Events are part and parcel of every brands’ marketing calendar. Where possible we like to use traditional activities – press conferences, sponsorship gigs, launches, etc – as the platform for moving branded stories and messages around the network, beyond the walls of the event itself.

In other words, we like to extend the value of bog standard marketing events to Social Media and the wider world.

Here’s our best practise ‘Kit Bag’ for doing it. (NB: includes a nice activity TICK LIST at the back.)

Have a browse, use it, and tell us what you think.

Until then, here’s my list.

Useful Search Operator Combination 1: Get (some) Google link information

Operators to use: intext: site: inurl:

This one’s really useful – if a bit of a makeshift – because Google’s own ‘link:’ command provides only a partial list of sites, as the full selection is reserved exclusively for site owners with Webmaster Tools installed.

I should point out that this is an approximation and only looks at links that use the URL (rather than those that use other anchor text), but It’s still useful as a lot of legitimate links reference URLs rather than using other anchor text.

e.g.To find external links to the main domain of C&M’s recommended provider of ‘Cheap UK Lunch Snacks‘, I’d search:

intext:www.findus.com -site:www.findus.com (to filter out internal links) -inurl:findus (optional; to filter out other Findus affiliated domains)

Finding links this way also affords the added bonus of Google’s sidebar filtering, so you can then sort results by date, region, etc. Very useful. Very moving.

Useful Search Operator Combination 2: Find blogs from a given region, source, or author that have mentioned your website or brand

Operators to use: intext: OR site: inurl: inblogurl inpostauthor: (in Google Blog Search)

e.g. to find mentions of the C&M brand from UK affiliated domains I’d search:

intext:C&M OR “Content & Motion” -site:www.contentandmotion.co.uk inurl:co.uk

And to find the mentions from a given source such as Wired Sussex:

intext:C&M OR “Content & Motion” -site:contentandmotion.co.uk site:wiredsussex.com

And to find mentions by the world’s leading writer of tasteful erotic fiction Jake Doran:

intext:C&M OR “Content and Motion” -site:contentandmotion.co.uk inpostauthor:Jake Doran

Note: as this search is made in Google Blog search, you can also easily obtain an RSS feed of the results to spy on monitor mentions of your brand.

Useful Search Operator Combination 3: Identify how many of your own pages are optimised for the same search terms

Operators to use: allintitle: allinurl: site:

Like death and wild religious visions, some things are absolutely inevitable. For instance, there comes a time when every human being needs to take a second look at their website’s keyword optimisation.

And, if you’ve reached that stage in life, you’re in luck. The handy command outlined below allows you to see how many of your own pages are optimised for the same term – in either page titles or URLs – helping to identify where search term focus needs to be refined and improved.

e.g. if I wanted to look at how many internal pages on the C&M site are optimised around the term ‘Facebook Marketing Strategy’ within page titles, I’d search:

allintitle:Facebook Marketing Strategy site:contentandmotion.co.uk

And to check URL optimisation:

allinurl:Facebook Marketing Strategy site:contentandmotion.co.uk

In the above examples there’s only one page that is optimised – which is fine. However, if the results returned showed a plethora of pages optimised for the same term, then it would be time to sharpen things up.

Useful Search Operator Combination 4: Find out how many competitor sites are targeting the same keywords as you are

Operators to use: allintitle: site:

e.g. to find the number of competitor sites that are optimising around the term ‘Social Media Agency’, I’d search:

allintitle:social media marketing -site:contentandmotion.co.uk

This operator combination is a useful keyword research tool – the fewer competing results that are actively optimising around the term by including it in page titles, then the less competitive the term is and the easier it will be to rank for searches on that term.

Useful Search Operator Combination 5: Get a list of sites that others are linking to and identify influential hubs

Operators to use: linkfromdomain:

Also-ran search engine Bing is needed for this one and the operator ‘linkfromdomain:’ is your man.

e.g. if I wanted to analyse the links from the C&M site, I would type linkfromdomain:contentandmotion.co.uk

This is also useful for identifying useful hubs and communities around given topics that are being linked to from authority domains.

e.g. if I wanted to look at blogs that focus on gourmet food – which are linked to from an eminent newspaper such as The Guardian – I’d search:

linkfromdomain:guardian.co.uk gourmet food blog -site:guardian.co.uk

Note: You can also use ‘linkfromdomain:’ to find expired domains with authority links, by searching for:

‘linkfromdomain:guardian.co.uk domain expired‘ or ‘linkfromdomain:guardian.co.uk domain for sale’

Then acquire these domains and 301 redirect them to your own. Furtive (but rewarding).

Useful Search Operator Combination 6: Find backlinks to competitors from trusted authority domains (then approach the same sites with useful content)

Operators to use: linkdomain: inurl:

Google is perceived to place a higher importance on links from trusted domains, such as those affiliated with governmental organisations or universities.

Identifying links to competitor sites from such domains can be a good way to pinpoint potential linking opportunities. The sites that are revealed can be worth trying to get links from, as authority sites are less likely to host spammy/paid-for links.

To achieve this, it’s best to search for the common URL extensions of so-called authority domains that belong to the likes of Universities or government institutions (like .ac.uk, .gov.uk and .edu) alongside Yahoo’s ‘linkdomain:’ command.

e.g. if I wanted to analyse the links to Econsultancy from educational domains, I’d search (in Yahoo, not Google):

linkdomain:econsultancy.com inurl:”.ac.uk”

To check competitor links I would simply replace the C&M URL with that of a competitor.

Alternatively, you could go the other way around and use the command ‘linkfromdomain:’ (covered above), to arrive at a subset of links from a specific site.

Useful Search Operator Combination 7: Find Twitter mentions over a given time period

Operators to use: linkfromdomain: site: daterange:

Twitter only provides a week’s worth of mentions from its own search engine but sometimes it’s necessary to get figures for a longer time period.

So, if you’ve just got to have the figures, you can search for @contentmotion site:twitter.com , (replacing our twitter account name for your own) then filter using the daterange: operator or – more easily – Google’s advanced search options on the left sidebar.

Note: this is also an approximation as Google’s results aren’t 100% accurate, but it’s a worthwhile system in the absence of more complete information.

Useful Search Operator Combination 8: Launch stark-naked Michael Barrymore into the stratosphere at 6x the speed of sound

Operators to use: Coming soon

This one can only be used on a single occasion and will cause a critical syntax error if someone has already used it. I’ll include it in my next post.

We’re slowly moving towards something glorious.

Bonus resource coming soon.

IBM have tackled this issue in an innovative way with their Blog Muse tool, described recently on Gigaom as:

“…a kind of social recommendation system for blog posts in which users say what they want to read about, other users then vote on those suggestions, and the most popular topics get distributed to those most likely to want to write about them…”

Sadly this tool is currently only available to IBM bloggers via an internal system, but with the wealth of analytics and trending tools available, there’s nothing to stop any company or individual blogger putting a similar process in place to inform their blogging schedule.

If you read Roger’s recent post on Informed Creativity, you’ll have seen our Social Media Planning slidedeck, which outlines C&M’s approach to content planning. And as far as blogging is concerned, it’s not a million miles away from IBM’s technique.

From my point of view, as the person who drives the creative side of content planning, it helps to pinpoint more general content themes for each client, around which to write specific blog posts. This not only gives a focus for the analytics that drive topic ideas and keywords, but helps to ensure a good balance of content on an ongoing basis.

These themes are obviously different for every client and industry, but here are some of the recurring ones as a guide:

• PRACTICAL: Deconstruct industry practices, offer advice/recommendations
• EVENTS: Identify and write about key industry events/conferences. Live tweeting from events can also be made into post-event blog posts
• CASE STUDIES: Interviews with key customers/clients – this could be via an embedded video or podcast, or a plain old-fashioned written piece
• CHALLENGES: Respond to common industry problems, encourage customers/potential customers to interact
• NEWS: Staying on the pulse of related online content and commenting on high profile news pieces/articles, adding your own thoughts on a subject via blog posts/tweets
• SURVEYS: Encourage customers and general public to participate in area/event/topic focused online surveys and use the results to create blog posts and stimulate conversation
• STAFF: Individual blog posts by employees with more personality (i.e. ‘The team recommends’, opinion pieces, fun stuff)

There are plenty more I could include, but you get the picture. Once this content framework is in place, we use our analytics and trending tools to identify the best subjects to blog about at any given time and the best keywords to focus on within those broad themes.

Our blogging guide tells you more about this content planning process, as well as lots of other useful tips on blogging in general – including what to write about and how to get your blog noticed once it’s up and running.

Remember that a good post doesn’t have to equal a long blog post, in fact short and sweet is often the best way to ensure that the whole post gets read and isn’t dismissed as ‘TLDR’ (thanks, @Jake_Doran, for that gem). Many blog posts these days simply consist of a Social embed (Flickr slideshow, YouTube video) with a little bit of an intro – and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s useful, relevant and interesting to your readership.

And whether you decide to blog daily, weekly or monthly – stick to a consistent publishing schedule so that your regular readers will know what to expect and you will know exactly how much content you need to be producing in your planning cycle.

If you follow these simple principles, you should never find yourself asking “what shall I blog about today?” or plucking random subjects out of the air.

The thumbnail that accompanies this post was adapted from a photograph by FarleyJ on Flickr.

In terms of Alexa rankings, it’s one of the biggest stand-alone social networks on the web after Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Flickr. The total registered users is also nothing to sniffed at, with over 50,000,000 members and rising.

By far the biggest and most interesting of all the improvements to the LinkedIn platform is LinkedIn Groups. Ostensibly a place for like-minded professionals to come together over a subject or interest, it can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website and online marketing if you know how to use it.

LinkedIn Marketing: How and Why?

Groups has some startling similarities to Facebook’s Pages functionality: members can become ‘fans’, group sections are sorted along the top of the screen in tabs, updates can be sent out to members of the group via e-mail, etc. As is also the case with Facebook, a group on LinkedIn gives you the ability to import RSS feeds, meaning that all updates for a given feed can be distributed inside a group, broadening the reach of your content to influential and like-minded people.

Of course, the above actions will only work if you’ve got a lot of members in your group. If you don’t feel like setting up your own group or don’t have many group members, you can always join one set up by someone else. The concept works in much the same way: join a group, join in discussions with other people and link them to your content (remember: hard sell is doomed to fail nine times out of ten in the context of Social Media – if you can’t add anything worthwhile to a discussion then it’s best not to bother.)

LinkedIn Polls also offers a way to perform quick and easy market research. Polls within your network (i.e. your connections only) are free. However, should you want to ask a different group of professionals (such as small business owners, software engineers, etc.) that you can target by industry, a pricing option of $50 (minimum) per response comes into play. In a similar vein, LinkedIn Answers works in much the same way as Yahoo! Answers, except the subject matter and responses are actually useful.

They key advantage of LinkedIn for the above activities as opposed to, say, Facebook Pages is the audience type. LinkedIn is targeted towards a more professional, business-minded user base, therefore reaching individuals with the same goals and interests on a professional level is far easier than on Facebook, despite the platforms being equally as ‘closed’ as one another.

Joining The Dots: LinkedIn Integration

It’s important to note that LinkedIn should be used in tandem with your existing Social Media content and marketing set-up. As useful as the various services such as Groups are, LinkedIn could never hope to replace the immediacy or openness of Twitter or the sheer size and popularity of Facebook.

In terms of platforms, Twitter and LinkedIn are currently the most friendly with each other, offering synchronisation between the two: if you make an update on LinkedIn, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to tweet it, and if you tweet using the #li or #in hashtags your tweet will appear in LinkedIn. There are also numerous apps available for Facebook, offering similar integration.

You can also integrate your WordPress blog with LinkedIn. By installing a couple of free plugins (the WordPress app on LinkedIn and the GD LinkedIn Badge or LinkedIn Resume on your WordPress install) you can pull through your most recent blog posts onto your LinkedIn profile, and display a badge to your LinkedIn profile or small feed of your CV on your WordPress blog. Other blog platforms can be imported using the RSS feed feature.

What are your experiences with LinkedIn? Have you found it a useful platform to work with for promoting your business or content? Feel free to leave a comment on this article and let us know all about it. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, we’d love you to join our very own LinkedIn Group, Pals of C&M.

