Introduction

As this was part of a panel (with Shira Abel of Hunter and Bard, Jon Sumroy of National Positions and our fearless moderater Sam Michelson of Five Blocks) I wanted to focus quite specifically on reputation in the search results; rather than the social media sphere in order to prevent too much overlap.

My perspective on ORM in the search results (and therefore the wider content/reputation messages these results point to) is not about trying to “control” search results, but more about a strategic approach to message-management; with content-strategy, message position and communication tools being the essential stages to managing a campaign.

Getting decent citations and links from local websites should be a fundamental part of any local SEO strategy. I’m a firm believer that this should mean getting out and meeting real people and forming real relationships. Spurting out link requests all day long can drive pretty much anyone to despair. Getting involved in your local business community is a lot more enjoyable and can be really productive in terms of business development AND your local rankings. In fact, this is all about thinking way beyond just getting links. If you can build up real partnerships and earn a good local reputation, the links you need should follow.

What I’m not saying is that the normal methods of SEO and link building can just be forgotten about; making sure your website is SEO friendly and optimised correctly, whilst at the same time building your domain’s authority are still vital. But how about going the extra mile and making a real impact in your local area? If you can incorporate this into your existing online work, then you should be in a much stronger position to dominate the local search results.

So how can you go about making a start in taking your online efforts offline? I’ve personally been looking at ways in which I can improve our local presence at Go Search Marketing, and without too much effort found some pretty interesting ideas:

Networking Events

Just by searching for networking events in my local area, I immediately found quite a nice selection of organisations who host a variety of different networking events where local businesses can get to know each other. One of the most popular style of events I found were breakfast meetings where for the price of a decent breakfast you get to get to know other business owners over a plate of bacon, eggs and of course a fresh coffee.

Due to my standard pre 9am personality failure (just ask my wife), I thought I’d search for some other options and there were plenty around. Ranging from evening events, business awards and workshops, there are absolutely tons of ways that I could go out and start getting involved with other like minded business folk. Taking this back to local SEO, it shouldn’t be too hard to find people with websites that could be interested on working together on some content, or recommending each other’s services (via links). If all else fails then at least you’ve had some decent grub along the way.

Partnerships

It would be pretty unlikely if your local area didn’t feature some businesses with which you could potentially partner up with in some way. Even if it’s just a case of recommending related services, or coming to some agreement with regards to referring clients; there are always opportunities, you’ve just got to find them.

Even though your end goal might be to get some links, try to separate yourself as far as possible from that state of mind. When contacting someone for the first time try not to even mention links or anything to do with SEO. Instead, why not try asking if they’d like to meet for coffee sometime and seeing if there’s any possibility of getting involved and potentially helping each other out with business?

Local Community Projects

How about looking out for local community events and projects that your company can get involved with? If you’re reading your local press on a regular basis, you should easily be able to find some events or projects to help out with or maybe sponsor. For example, in my town every year we have a ‘Race for Life’ which helps to raise awareness for breast cancer. That’s a great opportunity to get involved and help out. Are there any small charities operating in your area? Small charities are usually really gratefully for any help they can get, so why not get in touch and see if you can help out a little?

There’s quite a lot of debate over whether it’s ethical or not to donate time or money to charity for the purpose of building links. My personal view is that it all depends on your attitude and relationship with the charity or local project. If you’re fully committed to helping out and being involved and you happen to get a few links for it, then to me that’s no problem.

Local Societies

Does your town or city have any clubs or societies that hold events? It would be quite unlikely if there was nothing going on at all. Often, smaller societies and clubs are on the lookout for new ideas for their events as they need to fill their calendar and keep their members entertained. It might be Worthing speaking to some of them to find out if there are any speaking opportunities, or maybe to find out if they are looking for anyone to sponsor any upcoming events.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how SEO and online marketing needs to become more and more integrated with offline marketing and genuine relationship building. With all these great opportunities right on your doorstep, this is approach is none more true than with local search.

