picture of a slot machine.  Regardless, read on because this is probably the best post about gambling influencers that you’ll read this week, and you wouldn’t want to miss a trick.

1)    PokerPlayer Magazine – These guys’ Facebook page has interviews with people who are good at poker, articles about how to be good at poker and even news from their tour, where you can watch people being good at poker. All in all, if poker’s something you want to be good at, head to this page.

2)    The Poker Players’ Alliance – If it’s angry poker players you’re into then look no further than this Facebook page. Although it’s based in the US, this is a great resource for anyone interested in issues within the poker industry.  At the moment, they’re pretty hopping mad at congress. They even made t-shirts about it, that’s how angry they are.

3)    BettingExpert.com – I used to think travelling into the future was something that only Doctor Who and Doc Brown could do.  If you possess neither time travelling skills nor a medical license, and want the best predictions about what’s going to happen (in this case in the sporting world), head over to Betting Expert – it’s where all the tipster cool kids hang out.

4)    Woman Poker Player Magazine – This page has over 17,000 likes. Seventeen thousand. I didn’t even know that many women existed. Amongst articles about poker stars of the female persuasion, the magazine also posts handy links on all those topics that women love, like fashion, cooking tips and weight loss. Cute.

5)    GoldenBoysBet – New betting kids on the block GoldenBoys have come up with a pretty gosh darn splendid page that proffers a pleasing melange of news, views and their new competition, which gives punters the chance to live like a millionaire for a weekend. On top of this, their ‘millionaire’s newsfeed’ fills fans in on the debaucheries of the country’s rich and famous. Top notch.

6)    Bluff Magazine – Bluff Magazine might be ‘poker’s leading publication’, and their Facebook page might report on all the latest poker industry news. Or are they just pulling our leg?

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Updated 02/05/2012

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Mike Stiles

It seems like everyone wants to be famous these days.  People dream of being actors, actresses, singers, athletes, whatever will lift them above the masses and establish them as something special, something above and beyond the norm.  They want the public to love them so much they’ll follow their every move with rapt attention, seek out and purchase every product that’s theirs or that has their name attached to it, and read every word written about them.  They want to be dominant in hearts and minds.

Ben Lashes is a meme manager, an agent for Internet stars of the Internet.  He reps memes like Keyboard Cat, Nyan Cat and Scumbag Steve, as well as their creators.  His belief is that the people who create Internet phenomena are stunned by, and not accustomed to, the sudden fame that comes their way.  They don’t know how to represent themselves when dubious operations start using, without pay or permission, their content.  He says, “Anything you can’t do to Mickey Mouse, you shouldn’t be able to do to memes.”  But, whereas huge corporate entities like Disney develop content slowly and methodically, the digital content being generated by all the twisted minds out there gets created, posted and discovered in a flash…unencumbered.

George Takei had plenty of fame as “Star Trek’s” Sulu.  But his digital antics have taken his persona and fame into a current and relevant arena that goes far beyond appearances at the occasional Trek convention.  His funny photos and memes get crazy engagement levels, even beating out Rihanna, the most liked person on Facebook.  He has 1,624,780 likes on Facebook and 348,019 Twitter followers.  If a post gets 50,000 likes and 30,000 shares, that’s not an aberration, it’s par for the course.  Takei has extended his fame by reinventing himself as a social celebrity.

Why am I telling you B2B social marketers about these two fellows?  Because they can teach you how to turn your brand into a celebrity.  Many of the same traits and tactics that turn unknowns into celebrities seemingly overnight can be spun and applied to the social platforms to give your brand a taste of fame.  Here are just a few ways you can possibly make it happen.

1. Do something!  You have to do something if you want people to notice you.  It should stand out, be memorable, and get people talking about you.  You can take just about any famous person and trace their fame back to one specific product or moment that “launched” them to fame.  What’s yours going to be?

2. You have to come across as cool, because the opposite of cool is “lame.”  If the content you put out is safe, makes no waves, and isn’t attention getting, then it (and your brand by association), is lame.  You can’t be lame, then expect people to want to be identified with you.

3. Create a culture around your brand.  I’ll go ahead and give you the best example of this there is…Apple.  Apple isn’t just a line of products.  It’s a culture.  It’s a way of life.  Every experience associated with Apple, from their product design to their packaging to their Apple Stores to their Genius Bars, is one of many components that create a culture and aura around the brand.  Your corporate culture has to yield to a much hipper public culture.

4. Have you been struggling to get people to Like your Page on Facebook?  George Takei didn’t “struggle” to get his knockout numbers.  Keyboard Cat didn’t “struggle” to get the attention it got.  Cold hard truth: if people already adore you, getting Liked will be no problem at all.  You won’t be able to stop it.  If the public is reluctant to Like your brand, then the brand has problems that go well beyond what’s happening on its social streams.

5. Getting famous requires guts, risk, a willingness to fall flat on your face, a commitment to pleasing fans, and a burning hunger to leave your competition in the dust.  Sadly, none of these things are very common in or indicative of most corporate cultures.  Never experimenting, being too thin-skinned, not really caring if you get praise or applause from customers…these are all sure paths to total anonymity.

Do you want your brand to be a rock star?  Do you want to hear customers chanting your name?  Do you want to see them standing in line to get your product?  Then you’ve got to do what every show business dreamer has done, do whatever it takes along the way to make it, and don’t stop until you get there.

About the Author

 Mike Stiles is a content specialist, writer, blogger and producer with Vitrue, the leading social relationship management technology platform in the industry.

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