The best strategy to take is one of simple planning. Begin by breaking down the various platforms you use into groups, and work out what needs to be done in simple increments: daily, weekly and monthly. Here are some examples using common Social Media platforms and actions:

Daily Social Media Content Actions

• Tweet/respond to tweets/retweets
• Check Facebook profiles, pages and groups
• Respond to blog comments on your own blog(s)
• Add bookmarks to your Delicious account
• Check your RSS feeds for items of interest and have a good read

The quickest and most straightforward of the Social Media content actions on this list are the daily updates. These are also the actions that need daily attention due to their fast-moving nature. Twitter is probably the fastest moving of all Social Media content channels, but staying on top of your tweets can be a lot easier if you use tools such as TweetDeck or HootSuite to manage your profile(s). Netvibes is also a great time-saving tool for managing your RSS feeds.

Weekly Social Media Content Actions

• Write a new blog post and get it circulating
• Engage with relevant bloggers on their blogs
• Check LinkedIn groups for new items of interest
• Search for and add relevant new people to follower on Twitter using a service such as Twellow
• Make new Twitter lists, or spend some time curating your existing ones

Weekly Social Media content actions are more ‘bulky’ than their daily counterparts. Spreading these over a week will enable you to put more time into researching and actioning the larger bits, such as a new blog post and finding new Twitter users to follow. Twitter lists are a useful tool for grouping together Twitter users of interest, as previously covered in a blog post by Roger.

Monthly Social Media Content Actions

• Produce a new video and distribute it using TubeMogul
• Upload a batch of new Flickr photos
• Post new PDFs to Scribd
• Post new presentations to Slideshare
• Host and distribute Social Media bulletins and news releases using a service like PitchEngine

Monthly Social Media content actions are a mix of items larger again than weekly actions – such as producing and distributing videos – and items that require less-frequent checking and updating. TubeMogul is an excellent service for distributing video content to the biggest video hosting sites on the web. For Social Media bulletins, PitchEngine is a great service, allowing you to embed written copy, video, images and links in one handy pack for easy distribution.

Here’s a handy cut-out-and-keep version of the above actions for you to print out and glue to your monitor, desk or front door. Click the image for a bigger version:

Remember, this is only a guide for some of the most common things you might be doing with Social Media. Feel free to add your own tips or suggestions to our Social Media content guide in the comments section below.

Apps can help your page stand out from the crowd, as well as providing extra functionality for your page and fresh ways to connect with your Facebook audience. All the apps featured in our list are free and most require no technical knowledge to install or use.

• Notes – Think of the Notes app as a way of blogging on your Facebook page. With the ability to embed images and publish to the page wall, Notes is a simple way to communicate with your fans, and being an official Facebook app it’s (relatively) bug free, too
• Social RSS – On the other hand, if you’ve got a pre-existing blog hosted on an external site, you can pull an RSS feed of entries through onto a page tab with this app
• YouTube Box – This handy app offers a lot of functionality when it comes to handling YouTube videos. Videos can have custom descriptions and titles independent from the source video, and there’s even a handy analytics package built in so you can monitor how popular your videos are
• Social Tweet – Get your Twitter updates pulled through onto a tab on your page with this great app. You can also tweet directly from the app and select which tweets to be posted to your status
• FlickrTab – Perhaps the most fully-functioned Flickr app for Facebook, this app gives you a choice of several different page layouts, providing you with a variety of options when it comes to displaying your Flickr content
• Static FBML – As basic or powerful as you need it to be, the Static FBML app allows you to create custom FBML (Facebook Mark-up Language) or HTML boxes/tabs on your fan page. There are many useful tutorials out there on how to get started, as it can be a little confusing to begin with, but it’s worth persevering with as you can achieve some great results
• Extended Info – This app gives you the ability to add extra fields to the Info tab on your page including FBML, custom categories, videos, images, tags, bulleted/numbered lists and more

The catalogue of apps available for Facebook is constantly growing, so if any particularly great new ones emerge, we’ll update this list and let you know. If you’ve got your own suggestions for any top apps that you use, feel free to add them in the comments section below.

Native Facebook Tools

Though they don’t tend to shout about them, some of the most handy Facebook tools are within Facebook itself…

Researching for Facebook Campaigns with Lexicon

A useful stats tool for Facebook, Lexicon gives you trending information on words and phrases used on people’s walls. For example, this graph shows how mentions of “red wine” in wall posts have slowly decreased in the last two years. This kind of information is useful when choosing which keywords to use in a Social Media campaign and indeed whether Facebook is the best platform for any given subject.

The new version of Lexicon, currently in preview mode, will also reveal a more detailed breakdown of keyword stats, such as how many people have used a term (as opposed to how many times the word or phrase has been used) as well as gender and age demographics.

Promoting Your Page/Event/Competition with Facebook Ads

The closed nature of Facebook makes it difficult to find and interact with people unless they are already your friends. One of the best and most time/cost effective way of shouting about your page and building followers is using Facebook Ads.

These can be highly targeted to people with relevant keywords in their profiles, or of a certain demographic. Easy to set up and manage, you can also set daily/weekly budgets for Facebook Ads and specify a maximum cost per click.

Discover How Well Your Facebook Page is Doing with Facebook Insights

Anyone who’s managing a Facebook Page should be all over Facebook Insights (accessible from within the Pages Admin section of your account). It’s another analytics tool that shows how your followings are developing and gives context for interactions on your Page, including wall posts, likes and comments. As Facebook explains it:

“ Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size. Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak.”

External Facebook Tools

Keep Facebook Updated with Sendible

A cross platform scheduling tool, Sendible lets you queue up Facebook Page updates to release at a certain time (much in the way that Twuffer and HootSuite do for Twitter). If you are going to be away on holiday or too busy to update your Facebook Page, this is a great way to keep it populated with regular content – though of course should not be a replacement for daily interactions. It also works for Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plurk, Tumblr and Flickr among other services.

Monitor, Post and Schedule Facebook Activity from HootSuite

If you read my recent post about web-based Twitter client HootSuite, you’ll already know that I’m a big fan, especially since all the recent changes which integrated Facebook and LinkedIn. While some other Twitter clients now let you post to your personal Facebook profile and even Facebook Pages, HootSuite is the only one that also has an in-built scheduling tool which you can use to queue up future Facebook Page wall posts (as with Sendible). Unfortunately HootSuite has yet to incorporate Facebook posts into its link-tracking stats package – though I am sure this will come in time.

Facebook Pages on HootSuite

…and what they look like on Facebook

There are of course many other Facebook tools and apps out there, but these five make a good basic toolkit for beginners looking to enhance their Social Media marketing experience. We’re already planning a post on how to jazz up your Facebook Page, so watch this space for more Facebook tips coming soon…

And they’ve been especially busy recently, tinkering with their SERPs, adding new functionality and tightening up all the nuts and bolts on their search behemoth. Handily, we’ve rounded up some of these new changes and are going to share them with you… Yes, you.

Three Results in the SERPs

What it is…
Three results pages – due to a double indent – are appearing in Google (first position) results in response to search queries. This means that more than two pages can be optimised for a single term without ranking conflicts.

What it means…
You may be able to optimise more pages for similar terms in the future and also occupy more search space if you achieve first spot on the SERP: the position to aim for. However, this is a recent development and only present on pages that rank in first position or for branded searches. More reading here.

Meta Description Links (as well as Site Links)

What it is…
Links to other site pages are appearing below meta descriptions. Although the links that appear are determined by Google’s algorithms, they are influenced by the main links that appear on a given page.

What it means…
The most important pages on the site should be linked to using the main navigation. For instance, a link to a ‘Trade-In Offer’ page from the home page – within the main navigation – may encourage the appearance of one of these links on a SERP and result in better click-through rates. Read more about this here.

Rich Snippets

What it is…
Google is experimenting with rich snippets, in which additional content can be added to a webpage in a supported format (either microformats or RDFa), which is then returned in the search results near the meta description. At the moment, Google is mainly displaying reviews and people information.

What it means…
If positive information is displayed then it may encourage clickthroughs, as well as allowing a site to occupy more search ‘real estate’. More reading here, and here

Google SideWiki

What it is…
Google now allows users (who have installed the Google Toolbar) to install the SideWiki system and leave comments about a web page. These comments can then be viewed by other users. At the moment this is only available to users who have installed the toolbar – but this is not an insignificant number of users and will definitely increase.

This will allow Google to directly monitor sentiment about a given page and could even be used to rank pages in the future. This reinforces the idea that being useful (and indexable) is important.

What it means…
People can review your products, services within a SideWikis, and publicly comment on any part of your site. But be warned, this can of course, go both ways and you could receive negative reviews as well as positive ones. Find out more here.

Google User Data to Rank Pages

What it is..
Google seems to be developing its algorithm to take into account user search patterns, click-through rates and bounces, as well as traditional cues such as links. This is backed up by patent applications, as well as inferences from search results and the observations of the SEO blogging community.

What it means…
If – as public information seems to suggest – Google is boosting those pages that have better click throughs than others, then meta descriptions (the text that, by and large. features under a page title in a SERP) become an even more important factor for SEO. They need to contain keywords, and they need to be snappy enough (with a call to action) to encourage a a higher rate of click through. Whilst this is SEO / content optimisation 101, it’s a great reason to revisit any your more dusty metadata. Further reading on this can be found here

Google Blog Search Results Embedded in SERPs

What it is..
Check the bottom of your search results pages. The above example is a search for ‘Social Media Agency.’ As well as including ‘related searches’, Google is now including blog post results from its Blog Search index. In other words, it’s now inserting relevant, real-time results from a fresher content store (the two indexes are, of course, different – one deals with all web pages, the other deals with blog post pages only… which means that blog search results tend to be more up-to-date, real time affairs).

What it means…
Happily, against the search in question, we currently rank as both a web page in the main listing, but also as a blog post in the ‘Blog Post’ section. Over time, we need to work hard to maintain and improve our position in the main results. But it’s a lot easier to bolster this position by blogging regularly around our core keyword themes. Short term, if we don’t blog about being a ‘Social Media Agency’ we’ll be replaced in the Blog results by newer blog post content, whilst our position in the main listing is likely to be more stable. So, the point is clear: blog more about around your core keyword categories and feature twice on a page one SERP.

That’s all for now, but Google being Google, there will almost certainly be more changes on the way. And when they do, you know where to come for our thoughts and theories.

Why Live Tweeting?

The increasing use of Twitter as a reporting tool connects it very much to the real world and is a brilliant way of bringing it to life for skeptics. The prolific tweeting of high profile happenings like Obama’s inauguration is switching more and more people on to Twitter as a means to keep up and interact with important events in real time.

Lately we’ve been helping some of our clients with some ‘live tweeting’ – capturing key moments at conferences, performances and the like, and bringing people together who may otherwise have only met across the ether.

A Twitter Debate

At Squiz’s ‘Future of Web Content Management’ event earlier in the summer, we used Twitter to stimulate debate and take questions for the panel, whilst also fielding technical queries about their own CMS, MySource Matrix. Even people who were not at the event participated, following the #CMSDebate hashtag we’d created (which incidentally ended up on the Twitter trending topics that day). It was a great example of how Twitter can reach beyond the virtual world and facilitate and enhance real life happenings.

The #CMSDebate on Hashtags.org

Beyond Flashmobs

Flashmobs and Twitter were always going to be natural allies, but in August we took this partnership one step further, helping London’s Southbank Centre at their Dancemob event – a mass synchronised dance routine in which the public were the performers. As well as using Twitter to rally the troops ahead of the day, it was also a fantastic way to capture the action as it unfolded.

Much like a sports commentator at the racetrack, we delivered a blow-by-blow account of the day’s events, complete with photos and videos (courtesy of services like Twitpic and 12Seconds). But unlike a sports commentator, detached from the public in his little box, we could also interact with participants and spectators using Twitter and see the action from their perspective.

 

Live tweeting Dancemob videos via 12Seconds.tv

Using Twitter creatively in this way can add an extra layer of interactivity and buzz to any event, whilst also having the added benefit of building followings in the process.