About me: I run Go Search Marketing, an SEO consulting business offering advice and services to SME’s and local businesses. Feel free to come and say hi or throw me any questions on twitter @jonquinton1

Completing my response to the report was an enjoyable and interesting experience, as we were asked to consider factors such as

• how much education plays a role in producing quality content
• what we look for in a writer
• what university education (or lack thereof) has done for our own business

You can get your own copy of the report completely free when you sign up to Angie’s newsletter, or if you would prefer to find out more about the sort of content Angie will be providing in her newsletter then read a little more about it here.

I was aware of the Digital Surrey community, and on a recent trip to leading Surrey Online PR Agency, thebluedoor to deliver some advanced SEO training via SEO PR Training; was invited to attend the next event by the team there, who are instrumental in supporting and organising the Digital Surrey events.

The event on April 20th promises to be something extra special, as the format will consist of what is known as Pecha Kucha style, which restricts each speaker to a very strict 6:40 slot.

Although tickets for Digital Surrey April have already “sold” out (it’s free, but you know what I mean) you can register your interest should space become available!

http://digitalsurreyapril.eventbrite.com/

It’s a hotly contested topic at the moment, with many large media and organisations such as NMA and Econsultancy also debating which discipline is best qualified to own your strategy and budget, with Chris Lake of Econsultancy telling brand owners “your social media strategy shouldn’t be owned by a PR or ad agency“.

Registration is free and the event starts with a little light networking at 4.30, with the debate commencing at 5.30. Drinks and refreshments will be served.

Arguing their respective case:

Digital Marketers: Andy Oakes, NMA (New Media Age)

SEO specialists: Kevin Gibbons,  SEOptimise

PR specialists: Claire Thompson, Waves PR

Social Technologists: Benjamin Ellis, Redcatco

Social Media specialists: Nichola Stott, theMediaFlow

Event hashtag = #ownSMW

See you there!

The job of an SEO is not getting easier, but they can handle it.

One thing I often proclaim is that people should start looking outside of their websites when trying top optimize for search engines. Branding and marketing are becoming more important on places where people exactly are and search is going to play a much bigger role in branding than it did until now. I’ve written about that several times and I’ve even talked about it many times.

One thing I always have to watch out for when I’m saying these things is that people think they can ignore all the on site elements except for linkbuilding and that life has just become a lot easier, because you don’t need SEO anymore.

Here is where my story hits a ‘dangerous’ area. Because I do not believe that you do not need SEO anymore. In fact, SEO is the basis for becoming successful in your marketing and branding efforts. So on site SEO should be step 1, off- site SEO step 2. And though opportunities are growing, it is definitely not becoming ‘easier’ to optimize. The job of an SEO just got a bit more difficult again. But the SEO professional can handle that…

The job of an SEO evolved more or less from the job of a programmer. What you can see is that many programmers caught the “SEO-bug” and started working on optimizing websites from a code-perspective. Trying to make sites rank better based on things they can change in the code. That slowly changed when the technical parts were not the only ranking factors anymore. In came the textual part. When search engines decided a page was going to be ranked based on the content, all of a sudden SEOs were forced to think about text. And that is not always easy for a technical person who sometimes rather “talks-in-code” than in text.

But the SEOs got the hang of it and now had two major things they were supposed to do: optimize a website based on text and optimize the code. Or wait, is there more? Yes there is. Remember the idea Larry Page once had,.. Pagerank? This algorithm meant that another huge ranking factor is links. Links from other websites. So the SEO needed to do three things: think about the content, optimize the technique and get links. They could get links
technically by simply building a lot of sites but they should also get in touch with other website owners to ask them for links. In a way they were ‘selling’ their own sites to get the links.

Maybe the fact that SEOs are not sales people has something to do with some of the crappy link-exchange requests we get daily?

At this time an SEO combined three jobs in one: a technical programmer, a content writer/ editor and a sales person. And don’t think that each of the jobs they have to do is simply following a list. With the ever changing search engines the way things work within all of these areas can change from one day to another, just look at all the local aspects. Must be hard to do that within 40 hours. But hey, the SEO did it!

So that was the job of an SEO. And in comes web 2.0. Social Media, websites like Slideshare, Scribd, video sites like YouTube. You can all use them to get your brand out there and make a name for yourself. For that you need to first find out which are the places you want to be. Then optimize for that specific place and then get it all back to the original place you were optimizing for: your website.

