Tag Archives: seo

15 Online Marketing Techniques: How they Relate to Your Firm’s Growth

With so many different marketing channels at your fingertips, how do you decide where to invest? Which online marketing techniques are really going generate leads for your firm?

Here at Hinge, we set out to answer these questions in a recent study of 500 CEOs and marketing executives from professional services firms across the globe. The survey was simple: rate each of 15 online marketing techniques on a scale from 0 – 10 on how effective they are in generating leads for your firm. Continue reading

5 Ways to Stop Cutting the Brown Grass in Social Media

When are you going to stop cutting the brown grass of PR?

During summer a few years ago, I was on my way to a meeting and I saw something that made me scratch my head. We were going through one of those incredibly dry summers and local watering bans had caused all known forms of vegetation to wither and die. Snapshots of our community could have easily doubled for the Sahara.

Naturally, in the absence of water, all the grass had died and turned brown yet I stood there and watched as a team of landscapers busily cut, trimmed and weed wacked away as if we lived in the tropics during rainy season and the grass had shot up a healthy two inches since their last sweep of the office park.

“For Pete’s sake,” I thought, “why in the world would they spend time cutting grass that was obviously dead?”

2012 was predicted to be the obvious maturation of social media for businesses. Reaching past the “shiny new object” status deeper into data and analytics and into new applications like targeted visual content generation, mobile, and real-time responses, this was the year we all could roll up our sleeves, dig in the garden, and reap the social media crops we had been cultivating for the past few years. Continue reading

Searchmetrics: A Tale of Two Visibilities

Last month I wrote about a demo of Searchmetrics Essentials, and this weekend I had the chance to get a first-hand look at the dashboard.

Essentials looks at the connection between social and search data, particularly SEO. Take the chart below, for example. This shows Social Visibility for individual blog posts from PRBreakfastClub.com. Social Visibility is defined as follows:

With a Facebook share or a Google plus-one users can vote on the quality of a site. Therefore, the aim is to motivate users to perform as many of these actions as possible. Social Visibility presents these results and prioritizes them according to the network and type of action. Continue reading

The Secrets to Success in Social Media

Did I lure you in with my snazzy headline? Yes? Okay great. Now I’m going to spend the first few sentences using buzz words so that you will keep reading my social media post. Then after you’ve gotten through the first couple of paragraphs, I’m going to provide you with these awesome bullet points packed with information that you already knew.  Lastly, I will summarize the topic which pretty much has nothing to do with my headline that I created for SEO purposes.

Does this situation sound familiar? Every day my inbox and RSS feeds pile up with articles about social media. The articles seem to always be about the same topic but recycled, rehashed, rewritten – they are offering me nothing of value. If you are like me, you’ve probably about had it. Continue reading

Preparing for the SEO of the Future

Do It YourselfWith less than two months to go, my away-from-work-life has consisted of registering for baby stuff, painting a nursery, complaining about maternity clothes, trying to avoid ice cream – everything and all things baby!

Now my husband just informed me that he bought a domain for our future son as a gift. My first reaction was “We don’t even have diapers yet.”  So, I sent out a tweet about his latest purchase, and got an immediate number of responses.  It seems he isn’t the only one preparing for our child’s SEO future.

Honestly, this would be the last thing I would even think about as I get ready for parenthood, but these days, should it be one of the first? Continue reading

PR ADD

Sometimes old PR tactics work the best.
Old tactics, new results?

In the business world, thinking outside the box is the unofficial motto. In public relations, we’re tasked with being creative thinkers. Our clients want us to find different ways to get in front of influencers and, ultimately, customers.

But we are so quick to focus on what’s next, sometimes we do it at the expense of what’s current. Continue reading

Companies: Be Good in the Social Web

Mouse Icon On Find Over Person's Eye Through Magnifying GlassIn the rush to get every consumer eyeball on their site, we are starting to see more instances of companies that are willing to align themselves with not so great people/vapid stars in order to boost their own Web presence/SEO. I won’t go into too many specifics here because we all know of some company that has done this, but I’ll be frank here: An attempt by companies to align/partner with  wanna-be celebrities that have terrible reputations or utilize shady social media marketing opportunism practices purely to build Web traffic and SEO for their company is NOT a strategy. Continue reading

Gray Hat SEO

berto-eric-webHaving your blog or Web site rank high in search engine is essentially a guaranteed way to convert sales. But as a PR person, how can you help your clients achieve number-one ranking nirvana?

While at the recent BlogWorld Expo, I sat in on a session that proposed the creation of a network of blogs with content specific to the various products or services your client sells. Relevant key words in the blogs’ titles and content will help it rank so that it does not dilute the keywords in other articles. The strategic use of keyword specific anchor text and linking structures will help as well. Continue reading