The C&M Live Tweeting Lowdown

Here are a few tips for anyone thinking of live-tweeting an event:

• Create and use an event hashtag (e.g. #CMSDebate / #Dancemob) to help people follow and contribute to a stream of event-related tweets
• Use other event material to promote Twitter participation on the day and beforehand (e.g. flyers, posters, screens)
• Only tweet notable or interesting moments, quotes etc.
• Always respond to questions or refer them to a fellow tweeter who can
• Re-tweet other people’s interesting or funny tweets
• Keep track of anyone who has participated in the hashtag conversation and follow them (if you’re not already) after the event
• Keep the conversation going afterwards and ask people for their feedback via Twitter

The same basic rules apply as with everyday responsible tweeting – be sociable, share content, respond and interact. Live tweeting is more than just being a scribe – you’re journalist, photographer, interviewer, PR and party host all rolled into one. You’re there to help other people be reporters too and to encourage them to connect with each other online and in the real world.

You’ll know you’ve cracked it when you can step back and enjoy that “my work here is done” feeling as you watch the event come to life on Twitter. Of course it helps if you have lined up a cold beer with which to toast your success – and I would heartily advocate the use of Twitter to engineer this.

Meantime, here’s a feed of all the Flashmob action at the Southbank Centre…

With that fact in mind, I’d like to briefly run through which content types regularly appear and how to use this content to clamber through the sweaty throng of competing pages.

Firstly, here are some broad content principles that you should be focused on:

Keywords

…need to be selected, based on competitiveness, search volumes, and long-term trends.

Research

…the content themes and formats (eg, Videos, Blog posts, Tweets) that your target audience is most interested in.

Create

…good, interesting, valuable, sharable, content – and publish it freely where possible. Create something of unique value that can’t be found elsewhere.

Optimise

…this content. I’m not advocating a selfish SPAM approach, but why wouldn’t you want to give your content the best possible chance of being indexed, noted and linked to? Search Engines need to be given explicit cues (in titles, headers, links) – regardless of quality, content, and context.

Identify

…influential hubs and make sure that you promote your content within them (responsibly). The mantra of ‘build it and they will come’ won’t usually work.

Done That… What’s Next?

Here are the main forms of content you should be interested in. The key to a lot of content optimisation is getting search terms in a) The Page Title b) The URL, and c) including links to raise awareness, link equity, and the likelihood of others linking to you.

SEO Tip 1: Blog Posts

It’s also best practice to register your blog with Google and Technorati.

Why?: Good blog content can quickly appear on the front page.

Ideal when: Your blog is well-read, established, and has garnered some respect (from both users and Google).

Example: (Term = ‘Social SEO’, Results no 5/6 / PageRank 5)

SEO Tip 2: News Articles / Press Releases

Also, make sure you’re indexed by Google News and add selected keywords to your XML news sitemap if you’re using one.

As with blog posts, most CMSs can be used to add keywords to the most important places.

Why?: News articles rank (transiently) in most SERP sectors – increasingly at the pinnacle.

Ideal when: You’re regularly producing good, neutral, and newsworthy content and have the resources to continue to do so. Even better if your competitors aren’t using the same technique.

Example: (Term = ‘Hotels in London’, Result no 1)

SEO Tip 3: Facebook Pages

Why?: Social Profiles are becoming more prominent within the SERPs. Facebook pages are publically viewable and ranking with more frequency. Within pages, discussions and sub-sections can also infiltrate the results pages.

Ideal when: Your page has attracted high membership and you’re in a market that isn’t saturated with similiar pages. It’s also more auspicious for your page if your brand name is highly searched for.

Example: (Term = Hackett London, Result no 3 / 1,090 fans)

SEO Tip 4: Twitter Profiles

Don’t worry too much about links and the language used within them, they don’t pass any value or PageRank. However, I generally don’t shorten links unless I have to: user experience is improved if link text is explicit and descriptive.

Why?: Recent Google updates have led to Twitter profiles becoming far more prominent in the SERPs (although this trend has tailed off in recent weeks).

Ideal when: Your profile becomes established and linked to. Most profiles that rank are well established, highly followed, frequently updated, and continually on topic.

You’ll also stand a better chance of ranking with a valued brand name and a comfortable ‘social’ fit. eg, if you’re a known quantity in the Art or Tech sector, you’re likely to be followed in high volume.

Example: (Term = ‘Social SEO’, Result No 10 / 894 followers)

SEO Tip 5: YouTube Videos

It’s also best to include links back to your page in the video description and whenever possible.

As YouTube is effectively an independent search engine, make sure that tags are optimised so internal searches are returned in response to keywords.

Why?: Google owns YouTube and loyally places its video content within SERPs.

Ideal when: You’ve created a video that really is going to be viewed, rather than a thinly veiled corporate advertorial: most videos that rank are fairly popular.

Also helps if you’re in a relatively uncompetitive search sector and competiting against few similiar videos.

Example: (Term = ‘Social Media’, Results no 2 / 3 , 320,400 / 697,381 views)

SEO Tip 6: Images

Why?: Images regularly appear within the SERPs. Note, Google isn’t affiliated with one particular channel (like Flickr) and uses a slower bot (googlebot-image) to crawl images for inclusion within its image search index.

Ideal when: You’ve got a hefty selection of quality images to use on your site

Example: (Result no 1 for ‘Lesser Spotted Woodpecker’- the highest volume term on the teletext internet)

SEO Tip 7: PDFs / White Papers

Why?: Within niche, emerging, sectors, white papers and focused PDFs are vessels of valuable knowledge. Framing the paper by a key term also increases the chance of users linking using search terms as anchor text.

Ideal when: You’re in an emerging sector and have something interesting to say. As the sector grows, (early) established rankings can stick like muck.

Example: (Term = ‘Social Media Marketing’, Result No 7)

SEO Tip 8: Listings (Products/Jobs etc)

Why?: Product items feature heavily on the first page for specific search terms, and other items are Increasingly – but still sparingly – appearing.

Ideal when: You’ve got a steady flow of products to release onto the web that cover a wide range of long-tail search terms

Example: (Term = ‘Board Game’, Result 4)

There are a few other relevant content formats, but the principles remain the same.

Stick to the above and you’ll stand a good chance of ranking – even in more competitive sectors.

Adios.

Here’s our simple four step plan for doing effective, results-driven Social Media and Online PR work…

Tell us what you think!

C&M Guide to Social Media Campaigns

Here’s a roundup of some of our recent white papers, think pieces and case studies …all in a highly desirable, super sharable, PDF format.

Dig in and tell us what you think….

C&M Social Media Content Strategy Map

C&M Quick Start Content Optimization SEO Guide

C&M Social Media Case Study Hotels.com

C&M Case Study Online PR Agency

Meantime, our full archive of Online PR Agency papers and downloads is available here via Scribd. (We love Scribd.)

How to Win Friends and Influence People With Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogosphere.

Overview

This short paper gives you a ‘101’ view on how to research and implement a basic Online PR / Social Media Campaign.  Specifically, it offers some best practise advice on how to use Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogsphere for successfully seeding campaign ideas.  (If you’re a Facebook or LinkedIn addict don’t worry:  we’ll be writing a separate paper about Online PR in Social Networks very soon!)

Part 1: Social Media Campaign Philosophy

“The skills required in the Online world are very different to those practised in traditional Media Relations.”
Roger Warner, MD of C&M

It may have been said before, but I’m going to say it again: Online PR is putting the ‘public’ back into ‘public relations’. Gone are the days when us PR people have to rely on a third party (i.e. the mass media) to get a message ‘out there’, because Social Media has opened up a wealth of opportunities for talking directly with your customers. And for this we use a Social tool set and a more human approach.

But this also means that we assume direct responsibility for what is said, and are liable to take the flack if we say something offensive or inappropriate. The phrase ‘outreach’ has been banded about a lot in relation to Social Media and Online PR campaigns lately – but we try to avoid it here at C&M. ‘Outreach’ seems to imply a one-way, outbound transaction with external parties (it’s a term often associated with the disenfranchised – homeless people, drug users, etc.), whereas our best work is all about give and take on a very intimate level. Talking to Joe Public is an entirely different ballgame to media schmoozing, and should always be approached as a conversation rather than a pitch.

Social Media Campaigns – Just like a face-to-face chat, but online.

Once you get your head round these essential differences, Social Media campaigns can be a huge amount of fun and massively rewarding – in a much more personal, direct and measurable way than, say, seeing an article placed in a magazine. It’s not about firing off press releases, sucking up to journalists and counting the column inches, it’s about starting a dialogue, that should – if you do it right – take on a life of its own,  distribute your message, and drive warm blooded web traffic.

Part 2: Social Media Campaign Research

“True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.” Ben Jonson

The best conversations in life are those we have with like-minded, interested, interesting people who are good at listening as well as talking. The same goes for Social Media conversations, so don’t waste your time and energy on someone who really isn’t bothered about what you’ve got to say.

In most cases, the quality and relevance of your followers/friends/contacts is more important than the quantity. It may look impressive to have a 1000+ Twitter following, but how many of them are actually contributing anything to your cause? And who they are and where they come from is often less important than how they can help you.  In Online PR terms, your media can be a customer, a partner, a consultant, a member of staff or a reporter – the important thing is that they care for you and are able to extend the conversation around your brand.

Identifying the right audience is the first step to good Online PR practice, and there are hundreds of tools out there to help you do it. Here are just a few of our favourite research tools for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the blogsphere, plus some general notes on monitoring and managing potential contacts.

Part 3: Social Media Research Tools for Online PR Campaigns

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

Twitter

• Twellow is a really useful directory of Twitter users, because it lets you search people’s bios as well as their names. So for a UK-specific campaign that’s promoting new web design technology, you could type in “Web Designer UK” to get a list of relevant users.
• Tweetbeep is a bit like Google Alerts for Twitter. It allows you to set up keyword specific searches that can be turned into alerts or RSS feeds so you can receive alerts whenever someone is Tweeting about a specific subject. The tool’s advanced search also letsyou can also specify a location: for example ‘500 miles from London’ would show you any tweets on your chosen subject sent within that radius.
• Twitter Karma is particularly handy if you’re taking on an existing Twitter account that needs some TLC or if your current profile is in need of a follower overhaul. It shows you who is following you back and which of your followers you are also following. The main advantage of Twitter Karma over FriendorFollow (another popular Twitter housekeeping tool) is that you can speed up this process by bulk following and unfollowing.
• When deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter, we also take into account the velocity, sociability and lucidity of their tweets, as well as the obvious number of followers and weight of second-order followers. Twinfluence is a good tool for measuring most of these things.

Flickr

• The most straightforward way of searching for suitable Flickr contacts is within Flickr itself. The ‘search for members’ function allows you to find people by their interests, which makes it easy to target relevant people. Of course, users may not put all of their passions into their bios, so another way to approach it is by tracking down photos on a certain subject and tracing them back to their creator.
• For a photography competition we’re currently running with Plain Lazy, I used Compfight to find pictures of skaters, surfers and other relevant communities. It shows you a big page of thumbnails on your chosen search query – and this is much easier and less time consuming to browse than Flickr’s own search engine.

YouTube

As with Flickr, it’s often easiest to search for photos rather than users, and for this I recommend using Google’s advanced video search, which gives you more options than YouTube’s own search engine. (Note – I’m suggesting that you leave the YouTube environment to conduct YouTube searches here.) This also allows you to turn your searches into RSS feeds, so that you can monitor new content via your RSS reader app without needing to go back and do new searches each time.

Blogs

To identify relevant blogs, we use a combination of Google blog search and Technorati, and then rate their influence manually using sites such as delicious and by counting the level of backlinkage and extent of connectivity within blogger communities. We also use Linkdiagnosis.com to validate the quality and relevance of the backlinks.

Another Great Multi-Purpose Tool

For an all-round handy tool, Social Mention is a Social search engine that pulls content from across all Social Media. This is especially useful if you don’t have time to search each platform individually.

The Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

Once we’ve identified the users and communities to target, anything with an RSS feed gets plugged into our campaign Influencer Monitoring Dashboard (we use Netvibes, but any RSS aggregator would work), so that we can keep tabs on new activity in real time. The Influencer Monitoring Dashboard is also where we collate all our keyword searches for blogs, news sites and any other relevant online communities. (If you’re interested about how we do this and what a Dashboard looks like, then just email us or tweet us at @contentmotion and we can share some examples with you.)

