Digital Marketing

The basis of how good a website’s SEO value is is judged on many aspects, but most consider the most important factor to be the SEO ‘equity’ passed to the site from external linking sources. These ‘backlinks’ are monitored to try and gain an understanding of the value that they are passing to the site. There are many tools that allow you to measure these values, one of which is Majestic SEO.

Yesterday Majestic SEO announced two new link metrics, Citation Flow and Trust Flow, for measuring the perceived quality of a domain, subdomain or page.

Google.co.uk

Over the last couple of years the use of Google’s PageRank measurement has seen a decline and SEOMoz’s MozRank has taken over as the go-to measurement of value. Majestic SEO are now claiming that their new metrics are the successor, with a much more useful set of measures.

Citation Flow – This number predicts how influential a URL might be based on the number of sites linking to it. The more links that the site has, the higher it’s Citation Flow.
Trust Flow – This number predicts how trustworthy a URL might be based on a backlink’s proximity to trusted domains. Links from within trusted neighbourhoods are more trustworthy than links from spammy neighbourhoods. Read more…

A recent report published by social media analytics experts Simply Measured unveiled that automotive, electronics and luxury are the top 3 industries on Google+ user engagement within the Interbrand Top 100 brands. According to Simply Measured CEO Adam Schoenfeld  ”luxury and automotive brands are clearly finding Google+ to be an effective way to connect with consumers”.

Brands like Ferrari, GUCCI and Burberry appear to be in the top of the Interbrand Top 100 list in the number Google+ circlers (followers). Read more…

The brightonSEO conference earlier this month came and went with a flurry of insight and opinion, and a hadouken.

Those returning after a classic sun-drenched Brighton lunch hour were treated to a presentation from iCrossing’s very own Charlie Peverett. He told a tale of innocence, how he spent his days as an editor blissfully oblivious to the intricacies of SEO. However, when the curtain was pulled back he peered into a murky world that revealed the true reason why nobody was reading his content

The presentation is now available to view in all its glory, where you’ll discover why ‘great content’ is more than just a check box on a SEO to do list (an issue discussed in greater depth in our latest ebook, How to Plan a Content Strategy).

If you pay attention you may spot a random satsuma. Read more…

After 2 somewhat unpredicatble and very compelling races here are the results for the last 2. Apologies for the slight delay on these it has been a manic couple of weeks for Creative HQ!

We particularly like the look of Shanghai!

Read more…

Today Eloqua published The Blog Tree: UK Edition, their latest infographic centering on bloggers in the UK. It shows the most influential marketing-related blogs in the UK, and we’re thrilled that Connect has been included!

Read more…

I’m participating in an event next Wednesday which iCrossing is hosting in association with Travolution called When Travel Brands Fight Back. I felt it would be great to set the scene a little ahead of times and maybe even start the debate early!

So, what prompted us to choose this particular topic? Here’s a perspective on where the online travel sector is now and how we got there for big travel brands like legacy airlines and major tour operators. It’s intentionally simplified to make a point and, I hope, to catalyse the discussion.

Cutting costs, cutting service?
It starts about a decade ago when online purchasing technology really started to work. Suddenly websites could be much more than just a bit of window dressing. These technical advances offered huge opportunities for achieving economies of scale. You could now service lots of people at the same time – who needs telesales people or travel agents if a customer can query the booking database themselves and book their own flight or holiday? Cue big investment in web dev and cutting back on traditional customer service and sales channels like travel agents, brochures and telesales agents.

In the short term it probably worked – margins improved, the finance team were happy. But the technology wasn’t as good as it first appeared. (I often think we forget how maddeningly slow it was and how often it fell over in the early days.) From feeling like they were in control (and liking that feeling) customers began to sometimes feel powerless. And that made them really frustrated.

A customer service vacuum developed. The new technology promised more than it delivered – but when it went wrong, companies often weren’t well enough resourced to deal with the problems. Read more…

iCrossing’s Fashion & Retail Editor Jo-ann Fortune talks to some of the UK’s top fashion bloggers about their experiences of working with brands.

