The time is 5.01pm so we know that all the SEO programmers have gone home and it’s safe to relay some of the reasons why PPC trounces SEO every day of the week (apart from the weekend because I’ve scheduled our campaign not to appear…because I can).

Now it’s time to pool all the reasons why PPC is better than SEO into a hat and draw them out at random (seeing as there are enough here to write a series of books)….we start with…. Speed

The fact that, in PPC, results can be measured and understood from day 1 shows the speed at which you can get your campaign up and running and start to see a return on your investment. Heavy investment over many, many months in SEO could possibly end up outperforming a PPC campaign, it might, but it might not, in PPC we are able to make immediate changes and improvements in response to the moving goalposts and evolving business landscape. We can change the focus of a campaign almost immediately, responding to seasonality and time sensitive promotions, like a grizzly bear hibernating in winter, we can relinquish presence when times are hard with the knowledge that the stable environment we are in guarantees that we can regain that market share when things pick up. New findings and better understanding can quickly be used to benefit your account…and constant reporting gives clients the immediate understanding of where their money is being spent and what they are getting in return for that spend.

PPC Wins…1-0

Next out of the hat is….Ad Copy.

Firstly, its plainly obvious that in PPC campaigns we can efficiently decide what it is that a user views when they see your ad, this can include up to date offers, call to actions, relevant ad text, phone numbers, extensions to the ads such as call extensions, product extensions, location extensions and social media extensions, we can create text ads, image ads or video ads, our ads can appear away from Google search, using understanding, experience and FACTS & FIGURES we can place the ads in places and on websites where they are most likely to lead to a conversion…. added to all this we can constantly review the ad copy in use, making changes to respond to seasonality, new offers, competitor ads, quality of traffic and performance statistics, we can tailor our ads to specific needs whether it is to increase brand recognition, drive more revenue, increase the volume of leads or increase awareness. The uses and advantages of creating and managing your own ads are endless.

Errrm PPC Wins again….2-0

This is going to be a landslide victory by the look of it. The fact is that a well managed Campaign with a real understanding of how best PPC can benefit you is a must for any business. The mixture of imaginative ads, analytical understanding and constant monitoring far outperforms the smokes and mirrors and pin the tail on the donkey tactics employed by our friends in SEO. So can they claw it back this hammering so far?

For more reasons of why PPC outclasses SEO (and surely end up winning 52-0) please follow us on twitter during 2012 #PPCvsSEO

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It is possible that your target market will bring up Google in their web browser and type in a commonly misspelled version of a key term you are targeting completely by accident. For example, if your organisation targets the keywords ‘tattoos’, ‘tattoo parlour’ and ‘men’s tattoos’; your customers could still easily be searching for ‘tatoos’, ‘tatoo parlour’ and ‘men’s tatoos’.

Many organisations therefore insist on targeting misspelt versions of words contained in their key search terms, in a bid to drive a new realm of traffic to the website. On the surface, this makes sense, especially when you get the Google AdWords keyword tool involved.

According to the tool, the word ‘mortgage’ has global monthly searches of 16,600,000, whilst the common misspelling of this word, ‘morgage’, has 246,000. Surely by inserting ‘morgage’ into your content a few times, you can therefore tap into these 246,000 searches and target new traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. In fact, I think it’s utterly pointless for two main reasons.

Reason 1: Search engines conduct spell checks

In Google’s search results, you will always know when you have spelt a word wrong in your search if the following appears:

As we all know, the search engines – Google in particular – are not daft. If you have misspelt a word then Google will automatically correct it for you and display the search results for the correctly-spelt version of your search.

In fact, the majority, if not all of the top search results’ websites will spell all of their key terms correctly.

It can be argued that users do have the option to use the misspelt version of their search, but a very minute proportion of these people will bother. After all, what is the point when Google has recognised what you actually meant and has conveniently searched it for you?

Reason 2: It puts your integrity on the line

When I visit a website with several notable spelling or grammatical errors on any given page, I tend to take my business elsewhere. Somewhere in my subconscious, I know that if this company doesn’t lend enough resources to checking the spelling of their website copy, they probably don’t spend much time ensuring anything else is up to scratch, either.