The C&M Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

Part 4: Social Media Campaign Implementation

“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” Truman Capote 

Once we’ve identified the communities and individuals to target for a campaign, it’s time to start talking. There’s no secret formula or etiquette Bible for getting this right – we just rely on our instinct and approach it as we would any sensible conversation. You wouldn’t burst into the middle of a club you had just joined and start shouting about yourself without getting to know people first, and the same rule goes for online communications. 

Our advice here is to just be friendly and polite, contribute to existing conversations and be up front about why you are there. If you’ve done your job right in the identification process, it shouldn’t be too hard to get people listening.  Another key thought here is utility.  People are more likely to listen to you if you have something useful to contribute to a discussion – which in practice means servicing their agenda in the first instance and not yours.  In this context, a blog comment or a forum post will address a need – it won’t be an advertisement.

Social Media Campaigns in Action

Here are some examples of recent Social Media Campaigns that have worked well for us, and some tips as to how we implemented them.

Twitter

A recent campaign we worked on with IBM proved that Twitter can be a real force in Online PR, especially for niche campaigns directed at tight-knit communities. The aim of the campaign was to drive sign-up to a virtual event inside IBM’s Virtual Forbidden City and for our Twitter activity we took a two-pronged attack: enlisting the help of IBM staff and brand influencers to spread the word on our behalf, as well as targeting potential event attendees directly. We didn’t need a massive following to create a buzz because having a small but well-connected and active community was just as effective.

As well as talking about the event, we did our best to make our Tweets interesting by sharing news stories, replying to relevant questions and generally interacting. The campaign was a success, with the majority of traffic to the main site coming from Twitter.  (You can check out the full case study here.)

Flickr

We’re currently working on a photography competition with Plain Lazy, that’s using Flickr as the host platform. To get things going, we started leaving invitations on relevant pictures, asking the photographers to add them to our competition pool and explaining the campaign incentives (great prizes, etc). We mostly chose pictures that already had a number of comments, so that the note would also be seen by the previous commenters in their Flickr activity feed. After a few days, the campaign took on a life of its own and photos started appearing in the Flickr pool without being directly invited.

YouTube

In much the same vein as Flickr, YouTube is all about the comment box – although the main disadvantage is that web links are disabled in YouTube, and comments tend to be less friendly and constructive than in Flickr. In other words, it’s less of a conversational environment than Flickr, making For an upcoming competition with Hotels.co.uk, we’re getting around this by making a promotional video that will be hosted on a dedicated Hotels.co.uk channel, and can also be posted underneath relevant videos as a ‘video response’.

Blogs

Perhaps the biggest minefield of all Social Media interactions, blogs also have the biggest potential for reaching a large audience, and coverage tends to be longer-lived and carry more weight than most flash-in-the-pan Twitter stories because of the backlinkage they carry and their general permanence. But how to talk to bloggers without being perceived as a self-promoting PR menace?

For the IBM Virtual Forbidden City event, we used our Influencer Monitoring Dashboard to monitor activity on the blogs we’d identified as relevant and influential in our initial research and analysis. Whenever a related post came up, we’d then leave a (relevant, appropriate) response, along with a link to the event site – or we’d alert our IBM team to do likewise). This not only helped drive traffic to the site and signups, but it also resulted in follow up blog posts, comments and Tweets about the event.
 

Conclusion: Social Media Campaigns, Sorted

So, with a few handy tools, a bit of imagination and a willingness to research the playing field and get stuck in, there’s really nothing that scary about running Social Media campaigns. Think of it like blind-dating: find someone with similar interests and hobbies, work out a suitable place to meet up, remember your Ps and Qs, and don’t spend all night talking about yourself. If all goes to plan, you’ll be engaged before you know it…

(NB: this paper has also been published by our friends at New Media Knowledge).

Question:
How many Online consultants in flip flops does it take to screw up a good marketing plan?

Answer:
Normally just one, but we’ve seen whole agencies go ‘tribal’ on a perfectly sound set of ideas on more than one occasion.

You’ll be pleased to learn that we’re a different kind of consultancy (we own sensible shoes and  often wear suits to meetings).  Taking the pretentious out of PR, this paper is designed to demystify all this hip digital marketing stuff and show you how we normally execute a basic Online PR campaign – in under 10 pages!

It’s quite simple really:  all we do is shut up, listen and spin.  Here’s our five step guide…

1: A Good Online PR/Social Media Agency May Ask You to Shut Up

This first step is arguably the most important aspect of good Online PR and Social Media strategy. If our clients are good talkers but not so good at listening then we politely request their attention.

Shutting up is really important because, as you’ll see, great Online PR programmes are never just about ‘me, me, me!‘  For this reason, we never normally advocate building an ‘Acme Corp’ Facebook widget or a dedicated social networking platform straight out of the blocks. ‘If we build it, they will come’ was never a great maxim for the Interweb.  Instead, we recommend some of the following…

2: Listening & Learning is a Good Online PR/Social Media Agency Skill

This is good marketing 101: understanding what your customers want. We always do a spot of research before we dive in.  The goal is to get a feel for the kind of language that our audience is using in relation to our stuff, and to identify when and where they’re actively talking about it.

Here’s how:

i) Keyword Research

Using Google Suggest we can quickly tune in and learn how people are searching the big, bad Interweb for our specific product/service offerings and the things that are related to them.

Ideally we’ll find that our content commands a decent level of search traffic.  Just how much will depend on the market we’re in – obviously one would expect less traffic for B2B terms and more for B2C… But whatever the case, this research will show us whether our current marketing language is in tune with the people that are out there looking for us.

It’s easy to understand how keenly contested these ‘keyword markets‘ are in relation to the rest of the web.  We just plug them into Google to see how many other pages are out there ranking for the terms.  Our aim is to find some keyword ‘sweet-spots’ around which to optimise our work …In other words, a set of descriptive terms that are well searched for and not particularly well used by our serious competition.

ii) Blog and Twitter Research

Next we apply everything that we’ve learned to Google Blog Search, Technorati Search and Twitter Search to see if these tools can reveal who’s talking about us and where they’re at.

Once we’ve identified relevant blogs and/or forums we can get a very concise feel for how ‘influential’ they are by running them through analysis tools like Link Diagnosis and Xinu (in basic terms, if a site is popular and influential, it’ll have a lot of links pointing to it – particularly from places like Technorati and delicious).  Having done this we make a note of the good ones and bin the rest.

iii) Research our ‘High Net Worth’ People

Next we use BackType to get a handle on the blogs that our most influential people are reading and to understand how these people are interacting with each other.  BackType is basically a tool that lets us ‘find, follow and share comments on the web.’ In simple terms, once we’ve established a set of keywords and people to follow, BackType alerts us to their presence whenever they show up in blog comment strings. It helps us to stay abreast of all the latest influential chat and to ensure that we’re monitoring in all the right places.

iv) Stay Alert…

We also create a bunch of Google News, Blog and Video Alerts for all of our most important keywords, so that whenever somebody so much as sneezes on our patch we’re the first to know about it.

v) Stay on Top of Things.  Create a Social Media Dashboard…

At this point, the prospect of so much data is probably making you itch.  But don’t worry – the Dashboard is where we pull everything together in one place.

All of the ‘listening’ information described can be accessed via a series of RSS feeds and aggregated into a simple Dashboard like the one below. This Dashboard is a central part of our work – it’s our window onto the web.  It’s also one of the primary mechanisms for seeding our content effectively.

From left to right we have a variety of ‘tabs’ that provide important feeds on all of our brand-related terms and keywords from Google, MSN, delicious, Flickr, Twitter, and other key services.  In addition, we have tabs that relay every new posting from competitor blogs, partner blogs and keyword-related blogs.  We also have a variety of tabs dedicated to specific blog comments in relation to our target people, blogs and keywords.  And finally, there’s a tab for all of our keyword-related Google Alerts.

Our ‘dashboard’ is created using Netvibes, but you could just as easily use any RSS reader.  The important thing is that it’s web-friendly so that it can be published as a page for a distributed team’s perusal.  The other thing to note is that Campaign Dashboards are highly addictive:  they’ve been known to kill mornings, evenings and weekends at single sittings – so use them wisely!

3: Social Content is the Key to Online PR/Social Media Agency Spin

‘Social-ness’ is the magic ingredient of all great Online PR.

Our primary goal is to find the right homes for our messages and to optimise them (with keywords) to resonate with our audience. Our ‘listening’ research and  dashboard help us to write good targeted content and learn where it needs to be seeded.

Our secondary goal is to ‘spin’ it… to encourage people to pass it around on our behalf. In order to achieve this, we do everything we can to make it interesting and worthy of Tweeting about, blogging about, emailing to a friend, bookmarking, commenting upon, or linking to (ie, we make it spin-able’). If we’re successful at this then we achieve a wonderful snowball effect (formerly known in ‘creative’ circles as ‘going viral’).

Basic formatting ideas for Online spin can help. For example: if our clients have great spokespeople, we can make their demos more enticing and accessible by re-cutting them as (lo-fi) Vox Pop videos. Blog posts can be redrawn as useful ‘Cut Out and Keep’ charts, and best practice white papers can be re-edited as simplified ‘Top 10’ lists.

Traditional ideas of spin are also essential.  Wherever possible we try to ensure that our content is aligned with the current news or ‘buzz’ agenda within any given market.  This is all about identifying the dish du jour via our dashboard (i.e. via Google, Twitter Search and BackType) and then integrating it with our core content.

Here’s a trivial example… It snowed here in the UK yesterday and, as usual, the country was brought to a standstill (nobody’s sure quite why, but it always seems to happen whenever the weather gets extreme).  Within an hour or two a popular meme was spreading across the Twitter-sphere.  Everyone had something to say about #uksnow, and so a Tweet using the phrase ‘uksnow‘ became a surefire way of driving traffic to your content.  Smarter applications of the same idea are fairly easy to come by – all you need is a nose for news, an intelligent way of tying your ideas to it, and a little bit of hustle (i.e. spinning yourself into the right online media pieces, blog posts, comment strings, and Google search traffic).

We also use simple web apps that make it easier for people to pass our content around and/or bookmark it – such as ‘email a friend’ tools, social bookmarking apps like AddThis.  And we always ensure that everything we do is published via RSS feeds. We also create simple content ‘widgets’ via services such as WidgetBox with which users can plug our content into their own sites and profile pages (eg Facebook) at their leisure.

Finally, we always try to be free with our ideas.  We ask all of our clients to give away any useful-but-non-core tools and services that they have.  We do this because giving away peripheral value usually creates respect, trust, loyalty and – most importantly – something worthy of being linked to.

Additional Publishing and Distribution Thoughts…

So much for the ‘spin.‘  At a practical level, we need to publish effectively so as to maximise our chances of getting noticed in the first place.  To do this we use some fairly basic tactics:

1. We publish our content to the most appropriate channel on our target web site:  i.e., the ‘resources’ channel, the ‘tools’ section, the press release page, etc (which in turn should be published via our RSS feeds).  This puts the content in the public domain for random browsers and returning site visitors.
2. We blog about the new content (which also gets RSSd).  This gives us a second opportunity to promote our content by alerting those people who tune into our blog on a regular basis (via RSS or directly).
3. We issue an online press release and/or a social media bulletin to announce the availability of the new piece.  This might get us a little coverage on other online channels (blogs, media, etc), but most importantly it establishes some third party backlinkage to our new web pages – something that Google likes and that will tend to have a positive (although lower level) impact on our search rankings.
4. We bookmark it via social bookmarking sites (eg, delicious and Stumbleupon) in line with our core keywords (often referred to as ‘tags’ on these services).  This puts it in the face of other like-minded people who are using these services to help their browsing or search activities.(Note: we never abuse these services.  Their true value lies in the communal effect of lots of people bookmarking lots of different web pages in relation to any given keyword/tag – so that fellow users are always presented with a rich and varied stream of relevant content.  We would be doing more harm than good to the wider service if we were to only bookmark things that belonged to us (in fact, some services like StumbleUpon will actively ban users who use their system for solely bookmarking  their own content).  This should never really be an issue, however, if you’re using these services for your general bookmarking needs in your day-to-day work.)
5. We Tweet about the content on our own personal Twitter profiles as well as the campaign profiles.  This places the content in front of all of our current Twitter followers.  In addition, when keywords are used sensibly (as in the #uksnow example above) it also places it in front of people who are actively searching for related material on Twitter (either Dashboard fashion, or via Twitter Alerts (see Twilerts) or on an ad-hoc basis).
6. We also publish the content ‘off-site’ to relevant Social Media channels, using optimised profiles which have been set up in advance to support the campaign.  For example, we publish video to YouTube (and embed the results in our blog posts), photographs to Flickr and articles to Scribd.  Again, this places our content on other networks that have pre-existing communities that are – if well researched – already proven to be interested in the core keywords used to optimise our content.