Take some tips on how to, and how not to, go about working with fashion bloggers from the writers themselves:

Dos

“The best brand collaborations involve working with individuals that respect the fact that blogging is a business – actually compensating bloggers for their time, blog space and the promotional value they give to brands.” Audrey Rogers www.befrassy.com

“One of the best brand collaborations I’ve been involved in was when I was asked to dress the windows of a well-known high fashion store on Bond Street. Seeing my name on the window felt like such amazing recognition.” Carrie Harwood www.wishwishwish.net

“I really enjoyed a high fashion brand’s window-dressing event in Milan last season, and this season’s Lomography follow-up, and loved working with another designer brand to create my dream piece – a biker jacket with a hoodie inside.” Kristin Knox www.theclotheswhisperer.co.uk

“The more relevant information I get and the greater access to the products I have, the better the content I can produce around it.” Laetitia Wajnapel www.mademoisellerobot.com

Don’ts

“Some agencies are woefully behind when it comes to blogger outreach. Anyone still sending those ‘dear blogger’ emails needs a refresher course!” Jen Holmes www.littlebirdfashion.com Read more…

For those of you that are not familiar with the Search Alliance, it is an initiative that Yahoo! and Microsoft are taking to create a competitive choice for both advertisers and users in the marketplace.

Essentially, paid search results on Yahoo! are now going to be powered by Microsoft.  This means that our current Yahoo! accounts will cease to exist once the transition is complete.  The accounts that we have set up in BING will supply the search results in Yahoo!

To prepare for this transition, I have created suggestions and tips on how to make sure you safe guard your accounts from experiencing negative effects from the search alliance.

Actions that need to be taken before and during the transition of your accounts:

1. Advertisers should make sure that their clients know what the search alliance is. Make sure to communicate possible changes in the accounts before the transition occurs.
2. Yahoo representatives will now be managing the BING Accounts.  If you do not have a BING account set up in adCenter, get this account established and open an IO with your Yahoo representative.  Make sure that you discuss any discounts that you previously had with BING.  You will not be receiving the same discount after the alliance and you will need to start a dialogue with your representatives about what changes you should expect.
3. Have your Yahoo! representative perform a gap analysis between your Yahoo! and BING accounts and use this analysis to add keywords into your BING account. It might be good to mirror over your best performing Google accounts into MSN before the alliance so that you capture any traffic that could be lost.
4. Think about the possibilities of beginning or re-engaging SEO efforts in MSN and Google to counter any negative effects on traffic and performance.
5. As the transition occurs, increase your adCenter budgets.  Your Yahoo! and BING accounts will now be serving from one account, so you will need to allocate what you would be spending previously in Yahoo! and BING to your BING budgets.
6. Download the new version of the Desktop tool (8.3)
7. Continue to monitor your accounts for the changes that occur after the alliance and communicate the changes and trends that you are seeing to your account manager at Yahoo! and to your internal team.
8. Use search query reports (found on the reports tab in the engine) before and after migration. Read more…

Google Chrome is set to overtake Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the world’s most popular browser in May, finally ending Microsoft’s dominance.

Sunday the 18^th of March 2012 was an historic day in the browser wars, with Google Chrome finally overtaking Internet Explorer to take the top spot for the day in terms of global browser market share. Whilst this victory was short-lived, with Internet Explorer regaining its crown come Monday morning, it shows the impressive gains that Chrome has made since it was launched in December 2008.

The next question can only be: when will Chrome overtake IE for good?

Extrapolating the monthly market share for the two browsers shows that Google Chrome is set to continue its surge to permanently best Internet Explorer in May this year to become the world’s most popular browser.

But since Chrome will not overtake IE until the end of the month, we need to look deeper to see the point where Chrome has already passed IE. Read more…

Google has recently started taking action against blog networks in an attempt to remove low quality websites from its index. It is estimated that several thousand domains have already been removed from Google’s index and the number is likely to increase further in the forthcoming weeks or months. That means that hundreds of millions of links have been completely devalued affecting the rankings of several websites, directly or indirectly.

Carrying out a thorough backlinks audit for new clients is extremely important to us because it allows us to:

1. Get a good understanding of the link profile to their site and the quality of the historical backlinks
2. Work out the chances of losing some link equity in the foreseeable future
3. Closely monitor link equity loss on a weekly/monthly basis, react quickly and modify our link strategy if necessary
4. Forecast more accurately on ranking improvements and traffic growth

Preparing The Data

First and foremost we need to collect as much backlink data as possible. Exporting data from the following sources would make the data-set quite reliable – the more data, the better.

Majestic SEO Data

Majestic SEO historic index offers invaluable data about a site’s backlinks and should almost definitely be the primary source of backlinks data. Read more…