This last change, the one I keep on talking about to many people is a change which also is added to the job-description of the SEO. They now have a fourth job to combine: marketer. And you know what? They just do it.

I don’t think you’ll hear of many jobs who have four that different jobs hidden inside one job. With the latest change, the SEOs job just got a little bit more difficult. But the SEOs can handle that, trust me

Bio

Bas van den Beld is a Web/search strategist, international search specialist, trainer, and well-respected blogger. Bas keeps up to date about all facets of online marketing worldwide and especially Europe.

Bas is the owner of Stateofsearch.com. He is also the owner of NetTraject, a Dutch company that advises on international search matters and provides training in search engine marketing and project management.

Bas is also a regular speaker on different marketing and search events. He’s also host of several podcasts, including a weekly show on a WebmasterRadio.FM. Bas also publishes on his personal blog, www.basvandenbeld.com.

SEO-driven releases may be more likely to land up in a content aggregation site than they are ever to land up in a journalist’s in box, but they will be read by people as well as search engines, and in an ideal world will make people want to know more than simply what ranking Google delivers. The bunch of words created deserves also to be compelling reading.  And when it’s a press release, the reader expects news.

Before we start, we’ve all heard those comical rushed provisos, terms and conditions – the verbal equivalent of small print – at the end of radio ads. This next bit is the written equivalent of one of those: if the release you’re creating is for a highly regulated industry, such as financial services and pharmaceuticals, or for a listed company, it’s important to double check the specific rules relating to information release.

And think which type of person you would like to be reading your release (customer, partner, potential employee) and write in a style addressing them. Don’t fall into stereotype traps though – the results can be hysterical. The picture to the right is a great piece of government speak to teenagers in ‘text talk’ poster. You can see what the kids made of that.

I’ve made a recording with the key advice for creating releases on it, mainly because once I got stuck into this article, it drivelled on for far too long, but the key elements of a release, summarised, are:

1. Straightforward title explaining the story
2. First paragraph giving the important bits – who, what, where when, why in two sentences, top off with the reason anyone should give a monkey’s
3. Details of story
4. Optional: APPROVED quotes if used, properly attributed
5. Marker for the end of the story. (Conventions are to used the words /ENDS or ##)

The bit after the ‘end’ should be back up information, usually headed up ‘notes for editors

1. A ‘boilerplate’ – a standard description of around a paragraph in length, used for consistency, to describe the issuing organisation(s)
2. Additional information pertinent to, but not part of, the story
3. Any legal stuff that the lawyers insist on
4. Contact details

Generally the most important information needs to be highest up in the press release. With each passing paragraph you lose readers, so make sure it hooks the reader from the start. Any corporate guff needs to be right down at the end.

For myself, I usually make a bullet point list/mindmap of things I want to get into a story, and then try telling the story out loud, as if to a stranger in a bar. It works for me in an otherwise empty office. I can see some drawbacks in a crowded coffee bar. The aim is to cut out the unnecessary detail – or at least highlight what can appear further down the release.

This approach helps create a more natural tone too. Corporate speak and jargon are un-necessary. Check out Tim Phillips’ Talk Normal blog [http://talknormal.co.uk/] for some amusing rants about the kind of thing I mean. Sometimes it’s the professionals who are the worst offenders.

Most of all, think like a reporter – you want other people to pick up on what you’ve written and find out more, so deliver it like a reporter: in the third person (he, she, they rather than I and we), as factually and as interestingly as possible. And above all, honestly. Lying in such a public forum has to count as really dumb: unless, of course, you have a very dodgy PR strategy of creating a huge storm./ends

Claire Thompson, Waves PR is a freelance PR consultant with sometimes colliding passions for technology and the environment. She has worked on many campaigns campaigns from the big guys, like Kodak, Oracle and Apple, through to pre-launch start ups, including LastMinute.com in its early days. She can be found most places ‘socially’ as claireatwaves, but mostly only has time for Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIN. Tel: +44 (0) 207 795 8147.