We do all of the above to distribute our content, raise awareness of it and drive web traffic.  Because this activity depends on fixed assets such as the size of our team, the number of Social Media profiles we create and the general volume of our web traffic and blog following, it can only go so far.  This is why ‘Going Social’ is so important to our work…

4: Engagement – the Mother of Online PR/Social Media Agency Spinning

Going Social really is the magic ingredient.  To go stellar we need to rely on more than our own distribution efforts: we need to invite other people to spin on our behalf.  This is where our ‘Shut Up, Listen and Learn’ principles come into play.

Our Listening dashboard gives us a view on who’s saying what in relation to our content.  It also tells us where and when.  We use it religiously to get engaged with the people, communities and forums that are likely to be most interested and therefore most willing to help us spread the word. (And, if we’re smart enough, it’ll help us to find people that want to work with us and buy things from us at the same time.)

‘Getting engaged’ in this way isn’t rocket science.  All it takes is time and commitment. We’re talking about developing relationships with people and places, so it’s nothing new (good PRs have always been great at doing this).  It’s worth remembering that a PR relationship is for life, not just for Xmas… so we always start as we mean to go on and give as much ‘utility’ as we can over the long term to each person, platform or community.

In practice this generally means getting involved in debates related to blog posts and Twitter streams, the giving away of something valuable (content, tools, widgets, etc) and generally just being a good citizen by participating fully so that the overall value of the relationship or target platform increases over time.  In short, we give a little to get a little… and if we can establish a good, professional (or fun loving) rapport then our counterparts are likely to reciprocate, get engaged with our content and spin it on our behalf amongst their networks and communities.  It’s a virtuous reciprocal circle of spin…

Step 5: Online PR/Social Media Agency Measurement

Lastly a word about measurement, because in cash-strapped times like these, no campaign would be complete without it.  It’s important that we demonstrate progress and justify our keep.

Our general approach to measurement is quantitative and ‘by whatever means necessary’.  I say this because we’ve learned over time that it’s not particularly helpful to throw random rubrics around with our clients.  What they really need is a set of metrics that are a) understandable and b) applicable in a useful fashion.  To this end, we’re not particularly big on ‘favourability’ or ‘sentiment’ reports, but do like to create hard numbers and graphs that can be cut up and used in Powerpoints by VPs of Marketing and MDs.  You can check out our general menu of quantitative Online PR and Social Media measures here. We use it as a ‘pick and mix’ for any given project, and usually focus on the following areas:

• Conversions: number of sales, sign ups, registrations, etc.
• Basic Web Site Metrics:  visitor stats, bounce rates, etc.
• PageRank: have we moved the bar on Google and increased search visibility and traffic potential?
• Engagement: volume of blog comments, re-Tweets, media mentions, followers, etc.

Conclusion

…and that’s all folks.  An Online PR / Social Media Agency campaign from A to Z in 10 pages.  It’s now my turn to Shut Up, Listen and Learn.  What do you think….? Send me a comment or five over on the Blog channel…

We’re having an increasing number of conversations with clients who are looking to us for that all-important pixie dust that will drive new levels of awareness and traffic.

No surprise there, right? That’s our job! But rather than sit on these experiences, we thought we’d do the decent thing and share our insights with you…

Nine times out of ten we strike on a a set of common, fundamentally ‘social’ ideas that we know will make 100% of difference – and yet, for one reason or another, they tend to grate with traditional marketing theory.

As such, this paper is our attempt to convince you that great Online PR is easy. All it takes is some basic rewiring.

The idea is simple: in order to engage with your audiences online, you need to shape your words, messages and tactics around their agendas, not yours. In other words, your Online PR efforts need to be a whole lot more social than they have been up until now.

An Early Digression: The ‘Party Hard’ Principle of Social Media Marketing

She shares the same problem as our clients: how to ensure a message hits home in the manic environment of the web…?

Eldermariam draws a super analogy with the social mechanics of a networking party. Imagine it’s in full-swing and you have an important message to pass on to your fellow guests. You have limited time and resources, and no stooges to spread the word on your behalf…

How do you do it? Do you…

a) Stand on a chair in the middle of the room and shout your message repeatedly?

…or

c) Mix, mingle and meet folks, and – when you find the nice guys – pass on your message in the context of a conversation (and in the process encourage them to go spread the word on your behalf)?

Unless you carry the charisma of Jack Nicholson, then options a) and b) are out. Actually, they’re counter-intuitive – they’ll probably alienate you. (Who are you? Why should I care? Jesus – go away!! Somebody call the authorities!!!)

The point is, of course, that when you’re operating in a loosely structured environment like the web / a party – an arena where nobody ‘owns’ the terms of engagement – the best way to communicate is by being more social. Yet we seem to miss this point on a consistent basis.

As Eldermariam describes, the crux of our problem is that when it comes to the web (or newspapers, or any form of mass communication) there’s “a great tension between what people want and what we think they need to know.”

We’re so obsessed with the importance of our message – and so ignorant of our audience’s wants and needs – that we seem content to bleat without direction into outer space. In practice, we run elaborate flash banner campaigns (hey, give me that big chair to stand on – I’m gonna try to shout the LOUDEST!), and we build reams of funky little microsites (hey, screw this, nobody’s listening…let’s have our OWN party!).

A much better approach is to listen first, and then do the talking. We should try to understand what our audience cares for before we open our mouths. Effective web marketing does this in spades, just like the good guys at the party. They get their message across (and get all the traffic) not because they shout the loudest, but because they’re the most engaged and the most engaging…

In other words, it’s all about being more social.

With this in mind, here’s our five Basic Social Theories of Online PR…

(We recommend you print them out on nice glossy paper, stick them on your wall and then bake them into everything you do online…)

C&M’s Basic Theories of Social Media Marketing

1) Listen up! Don’t attach names or labels without taking counsel

SEO 101 teaches us that in order to make our content ‘findable’ by users and ‘indexable’ by search engines, we need to work within the linguistic framework of our searching public.

It’s easy to understand the psychology of search via tools like Google Suggest and Wordtracker – both will give you an instant read on the keywords your audience is using. Your job is to take this vocabulary and weave it into the fabric of your content: in site names, urls, page titles, meta descriptions, headers, links, and so forth.

For example, if you provide a slicker-than-average ‘personalised tone service’ for mobile phones, you may want to position yourself as something bigger and groovier than a plain old grubby ringtone …but your customers won’t be making that distinction. They don’t even know you exist. You might prefer to call your stuff a BingTone or a HumTone, but they’ll be searching for a plain old ringtone. And if ringtone isn’t at the heart of your content strategy, then rest assured you’ll be off the Google map and missing a stack of motivated traffic.

Getting these principles right is what’s known in the trade as Content Optimization – and you can learn how to do it here. It’s inherently social: it’s all about talking like a customer, and it’s the most cost-effective way of generating the right kind of web traffic.

2) Be interesting: create noteworthy content (make people laugh, mad and/or excited)

This dilemma is what separates good Online PR from bad. Your primary goal is to find a home for your message. Your secondary goal is encourage people to spread it on your behalf. As such, you should do everything you can to make your content interesting and worthy of emailing to a friend, bookmarking, commenting upon, or linking to.

If you can encourage people to do this, you’ll achieve a wonderful snowball effect (formerly known in ‘creative’ circles as ‘going viral’). In simple terms, a reference to your content on someone else’s blog enhances your ‘findability’ in the true sense of a referral. It’ll also help your SEO because it represents a ‘backlink,’ which makes you more desirable to the Greater Google God.

As such, you should ask yourself what it’ll take to frame your next piece of content in a more desirable, funny and/or controversial fashion. Tools like Google Trends, Twitter Search and BackType will tell you what the world is currently searching for and talking about. Use them religiously and try to find ways of embedding relevant and popular themes into your work.

At the same time, other more basic formatting ideas will make your content more enticing and accessible: for example, you could re-cut that white paper as a natty, controversial list rather than a long boring essay. And you might find the right angles to change your product literature into cool three minute VoxPops video shorts.

Another thing to consider is the inclusion of ‘social’ tools that will make it easier for people to pass your content around and/or bookmark it. It’s a simple task to embed an ‘email a friend’ widget and a social bookmarking tool at the bottom of your page templates; and you really ought to provide an RSS feed for all your content as default. In addition, there are a number of great ‘widget’ tools to help you create ‘Content Feeds’ for FaceBook, desktops and web pages – so that users can get hold of your content when and where they please, without having to visit your site.

3) Party harder: seek and you shall find. (Don’t expect folks to come to you!)

This principle is all about operating within your target markets. Once your content (or web site, or widget) is ready, you need to make it stick by seeding it in the most vibrant, influential and interesting places.

Tools like Addictomatic, Google Alerts, Twilert (for Twitter), BackType, and MonitorThis will help you to keep a close watch on the most active and relevant communities of the web. They’ll all provide you with a daily dose of alerts based on your chosen keywords. They’ll also allow you to identify and follow the most influential people within a given debate. It’s powerful stuff!

Once you have this ‘social targeting’ knowledge, your task is to actively participate in the right hot spots and to seed your ideas and content. You should be commenting on and contributing to other people’s blogs, forums and profile pages on a daily basis, and generally getting engaged with the conversations that you’d like to be part of.

Like the party analogy, you need to be a social butterfly. And if you can do this effectively, we guarantee that you’ll soon be able to steer the debate. (In addition, tuning in to communities, debates and forums is simply the best way to get new ideas for new content. When you participate you become part of your own focus group, which takes the guesswork out of content generation.)

4) Be a good social citizen: give your content away freely and generously

This approach is crazy. It’s you who should be working hard to generate buzz, sales and leads, not your customers! You invest stacks of time and money to drive people to your web site, so there’s no sense in locking people out.

In our experience, when you take away the sacred ‘web to lead’ form, the effect is always positive: you open up more keyword-rich content for Google to index and you enable more people to distribute it freely on your behalf. What you lose in ‘leads’ (and I’d question that term strongly – how hot-to-trot can a web sign up ever be!?) you gain in increased visibility and distribution. So, if you haven’t done so already, get your content out in the open today.

The same goes with any non-core tools and services that you create. When you give peripheral value away for free you generate respect, trust and loyalty. A great example that’s close to home for C&M is SEOBook. If you ever need a steer on the science of SEO then look here. You can pay to buy the book or attend the courses, but the site also gives you a stack of fantastic free tools to help you do better SEO work.

As a result, SEOBook makes a lot of money and has an incredibly loyal following. Even better, its decision to give much of its value away for free has had an immensely positive effect on its Google performance on ultra-competitive keyword searches like ‘SEO tools.’ (Note: because much of their stuff is free and because I love it, I’m linking to the site here and adding to that SEO equity. In this respect, ‘free’ and ‘useful’ approaches can really become virtuous.)

5) Be socially useful: don’t build unnecessary content services

This point is best illustrated by some negative examples:

• The celebrity CEO blog sounded like a great idea in 2005 – until we figured out that it had a) no audience, b) nothing interesting to say and c) no real value or utility. (So we ditched it and replaced it with a product development community blog, which is now going great guns.)

• Likewise, the FaceBook widget that lets users connect and share their passion for SprocketWise version 5.7 is also doomed to fail. It may be free, but it has no purpose. (I’ll stop now. This one really gets my goat!)