In this respect, not only is targeting misspelt keywords pointless; it’s also potentially damaging to your reputation.

A day-to-day customer is highly unlikely to come across a misspelt word and assume it is included only for SEO purposes, and the company in question is actually very reputable.

Really, the only purpose targeting misspelt keywords serves is to make it appear that your organisation can’t spell. If Google corrects any misspellings of your keywords, it doesn’t make sense to sacrifice the quality and consistency of your content for this purpose.

Alternative spellings of words

I feel it is worth mentioning, now that I have explained my argument, that there is a notable difference between the usefulness of including misspelt and alternative spellings of keywords in your copy.

This is particularly applicable when American English and Oxford English are concerned, as there are many spelling differences between these languages.

For example, if your organisation is based in the UK but you also want to target the US market, using both spellings for words such as colour/color, aluminium/aluminum, and centre/center is actually a worthwhile means of targeting traffic from both sides of the Atlantic.

I’d recommend using alternative spellings in your content, but would suggest that you don’t mix and match the different spellings in the same piece. Use ‘color’ on five subpages and ‘colour’ in five others, for example, to keep your content consistent and easier to read.

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How to market content

1. Use your social media outreach

The best content will connect with people, it will get them to think about the subject matter of the content, whether it is an editorial, infographic or video and encourage readers to form their own opinion. Whenever we create content, that is always the end-goal – to get people to think, and hopefully to like it. The most difficult part for smaller businesses is getting content to be picked up by the community and read by people, but this is why social networks have the potential to be so effective.

Even small businesses with a relatively limited social media outreach might be followed by other highly influential people with extensive outreach. The key is getting people to share it, so just make sure you post great content at an optimal time and make relevant people aware of it.

2. Have a marketing strategy in place

Don’t simply create one single link on your social media networks and expect it to go viral within 30 minutes. Have a plan in place before you release the content to extend its visibility beyond that of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Research the most active industry forums and decide how you are going to discuss it and generate buzz around it – what is the hook of the piece? Will it create controversy? Does it promote your products or services? Try to answer these questions and build a marketing strategy for your best content because this will help it achieve its full potential.

3. Time your release

In the ‘Science of blogging’, Dan Zarrella conducted a series of experiments aimed at discovering how the most successful blogs function. One of these experiments was testing when the optimal time to create a link on a social network was – when is the best time get retweets on Twitter, or the best time to get likes on Facebook etc. The results were surprisingly significant, and the vast dataset that the results were taken from makes them reliable, but obviously there might be some variations depending on the niche of the industry.

The results showed that the best time to post a link on Twitter is around 4pm on a Friday, whereas Facebook activity appeared to be much more prevalent during weekends, and generally during the mornings. Timing to launch your content at peak times is another great tactic to optimise your content for success.

4. Be Patient

Great content doesn’t always explode within minutes of its launch – of course there are exceptions, but generally it could take days, weeks or even months before a piece of content really achieves its potential. It can be frustrating because obviously a lot of time and effort is taken into producing high-quality content, but the best thing to do is have faith, and let it share and spread organically. Don’t repeatedly spam your social network profiles with repeated links to the same content if it doesn’t start attracting traffic instantly because you risk alienating your client base or damaging brand awareness.

Creating superb, original and creative content is one of the best things a company can do, no matter the size of the business. It is the best way to communicate directly with your clients and keep them informed about brand products, services and offers as well as achieving higher rankings in the SERPs. Hopefully these short tips can help you develop the reach of your content, but if you have any further comments then please feel free to comment on this blog.

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1.    Use the Facebook ‘Like’ Button –

With over 800 million active users, Facebook is easily the largest social network on the web, and as a result, it’s the easiest way a brand can share with their audience on a mass scale.  By ‘Liking’ your press release on such a visible platform, it increases the chances that your target audience will read your Press Release and maybe even interact with it.  This is great for increasing your brand visibility, engaging with your audience, and spreading the news that was included in the PR.