The point is that all of these new-fangled widgets, platforms and content services can really help us to sell, support, and educate in more sophisticated ways – but only when they’re used in the right context. Social networking platforms are great for hosting virtual ‘before and after’ a conference session. They’re superb for any product or service that has an inbuilt community with a passion for sharing information. But they tend to fail when they’re built for the hell of it. So make sure you can prove their value before you start working with them.

Conclusion: Great Social Media Marketing is – Um – Social

I started off by saying that effective Social Media Marketing grated with more traditional marketing techniques. From our perspective, it’s important to let go of yesterday’s ‘command and control’ approach to communications.

In today’s web-dominated world, the winners will be the firms that are able to listen and tune in to their audiences before they embark on the next big thing. This is what we mean by a ‘social’ approach to Online PR.

It’s not happy or clappy, it’s just common sense. Do a bit of research first, understand your users wants and needs, and then give them a little of what you know they want.

In other words, make like the good guy at the party and work the room. You don’t need an MBA or a degree in Marketing to do this well.

Our latest best practice paper doesn’t beat about the bush.  Nope.  It’s our QuickStart guide to SEO copy writing and how to radically improve your Search Engine ‘Indexibility’ (…and hence your SEO) by creating better, more search engine friendly web site content.

Without further ado….

Why Keywords & Content Optimization are so Important to SEO

The New York Times published a great article a couple of years ago that totally nailed the question of why Keywords and Content Optimization are so important to search engines. The piece was written by a reporter who was coming to grips with the fact that he was no longer writing just for his editor and his readership ….but also for a new, third reader called Google.

Here’s his leader: “Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.”

It’s a great introduction to how and why we need to rethink our web site content in order to make it perform better for SEO.  In short, creating SEO-friendly content requires two changes to everyone’s writing habits…

1: New Types of Keyword Research

In order to understand and address an audience via search, it’s critical to understand the language that they’re using everyday on Google. In other words, instead of just crafting witty headlines, a large part of the creative work becomes a matter of aligning what you want to say with the langauge that you know your audience is using. Tools like Google Suggest help us do this Content Optimisation research with pinpoint accuracy.

2: New Types of SEO Copywriting Skills (Content Optimization)

Google (and others) ‘read’ web content in certain ways. For example, page titles, the things that sit in the top (grey) bar of your browser window – are extremely important. Google takes them as an important indication of what your content is all about. From a technical perspective, most good CMS’s will take this title from the headline that you give to your page. At the same time, Google prefers to read blocks of title text that are 70 characters or less. As such, the scope for creativity in headlines is somewhat changed…. And this is just one Google ‘reading quirk’ amongst many. (Don’t worry, we’ll explore some more of them below…)

As such, if we want our content to be more attractive to search engines then these two thoughts – keywords and good content optimization – should inform every single piece of content that we generate for the web.

That’s it for the theory – let’s take a look at how it’s all done.

Keyword Research:  How to Do It

Your aim is to structure your content using the words that your audience is using to search the web – so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV content management software,’ then you need to align the language you use to describe yourself with these terms.

At the same time, you need to be aligning yourself with a set of keywords in a ‘win-able’ arena amongst competitors: some keywords will have no competition, others will be red hot.

In simple terms, this last point creates a ‘keyword index.’ You need to place a calculated bet on where you want to play. Your choice should be calibrated by the following formula:

Volume of daily searchers on any given key word

(…divided by)

Volume of other web pages that are optimised around those keywords

You want to engage with as many people as possible that are using search terms related to your products / services. At the same time, you want to position yourself where you can compete, given the resources you have to hand.

The challenge is best illustrated by a quick experiement….

If you’re in the business of software apps for sales support, you might choose to optimise around the term ‘CRM.’ This would currently give you an audience of 563 searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, it would also put you in direct competition with 129 million other web pages that are optimised on that term. Alternatively, if you were to focus your keywords around the concept of ’sales management software’ you’d have a total audience of around 50 searchers a day; and using this route, you’d be up against approximately 150,000 other pages.

Clearly the chances of capturing the attention of a ‘sales management software’ searcher are far more likely than for a ’CRM’ searcher…

But choosing keywords is not just a question of running the numbers. Other branding considerations are also essential to a successful keyword strategy.

For example, you need to consider the following things…

• You brand equity – what’s does your overall investment in non-web language mean to this work? What about your sales patter and your product naming conventions? Do these things fit with your keyword findings?
• Market maturity – does your current searching public really reflect where the market is at? Are you leading them or following them? What stage is your market in terms of possessing a common body of language to describe its problems and requirements?
• Influential people – are industry analysts setting the market terms? Or are they just spinning far-fetched yarns? Do you need to follow or ignore them? What influence do they have on your customers? Will this influence matter tomorrow? Has it already had an impact?
• Your resources – can you afford to compete in hotly competed areas? If you have a mega-budget, why not just nuke it out? If your resources are small, can you find smarter keyword arenas to play in?
• The quality of the data sample – if you’re playing in niche territories, are you willing to bet a keyword / naming convention on a sample of 10 searchers per day? Once your product category matures, how are the trends going to change?
• The state of the nation – can you afford not to play in competitive fields?

The above questions should create an interesting debate where branding ideas meet public perceptions of you and your products and services. But ultimately, your keyword choices should be determined by your gut feel and your resources.

Content Optimization: Better SEO Copywriting

Once you’ve established your keywords, you then need to integrate them within your web site content.

Here’s our QuickStart guide for good keyword implementation.

Technical Page Content Optimization Tips

Here at C&M, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential Content Optimization and SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO copywriting, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

• Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief – around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

• Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also a call to action like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it – this globbet of content is really, really important – this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

• Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

• Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Optimization Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

• Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)
• Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.
• Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.
• Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better – your goal is the bask in their sunlight.
• If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)
• Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All You Really Need to Remember About Keywords and Content for SEO…

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key phrases and content elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content should also be good to read…. and to be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about all this new-fangled SEO Content Optimization stuff, then just call us.  We’re an Online PR agency that specialises in just this sort of thing :  )

Meantime, if you’d like to just dive on in and get going on some Content Optimization work, then we recommend you check out our recent paper on Online PR and Content Optimization tools for the masses…

Of course, this hasn’t always been the case.  Before the web – and in particular the brave new world of web 2.0 – you needed extremely deep pockets if you hoped to move the needle.  Many of us would have sat in planning meetings a few years back wondering what the hell we were going to do to justify our fee or salary.

To do good PR used to mean having either the resources or the assets to convince reporters that you were ‘hot’ enough to write about for their magazine – and if you had neither, then it was probably best (and cheaper) to simply not turn up.

Today, this is far from the case.  Good PR today is Online PR, and good Online PR represents just about anything and everything you do on the web.

I’ve written about some of the fundamental differences between old PR and Online PR elsewhere, so won’t dwell on them here – suffice to say that any company with an ounce of ambition and a browser can make an impact right now through Online PR…

This, then, is C&M’s Rough Guide to planning an Online PR campaign.  We have FIVE rules for you, but before we dive in, we’d like to make the following points absolutely clear:

• Anyone can do it
• You don’t need to spend a fortune, but you do need to commit human resources to make an impact
• Everything is based on the publication of superior content
• You don’t necessarily need an agency to do it for you
• Online PR doesn’t really translate well to campaigns:  it’s a process and you’re either in or you’re out

If this sounds a little different than PR 1.0 to you, then great – so it should.  It’s also incredibly exciting and liberating.  So let’s crack on….

Online PR Rule 1:  Have Something to Say and Say it (Get Some Attitude!)

The first rule of Online PR is nobody talks about Online PR.  No, scrub that – bad joke.  The first rule is, in fact, make sure you do have something to talk about and then talk about it all of the time.

Think about this one for a minute.  In days gone by it was virtually impossible for any company of any size to say anything to its marketplace unless they’d just split the atom or landed a man on the moon.  PR 1.0 decreed that your main outlet for communication was a press release, and, as mentioned, it was only ever worth creating one if it was to have an audience.

(Not that this stopped us – I pity the poor reporters who used to (and still do) fence calls from young PR execs on the importance of the release of version 5.1.3 of Sprocket X!)

In other words, in the bad old days of PR, to talk to the world you needed a press release, a receptive reporter and a magazine willing to publish your story.  There were other ways, of course, like publishing your own magazine or advertising in the FT or on the TV, but these things tended to be out of reach for the majority of us.

Today, we have web sites, blogs, content management systems, and email tools, and it’s incredibly easy to publish our news, views and opinions.  We can cut out the middle man and go straight to the interweb, right!? So far, so obvious.  But reminding you how easy it is to publish is an important point to make, because to build an effective Online PR machine you need to adopt a new attitude.

This isn’t particularly simple because it’s behavioural.  The machine needs feeding, and the only way to do this is to throw off the shackles of PR 1.0 and to start publishing your stuff on a regular basis.

Instead of filter, edit, polish and then publish, your new mantra needs to be PUBLISH FIRST, THEN FILTER.  (Read Clay Shirky’s excellent new book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ for a snappy review of this trend.)

Don’t sit on your ideas, conversations and stories and expect to lay the occassional golden egg… Get some some new attitude.  Get your content out there.  The cost is zero and the upside is huge.  (And you don’t need to subcontract this if you don’t want to…)

More of the benefits below.  For now, here’s some publishing tools to help you spread your word easily and cost effectively…

Our Rough Guide to Online PR Publishing Tools

• Blogging Tools:  Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type
• Open Source Content Management Systems:  MySource Matrix (disclaimer, I’m an exec at Squiz!), Alfresco
• Micro-Blogging Tools:  Twitter, Pownce

Online PR Rule 2:  Help People to Find You

I sat through a meeting last year with a Hollywood Exec who had been asked to bring his wisdom and philosophy to the Online PR space.  His closing words were ‘In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Scream.‘  Now, despite his rants about production values and the spirit of Ben Hur, I left the meeting impressed.

His point was this:  all this new-fangled publishing is just posturing unless you can get people engaged with it.  The web is a big old space, and it’s easy to sink without trace.

Rough Guide Rule to Online PR number 2, is then, is to get out there and get yourself noticed.  How? Well, there are already a bunch of well trodden paths, ranging from paid-for (eg, Pay Per Click advertising) to more traditional PR-ish ways (eg, have an online magazine or influential blog write about you).  But these aren’t the most exciting because in our book they’re not the most cost-effective.  The best ways are free…

Here they are…

• Firstly, identify and participate in important blogs, magazines and forums.  This is simple and essential.  You ought to be keeping a running book on all of the most influential media (blogs or otherwise) in your space, and have someone dedicated to monitoring them and contributing to them by way of comment posts, contributed articles, responses to questions, posing questions and providing feedback to other participants.  In doing this you’ll build both awareness of you and your company and also some important link equity for your SEO.  More of this in a moment…
• Secondly, publish your stuff on platforms other than your own.  Issue your (now plentiful) press releases via online news hubs.  Submit your thinkpieces to article submission sites.  Maintain profiles on social media destinations like YouTube, Flickr, Viddler and Squidoo and publish your content assets on them.  All these activities will establish a footprint for you beyond your own backyard and will help to persuade influential people – prospects, partners, media, etc – to come and visit your site.

But the real payoff for feeding an Online PR machine with a steady flow of content is in search engine optimisation (SEO) – more of which comes next…

Our Rough Guide to Blog, Social Media and Buzz Monitoring Tools:  for identifying content and debate related to your brand…

• Google News Alerts
• Technorati Search
• Monitor This
• Social Scan
• Twitter Search

Our Rough Guide to Online PR Distribution Hubs and Article Submission Sites: for propagating your content on sites other than your own…

• PitchEngine
• FastPitch
• ClickPress
• Sane PR
• PR Log
• e-articles

Our Rough Guide to Social Media Sites:  for maintaining a profile and posting your content…

• YouTube
• Flickr
• Viddler
• Squidoo
• SlideShare
• Scribd

Online PR Rule 3:  Help Search Engines to Help People Find You (an SEO Primer)

When it comes to thinking about Online PR, the Godzilla in the room is SEO.  Put simply, everything you publish online, in whatever format and on whatever platform, is Google-juice.