2.    Use Twitter –

Twitter is one of the most effective social networks for businesses using online customer service, or looking to directly engage with their clients.  This is what makes it so useful for facilitating the spread and outreach of a Press Release.  By sharing a PR directly on a businesses Twitter account, they are maximising potential that PR has to connect with the relevant audience.  You can write a brief message describing the PR, and how it might help people, and this will also include a link directly to the PR.  It’s a simple, but very effective strategy.

3.    Embed your Press Release on your company blog –

By simply posting any press releases on your company blog you are maximising the potential for it to reach the audience it has been written for.  This mean people who are interested in the type of services or products you offer, or users that read your blog regularly and are likely to engage with it or share it on their own social media profiles.  It’s simple to do, and it makes sure that the potential outreach of the press release is capitalised upon.

4.    Link to your Press Release from your homepage –

Sometimes, when you post your Press Release on your blog, it might be missed by browsing users who are just scanning your homepage.  An almost foolproof way to ensure this isn’t the case is to link to the Press Release directly from your home page.  Again, like the previous points, this is an effective strategy because it makes the most relevant audience aware of the content included in the PR.

5.    Use intelligent internal linking in the PR –

One of the great features of releasing an online Press Release is that it naturally creates many new links form authoritative sources.  Because of the increased online visibility that a premium online PR generates, it is crucial that you optimise the linking in that press release so that users can navigate from it to any relevant websites quickly and easily.  This will make them more likely to share the PR, or even a direct link to your company website on one of their social media profiles.  This is a brilliant way to boos online visibility.

These are just five simple tips to increase the visibility of your online press release.  If you have any further questions about how online PR might influence your digital marketing campaign, then please feel free to contact anyone here at Click Consult via our website.

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Google’s own definition of Rich Snippets can be seen below:

“Google tries to present users with the most useful and informative search results. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide whether that page is relevant to their search. With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labelled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating.”

Read more about Rich Snippets by going to: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170

Here at Click Consult we have been doing some digging around and found that a large number of different types of Rich Snippets are now being used by a wide range of sites.

Below is a list of the Rich Snippets we have found that are currently live in the SERPs:

At this stage Rich Snippets have no effect on SEO or rankings. They can however help to improve the Click Through Rate (CTR) of a site significantly by giving the searcher more information at the decision stage. Basically a searcher is more likely to click on a site that shows 10 Reviews than a site that shows none.

Judging by the growth of Rich Snippets we predict that some of the following things could soon be appearing within the search results too:
-    Primary Image on Webpage (primaryImageOfPage)
-    Movie, Music and Event durations (duration)
-    The base salary on Job Postings (baseSalary)
-    Menu Snippets or Link to Menu for Food Establishments (menu)
-    Nutritional Information, including calories, fat content, carbohydrates and more (calories, fatContent, carbohydrateContent)

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There has been no official word on the subject yet by Google themselves (despite it being widely reported recently that Larry Page claimed 60% of users were active daily on Google+ and 80% weekly, this seems to refer to engagement with any of Google’s products rather than specifically with Google+ alone) about how many of their current approximately 90 million users are actually actively contributing, sharing and posting on Google+ regularly. Is it really providing anything different for your average user over the other, more established social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?

Personally, since I signed up in early July 2011, there was an initial flurry of activity where I added people I knew into my circles, gave myself a profile pic and interacted with a few friends/colleagues. I downloaded the android app on my phone and tablet, starting with good intentions of giving Google+ a good try, yet the inactivity of those in my circles soon meant my interest waned. Plenty of posting/sharing going on by those in my ‘internet marketing’ circle – but not much amongst my friends. My initial impressions were that I liked the look and feel of Google+, but until more people  joined up (it wasn’t even open to all at this point) then there wasn’t a great deal of value in it for me. Logging in every few days, as I have done since then, certainly isn’t anywhere near matching the amount of time I spend on Twitter and Facebook currently, but they do say that you get out what you put in…

One feature of Google+ that I use almost every day, without even thinking about it, is the automatic photo upload feature from my Android smartphone. Having an instant backup of any photos I take is a great idea – with them not being shared or made public unless I choose to do so. With more and more android smartphones out there than ever (with a reported 700,000 being activated daily around the world) the mobile Google+ experience is surely the route through which the most growth will come this year. I look forward to seeing how this area is developed more and more in the coming months and how the ‘out of the box’ experience improves for first time users.

Leaving aside the personal, individual aspects of Google+, what does this mean for business or brand use? It seems that more and more high profile music artists, businesses and other brands are starting to make Google+ a part of their online marketing strategy, but unless time and effort is put into participating and communicating with others, having a profile alone won’t be enough to make a noticeable difference as it won’t be offering anything up to date to interest to other Google+ users.

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Wikipedia Blackout

SOPA working together with PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) propose that anyone found guilty of streamlining copyrighted content without permission ten times or more within 6 months should go to jail. Furthermore, any site found enabling or facilitating piracy could be shut down. The acts will basically give more power to the American government to take down any site that it believes has copyright content regardless of who uploaded it which means that if the bills are passed, sites would have to closely monitor what exactly users are posting on their site.

If these new laws are to be granted the internet without doubt will not be the resource it once was, allowing people to share information openly and freely (that’s right, goodbye YouTube!)

On the other hand, the entertainment industry argues that the legislation is going to be a vital for protection in their battle against piracy accusing the likes of Wikipedia and Google of over exaggerating the impact that these laws will have.

But the question still remains whether these bills are badly written? Is SOPA being too irrational? With the internet being the ‘most powerful tool enabling us to create a more open connected world’ (Zuckerberg, 2012), will it be possible for anyone to do anything online without fear and apprehension?

Learn more about the issues discussed above and let your voice be heard http://www.netcoalition.com/sample-page/.

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Those arguing that you can’t separate the two focus mainly on a comparison with on-page SEO, as opposed to off-page. When you think about constructing an SEO campaign, there are always defined targets and objectives that an online business sets themselves. How successful a company is in reaching these objectives is determined by the various online analytics reports that are available for measuring things like ROI, bounce rate and traffic volume. In the earlier days of SEO, this was an exclusive feature of search engine marketing, because they were the main provider of these analytical reports. As time has passed, search marketing agencies have become able to develop these reports internally, and produce them with a great deal more clarity than the search engines provide in a raw form.

More importantly, however, as the social networks have developed over the years they have developed their own analytic reports based on social-specific measurements and metrics. I have written about how Facebook Insights improves social media marketing, but the important thing to remember is that the social networks, and various third parties are able to produce robust and reliable analytics reports regarding a businesses social media activity. This is no longer a feature exclusive to the search engines, and it means that potentially, a business could conduct all their online marketing on a social network (although, this really isn’t advisable!).

Another feature intrinsically linking social media marketing and search engine optimisation is that they are both long-term commitments. SEO requires lots of moderation and constant improvement and tweaking to succeed, and social media marketing needs the same. Both require fresh, unique and valuable content to be shared regularly if returning customers are going to be engaged enough to value your business.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject. Do you think Social Media Marketing and SEO are separate subjects?

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Some of you who are already wise to WordPress may be asking why we haven’t used the existing WordPress Text widget which allows the inclusion of text and HTML. The answer is simple, usability. If the content within this div may change regularly you want to simplify the process as much as possible so the client can easily manage the image, title and URL while removing the potential for them to affect the way it is displayed to the user of the website.

This has added advantages if you are allowing the user to manage HTML that if changed could break some functionality within the site, think a JavaScript accordion for example. Put simply it allows maximum flexibility for the client with zero potential for someone with no knowledge of HTML to inadvertently damage or break anything.

To create a custom widget open up the widgets.php file within the inc folder of your theme and create a new class that extends WP_Widget with the name of your widget. For example:


class DivName_Widget extends WP_Widget {

}

This class will fully contain your widget. Within here there are four functions that are required for the widget to fully function. They are:


function __construct() {
// code here
}
function widget($args, $instance) {
// code here
}
function form($instance) {
// code here
}
function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
// code here
}


Think of each one of these functions as a separate feature of the widget:

• the constructor
• the widget to be displayed on the front end of the site
• the form to be located in the admin of WordPress
• function to update the information stored in the database.