Depending on your objectives, you might want to think content publishing first and SEO second, but whichever way you look at it, you can’t ignore the fact that your Google PageRank is 100% dependant on your publishing efforts.

I’ve written here about the mechanics of SEO, how to do it properly and why your content publishing efforts are so important, so I’ll lay off the science here.  But if you don’t know much about the subject, just remember this:  your ability to rank well in Google is wholly dependant on your content being ultra-high quality, ultra-equipped with keywords and ultra-accessible to web crawlers.

As such, your Online PR efforts have two audiences:  the first is made of flesh and blood and the second is made of lines of code.

So, whether you’re publishing content on your site, participating in forums, commenting on blogs, or publishing articles on user generated content sites, your aim is to please the God of Search as well as a human audience. And this where the Online PR and Content and Search Optimisation smarts come in…

Put simply, your goal in SEO is to publish compelling content that will i) encourage people to create backlinks to you in their web sites, blogs and social bookmarking tools, and ii) encourage Google to crawl your site extensively and to index it in relation to certain keywords.

‘Compelling content’ in this sense means a) findable, b) readable and c) indexable.  Here’s how you make it so…

a) Online PR and Content Findability:  AKA Keyword Research

Your first task when planning your content is to make it findable.

Your goal is to engage with ‘high value,’ ‘prospective’ customer traffic.  ‘High value’ means visitors who are engaged with your product/services set and are actively looking for help.  ‘Prospective’ means visitors who are new, or relatively new to you/your site and are looking to you as a potential vendor.

In simple terms, you need to structure your on- and off-site content using the words that your audience is using to search the web – so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV set top boxes,’ then you need to align the language of your content with these terms.

There are an abundance of tools to help you identify these ‘keyword markets.‘  Many of them are free.  I’ve already created a list of great Keyword tools (and related things) for you here….

In the meantime, check out this recent blog post if you’d like to learn more about the art of effective keyword discovery and how important (but easy!) it is…

Our Rough Guide to Keyword Research Tools

• Google Suggest:  tells you average searches per month on any given search term
• WordTracker:  like Google Suggest but pulls independent data from multiple sources, and can therefore be considered more comprehensive and neutral.  Free version provides data from a small pool of searches; paid for version is extensive.

b) Online PR and Content Readability:  AKA Publish the Good Stuff

Your second task is to take these keywords and apply them to content that’s worthy of being read – by both humans and crawlers.  In simple terms, this is all about researching your market, or having a driving purpose to base your content around.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet here.  Your content is either going to be hot or it’s not.  Much of this will depend on your target audiences and how receptive they are to your overriding Online PR objectives, but here’s a few ideas to help things fly:

• Go back to basics and read those journalism manuals.  Creative headlines are what sells copy.  (Co-incidently, they’re also what will show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as and when you get indexed.)  And don’t forget to include those keywords!
• In terms of subject matter, a good dose of Money, Sex and Ambition also helps – but if you’re out of these, then think of creative ways to frame your content.  Whether you’re producing text-based stuff, or audio or video, lists are always a good idea because they signal a snappy purpose and state clearly the claims you’ll be making on a reader’s time:  for example, ‘Five Rules for….’, ‘A Ten Minute Guide to….,’ and ‘Three Reasons Why X Will Fail.’
• Write concise excerpts (meta descriptions) for your content – including your keywords at the beginning.  This ‘meta’ content will feature prominently in the SERPs (….more on this below)
• Try to align your content with the search and keyword zeitgeist.  Use Google’s free Keyword tools (like Google Suggest) to get a read on the areas of interest that surround your keyword markets, and Google Trends to see if you can gain any play with the most popular search topics of the day.  For example, you might have a great research report to promote and you may be confident of pick up, but aligning its title with a hot keyword can earn you extra readership and linkage because it will ‘pop’ that little bit more:  eg ‘Fifty Consumer Trends in IPTV Adoption:  Why Christina Aguilera On Demand Just Won’t Cut It’

c) Online PR and Content Indexability:  AKA Content Optimisation

Finally, having established your keyword set and some marketable content ideas, you have to have laser-like focus on making the content as accessible and indexible as possible – via some strict Content Optimisation work.

Here’s what you need to do to make your content more Google-friendly:

• Keep your page titles brief – around 70 characters or less, and use your keywords within them
• Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. Use around 160 characters and ensure your keywords fature prominently.
• Include a rich variety of keywords in the page’s keyword metadata field.  Whilst this used to be extremely important, it’s not so much any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice.
• Use keywords as part of your navigation labeling wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

In addition, you should apply the following principles to your on-page content:

• Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)
• Use keywords in your headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.
• Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this).
• Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above.
• If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and if your front end can accommodate them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like humans, crawlers get bored easily.)
• Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words and concepts go at the top of the page in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into these areas wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces your big keywords in its anchor text.

If you’d like to learn more about effective Content Optimisation tactics, then check out this recent blog post – it contains a bunch of practical information on the whys and wherefores.

Online PR Rule 4:  Help People to Help Others Find You

OK, so you’ve created some great content and you’ve optimised it to help humans and search engines find it, but it’s not time for a tea break just yet.

A further consideration is Online PR ‘enablement.‘  How easy have you made it for other people to spread the word on your behalf?  Unlike PR 1.0, good Online PR is extremely scalable because it exploits the network effects of the web.

A few years ago, notions of ‘scalability’ and ‘network effects’ were tied to a practise called ‘buzz (or viral) marketing,’ which, by and large, involved dreaming up humorous video shorts and emailing them to a large list of random people. Then we discovered Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and thought the smart thing to do was to dream up humorous video shorts and give them to ‘influential’ people who’d enjoy passing them on to other people on your behalf.

Both efforts were half-baked and not particularly empathetic.  But they did prepare our thinking in a positive way for the new world to come:  Web 2.0 and the FaceBook crowd.

Social Networks are fascinating things.  They give an online home to people with common interests.  If you own a community of followers (eg, your magazine subscribers) or can encourage one (eg, around a business or charitable campaign) then you should start exploring them right now.

In terms of Online PR, social networking platforms are superb tools for encouraging people to engage with you and others with similar needs and/or ideas.  An old school example is the forum. Squillions of these things exist on the web, and many of them will deal with your industry.  As mentioned before, our advice is to get in amongst them and start participating….

But when it comes to building your own, or building apps and widgets that sit on a third party platform, we recommend you think carefully before diving in.  Online PR through Social Media is very different to PR 1.0.

For instance, there’s a difference between using web forums to ‘pitch’ ideas to influential people and using them to participate in conversations which may influence other people.  The former involves persuading an influencer, and the latter involves being an influencer and helping people to connect with your ideas and services.

In our book, Social Networking platforms – and social media in general – serve a far better purpose as tools for participating and facilitating communications activities than for ‘pitching’ your ideas.

A good example is Barack Obama’s brilliantly executed electoral Online PR campaign..  This is big time.  His web site uses the best of the web -  a social networking platform, ‘MyBO’, a Twitter feed, etc -  to help people to enable other people to spread the word and get engaged.  He didn’t just use the web for pitching himself (which is what, by comparison, Hilary Clinton, seemed to do -  use the web as a soap box).

So how does this apply to you and your business?  Well, you can start thinking about creating platforms, tools and content that are designed to be taken up and used by interested parties – staff, customers, partners, etc – for engaging with other parts of the web, or for helping them conduct their business more effectively.

This can be done at both the micro level and the macro level.  Here’s some ideas….

Online PR Micro-Facilitation

• Make your content easy to link to and/or embed in other people’s sites.  For example, rather than solely hosting and branding your own video, think of the benefit of using YouTube as well:  aside from giving you another potential audience, YouTube outputs code snippets which allow people to feature your content on their web sites.  The same goes for images on Flickr, presentation material with SlideShare, and so on…
• Make it easier and attractive for people to pass on your content via embedded ‘email a friend’ forms.
• Make it easy to bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites by including aggregation tools within your content, like ‘AddThis‘.  (In turn, these social bookmarking sites will make your content more available to other people.)
• Render your content assets in a ‘Widget’ format, so that others can access it and feature it on their own sites as (for example) a sidebar feature.  There are now a ton of interesting widget-ization services available, many of which are free and do the work for you if you’re creating simple tools:  see WidgetBox, for example.
• If you can find the right angle, create more sophisticated widgets or applications to feature on other Social Networking platforms.  For example, there’s been great work done lately by the NSPCC to help donations through FaceBook.

Online PR Macro-Facilitation

• Create a ‘user generated’ FAQ section or forum for your site, or create a profile via a hosted service like Get Satisfaction.  Allow your customers and partners to engage directly with you and others on support issues.
• Create your own Social Networking platform for specific activities via hosted tools like Ning, or other Open Source social networking tools.  Good applications for Social Networking environments include:  events management (allow people to meet and greet online); education or training (host your coursework in an interactive space and have people mark it up, amend and improve it); host your fan-base (if you’re a rock star, or have any following of note!); best practise hubs (share your tips, tricks and insights in information-hungry or ‘expert’ environments)

The above examples show you how easy it is to co-opt other people into your Online PR efforts.  It’s not a rocket science activity, but one that does need to be treated sensibly.  One mistake to avoid is the ‘Build it and They Will Come’ mentality of many early Social Media marketing efforts.

Just because you’re a brand or you have an audience doesn’t mean that people will care about your new networking widget.  The most successful applications of Social Networking for Online PR tend to be those that are focused and designed to support a specific activity or application – eg, events support, customer support, and the like.

Online PR Rule 5:  Your Reputation will be SafeGuarded by Your New-Found Attitude

As mentioned above, good Online PR requires a different attitude.  Publish then filter is the way forward, rather than polish, polish and then publish.

In many respects, Online PR is a volume game.  The more great content you publish, and the more platforms you publish it to, the better your SEO will be and the more scalable your efforts will become.

Whilst this is a reductive view, it nonetheless speaks strongly to one aspect of PR that’s even more sensitive in the online environment than it used to be:  Reputation Management.

On the web, the idea that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper simply doesn’t exist.  The web is more or less an indelible environment.  What’s published today remains published tomorrow, and will be forever findable via the links that are built up around it.  Indeed, search engine algorithms are built on this premise!

So, when it comes to Reputation Management, aside from monitoring what’s being said and published about you, your job is twofold:

1. Don’t publish stupid things that may come back to haunt you (think twice and edit your content sensibly before firing off that angry blog post), and…
2. Publish as much great stuff as you can, encourage good Online PR karma, and have as many pages host your content and/or link to you as possible in a positive way.

The second point is the most important here.  What we’re talking about is an Online PR insurance policy of sorts, so that when the crap does hit the fan, the weight of your positive footprint outweighs that of your negative.  In other words, if you’ve published enough good stuff, and have built some serious SEO equity around this, then this ought to see you through the bad times… in the sense that Google searches on your brand name are more likely to return the good results than the bad.

Hence, Reputation Management becomes a case of ‘may the best content win’….

Our Rough Guide to Reputation Measurement Tools:

• Google News Alerts: get alerts on breaking news containing your brand/keywords
• Technorati Search: a Google search for the blog world
• Blogpulse: another Google-like blog search tool that allows you to track brand ‘conversations’ via graphs
• Monitor This: get a huge variety of RSS feeds on specific keywords in one place
• Social Scan: monitor how popular your site is on common Social Media sites
• Twitter Search: monitor micro-blogging discussions about you in real time

Conclusion

By way of a summary…

Online PR is everything that you communicate online.  Specifically, Online PR is an attitude that requires you to publish more high quality content, more of the time in a way that’s sensitive to Google and to customers, using tactics that make it easy and attractive for other people to wage your campaigns for you.  It’s a continual process to adopt – in particular because these new publishing habits will protect you from storms when bad weather kicks in.

Measurement also matters of course, but we’ll save that for another paper sometime soon.

The key thing to remember in all of this is that effective Online PR can be free and easy to plan and execute, and that the field is open to companies of every shape and size.

So, no more reading…. go play!

Frankly, it’s becoming a drag. Having a bunch of earnest questions flung in your face when you’re just about to hop into a brainstorm isn’t wholly conducive to blue-scaping or crea-magining, or whatever other super-urgent, creative things we’ve been contracted to do. Besides, we need at least 30 minutes in make up before entering a client meeting.