The constructor function will contain one line that sets the name and description of the widget which is displayed in the admin area.


function __construct() {
parent::WP_Widget(/* Base ID */'Apply_Online', /* Name */ 'Apply_Online', array('description' => 'This is a widget to manage the apply online sidebar feature'));
}


The widget function is the code that will be displayed on the front end of the site. It contains to arguments, the arguments (if set) and the current instance of the widget.

What it echoes out the required html code while adding the data where relevant from the instance argument passed into the function.

function widget($args, $instance) {

    extract($args);
    $title = apply_filters('title', $instance['title']);
    $img = apply_filters('text', $instance[img]);
    $url = apply_filters('url', $instance['url']);
    $title = addslashes($img);
    $text = addslashes($text);
    $url = addslashes($url);
    echo "<div id='name'>";
    echo "<h2>$title</h2>";
    echo “<img src=$img alt=”title” />”;
    echo "<a href='$url' >Click Here</a>";
    echo "</div>”;
}

The form function again has the current instance of the widget passed into it as an argument to allow the current data to be displayed and edited in the admin area. If the instance is currently set then it populates the form with this data, else it populates it with default data to be overridden.

It then creates the form with all the inputs required to manage the data. There is no need to include the form field, or the submit button due to wordpress managing this functionality for you.

function form($instance) {

if ($instance) {

$title = stripslashes($instance['title']);

$img = stripslashes($instance[‘img’]);

$url = stripslashes($instance['url']);

} else {

$title = __(‘title’, ‘text_domain’);

$img = __(‘img’, ‘text_domain’);

$url = __(‘url’, ‘text_domain’);

}

?>

<label for=”<?php echo $this->get_field_id(‘title’); ?>”><?php _e(‘Title:’); ?></label>

<input class=”widefat” id=”<?php echo $this->get_field_id(‘title’); ?>” name=”<?php echo $this->get_field_name(‘title’); ?>” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $title; ?>” />

<label for=”<?php echo $this->get_field_id(‘img’); ?>”><?php _e(‘Image:’); ?></label>

<input class=”widefat” id=”<?php echo $this->get_field_id(‘img’); ?>” name=”<?php echo $this->get_field_name(‘img’); ?>” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $img; ?>” />

<label for=”<?php echo $this->get_field_id(‘url’); ?>”><?php _e(‘URL:’); ?></label>

<input class=”widefat” id=”<?php echo $this->get_field_id(‘url’); ?>” name=”<?php echo $this->get_field_name(‘url’); ?>” type=”text” value=”<?php echo $url; ?>” />

<?php

}

Finally the update function is called when you make changes to the data using the form in the admin area, it over-rides the old data in the database to display these changes on the front end of the site.

function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {

$instance = $old_instance;
$instance['title'] = stripslashes($new_instance['title']);
$instance['img'] = stripslashes($new_instance['img']);
$instance['url'] = stripslashes($new_instance['url']);
return $instance;
}

And thats it, with these four functions WordPress will manage the rest for you and you will have a fully functional custom widget.

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Bing currently has a partnership with Facebook that allows them to use data that is publically shared through Facebook to personalise the results they show to signed-in users. This is similar to how Google are now leveraging Google+ data into their SERPs, and because of the aforementioned partnership between Bing and Facebook, they could theoretically recreate this. This is something Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land briefly mentioned in a blog post covering the launch of ‘Search Plus You World’, but I’d like to go into a bit more detail.

How would Facebook and Bing integration work on this scale?

Facebook is arguably one of the largest depositories of private information on the web, but as I briefly mentioned, only information that is publically shared can be used to personalise the Bing SERPs. This allows a lot of scope for expansion, or at least deeper mining of Facebook’s data by Bing, who are in a position to tap into one of the richest sources of information that could be used to personalise search results in the world today. However, Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ update has left them under the scrutiny of the FTC after they had been reported for anti-competitive behaviour, and this could potentially happen to Bing or Facebook if they choose to go down a similar path.

The move could potentially increase Bing’s search engine market share, because of the popularity of Facebook. Conversely, if this was integrated into Facebook, it would help to cement their position as King of social media. While this observation is just based on speculation, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter, and whether you think this could be a potential move for Bing and Facebook? What do you think the results would be for internet marketing on a broader scale? Please feel free to comment with your thoughts.

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