So I thought I’d jot down a few of our secrets to help these folks out. This way, the next time we get accosted we can just point people to a web page using a well optimised URL.

As such, here’s the essential Online PR & Content Optimisation tools which C&M carries in its handbag and uses day in, day out….

Online PR & Content Optimisation Research Tools

Things to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen

I nearly flipped my lid when I first used this plugin for Firefox. It’s a sidebar that – at the push of a button – scans whatever page you’re on and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. It also provides this information as a natty, visual tag cloud for those with autistic tendencies like myself. You should use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll learn heaps about why. I promise it’ll blow you away.

Google Adwords Suggest

Just type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns. When it comes to content planning, I’d be lost without this one. It tells me whether or not I have an audience for my keywords, and whether there’s any competition out there. As such, it helps me know what content to write, how to do it and how to promote it.

Wordtracker

Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. Basically, it keeps a three month store of activity on Google, MSN and Yahoo, and tells you how many times a day your keywords have been used by the world at large. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other interweb pages are optimised for your terms. This is gold dust as it enables you to get a true measure of whether a Content Optimisation strategy is worth pursuing or not. (What looks interesting from a search volume perspective may often turn out to be a monster when it comes to competition!) Costs a couple of hundred bucks a year.

Competitive Online PR & Content Optimisation Tools

Things to help you understand what black magic your competitors are practising…

Keyword Spy

A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns. Really useful for getting a quick view on who you may be up against on your new Adwords campaign (and for realising which keyword markets to avoid!).

Keyword Page Comparison Tool

From Aaron Wall’s wonderful SEObook.com. This rinky dink tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place. In addition, it allows you to do this stuff on a comparative basis, so that you can do a competitive bake-off between sites. And, even better, it lets you download this data as an Excel file, so you can get jiggy with it when you’re offline.

Keyword Density Tool

Again, via SEObook, this is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO. (I use it to see if competitor pages spit out a range of meaningful words, or just a bunch of crap. If it’s the former, then I know I need to really get with the program; if it’s the latter, then I know I can make serious a difference to relative performance with some simple Online PR and Content Optimisation work.)

Online PR & Content Optimisation Dreaming Tools

Things to help you get creative when you’re in a tight spot…

Google Trends

Very neat service which plots you a volume graph over time for ‘big fish’ keywords (phrases that are being used by lots of searchers). Also tells you which geographies this traffic is drawn from, and gives you pointers as to the key news pieces that may have driven keyword interest. Won’t give you any data on smaller keyword markets, but certainly provides you with a firm handle on the keyword zeitgeist via its read of daily trends.

Thesaurus.com

Because we all need a little help with our dreamscaping.

Dictionary.com

Because we also need to spell words correctly, innit?

SEO, Online PR and Content Optimisation Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand your performance and your competitors (and keep you amused deep into the night when you really should have gone to bed a long time ago)…

SEO Quake

The daddy of SEO analysis tools. A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data. DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT!

Xinu

This is an awesome little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics

If you’re not using Google Analytics to understand your traffic sources, your top performing content and your keyword performance, then you need your head examined. Also gives good readings on important stuff like bounce rates, time on page, average page views and the like.

Opentracker

Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site IN REAL TIME! (So that you can pick up the phone and harass them.) It does this by checking a visitor’s IP address against the Whois database. Costs peanuts a year and worth subscribing for this feature alone.

Google Webmaster

Lots of Jedi insider sprockets here to help you understand how often your sites are being indexed and which pages are being accessed. Also shows you what Google actually sees when it gets to your site. Invaluable!

Blog Content Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse

Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords to get an idea of what’s hot and what’s not (an essential skill for any Blogsphere Gal-About-Town).

Twitter Search

A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords. Then go and hide if it’s something you really didn’t want to hear. A fab time-sink for brands – as you can now see what the world’s saying about you in near-real-interweb-time. (Or at least listen to the Twitter crowd to check who’s bitching about you.)

Run of the Mill Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word and generate some backlinks at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the interweb at next to no cost. Very handy! (They also tend to use clunky spliced verbs in their brand names. Go CheckWatch them out!)

• PitchEngine
• FastPitch
• ClickPress
• Sane PR
• PR Log

Social Media Tools and Other Online PR Goodies

I really have to thank my friends at Nixon McInnes for prompting me to write this post, as they’ve also been sharing some great Social Media tool-age via their latest (and very excellent) social media agency newsletter. So go check them out. They introduced me to the MIND BOGGLING MonitorThis RSS tool. I shall forever love them.

Need Help?

If you need some help to crack your Content Optimisation and Online PR challenages, then give us a call today…!

Having an accessible web site will, without question, improve your commercial performance. But sadly web accessibility is also a boring, technocratic subject that’s usually championed by non-commercial people who speak in alien tongues.

As a result, when it comes to building or running web sites, accessibility rarely features on the development agenda (or when it does, it comes after some lengthy, impenetrable techno-speak on wiki’s or widgets). It’s perceived as a luxury item for all but the most cash-rich (or highly regulated) web organisations. After all, people with disabilities are such a small minority, so how could you possibly justify the extra expense?

Well, if you take this view then you’re missing the point and you could be making a very expensive mistake. For whilst it’s true that people with disabilities represent only a small fraction of your total audience, building an accessible web site is not just about catering for their needs and being legally compliant. Nor is it just a task for the techies, and it’s certainly not expensive. Its benefits are far more fundamental and it needs to be a top commercial concern for your business.

In simple terms, being accessible will help you attract more traffic, generate more leads, make more money, and drive more awareness of your products and services.

Got your attention? Great. Then let’s take a look why an accessible web site makes such good commercial sense and how you can start designing for Accessibility today.

Accessibility Payoffs – What it’s Worth to Your Business

Accessible web sites enjoy many of the following benefits: more site visitors, better user experiences, a wider range of users, lower maintenance costs, faster development times, increased reach, lower development costs and less legal exposure.

Let’s take a quick look at each of them…

More site visitors

Good accessibility practice is almost identical to good search engine optimisation (SEO) practice. This should come as no surprise to you if you know your SEO: Google’s search ‘spiders’ tend to read web pages in much the same way as humans, and so making your pages more ‘accessible ’ does a lot of good for both types of reader. We’ll cover the technical aspects of this later, but for now you should know that if you make your pages more accessible then a primary payoff is better Google performance on search terms that are related to you. Which in turn means more site visitors, and ultimately more sales / sign-ups / awareness / education / conversions (delete as necessary – whatever your ultimate aim, these objectives must be the core of your web strategy).

Better usability

This is the end game of accessibility – to make your site usable for people with disabilities. How it’s done properly is the stuff of debate amongst web developers, but from a commercial perspective all we need to understand is a simple distinction in web terminology: namely, that the practice of ‘usability’ will help everyone without disabilities to use your site, and that ‘accessibility’ efforts will help everyone (period!) to use your site more effectively.

Stop and think about that for a minute. Who would you rather have using your web site? I thought so. We all want everyone, all of the time. And, as we’ll see, since the cost of developing for basic accessibility has no discernible extra cost or time penalty, it ought to be very attainable.

Good Accessibility practices will therefore help all of your users to use your web site more effectively, all of the time. In practice this means placing human concerns ahead of technology or design concerns – ie, assuring that folks can navigate your page, fill out your form or complete their payment transaction rather than implementing that really cool widget or rendering the page with a purple and black ripple effect. This in itself is common sense as it helps you to realise your most important commercial goals.

More users (able and disable)

This is the net effect of building an accessible web site. Because it’s more usable, more people can and will use it. Now, the key point to establish here is what ‘more users’ means. Ideally ‘more’ means everyone, including those with disabilities, but I realise that you may not care for disabled people if they don’t need your products, services, or information. So why care? Well, building for ‘more users’ really means building for those people who are ‘less able’ than you are, and these folks may be simply:

• Short sighted (but not short of cash)

• Older than you (but more interested in you than the ‘average’ web Joe)

• Less familiar with the web (less comfortable with a mouse, but very much so with budgets)

• Temporarily less able than you (they broke an arm playing polo at the weekend)

• Linguistically challenged (but experts in their fields)

• Technically challenged (accessing your site via a hotel’s 56k connection)

• …or plain old disabled (a group that makes up X% of the world’s population)

Now, which of these people do you care for? I’m sure you get the point. Designing for Accessibility will challenge your assumptions in a profitable way.

Lower maintenance costs

Without diving into the technicalities (we’ll look at these later), we can say that building accessible sites requires a specific approach to planning and implementation that’s desirable in all cases because it will reduce your ongoing running costs.

In basic terms this approach necessitates the use of a good Content Management System (CMS) – a web-based software application that makes it easier and more cost-effective to publish your web site, and whose genius lies in its ability to separate the presentation (design) of a site from its content (the words and pictures) such that it allows non-technical users to focus on writing content (in a ‘Word’-like fashion) whilst the techies and designers can concentrate on presentation (ie, creating the code that dictates look and feel).

As such, a CMS-based site will allow you take simple publishing and editorial work away from technical specialists (people who are not known for their appreciation of copywriting or corporate policy) and give them to the right people for the task. For example, in a magazine, a CMS will enable editorial staff to publish to the web without calling in the tech support team; and in a software company, it’ll allow marketing staff to publish press releases themselves.

Faster development times, lower development costs and broader reach
Aside from helping non-technical people to publish web pages and reducing your maintenance costs, a CMS which manages your content as a separate entity will also help you to be more nimble when it comes to developing new web site channels or services.

Let’s say you decide to create a new site for mobile users. It needs to be optimised for a micro browser and it needs to be leaner, with fewer images to ensure speedy access times. Now, if your content isn’t tied to the presentation of your original site (by virtue of being hardwired into the page code), then you’ll be able to develop the new service in half the time.

In effect, all you’ll need to do is to keep the content separate and run it through a new design template (one that prescribes a different set of layout rules – such as the use of your low bandwidth image library rather than its high resolution counterpart) and serve it to users via a different domain. In turn, you can use this principle to create a whole stable of sites that are optimised for different audiences and different access devices – for example, a text-only version for users that are visually impaired.

In technical terms, I’ve just described how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) work. A style sheet sits between your content assets and a user’s browser and dictates how the content is to be presented. If you use them, then it’s a lot easier to build for the future because a new site or service will mean changes to your presentation ‘layer’ only, rather than forcing you to rip everything up and start again. And so the use of style sheets will allow you to cost-effectively develop a separate, accessible version of your site, or at the very least enable you to make it more accessible by letting you tweak it more easily.

Less legal exposure

The benefits listed above ought to provide you with the motivation to build for Accessibility, but if they don’t then the final reason is to avoid getting sued.

Your web site is your door onto the world, and it needs to be hinged properly so that you can get out and your audience can get in. At the same time, you must realise that you can’t restrict your audience – the web is extremely open by nature – so you have to build and design broadly. This means ensuring that your content can be accessed by absolutely everyone, otherwise you run the risk of being sued on a discriminatory basis.

To Be or Not to Be: The Accessibility Question

OK, so we care about Accessibility because it’s good for business, but what does it mean to ‘be accessible’?

This needn’t be a subject for navel gazing. In practice, being accessible means sitting on the right side of the law. If your organisation is designed to serve everybody then your web site needs to do so as well. It’s simply a question of equal opportunities, backed up by statutes from the United Nations (General Assembly resolution 48/96 of December 1993, to be precise, which states that all business and public service organisations need to provide equal access to all of their information and communication as well as their physical environments).

From a legal perspective, this means we’re heading towards a new era of law suits. Simple surveys show that around 50% of web sites fail basic Accessibility tests, and there are a number of complaints currently in session around the globe. The gist is broadly the same – people with disabilities are suing companies and organisations for locking them out of their content.

Now this shouldn’t come as a surprise as web development technology moves far, far too quickly for site users to keep up. When you consider that most major software companies also consistently fail in this regard – for example, their browsers are often incompatible with new variants of Javascript – it seems that everyone is doomed to remain inaccessible forever.

But the reality is not that grim, because as luck would have it someone is thinking about these issues for us. And, if we follow their advice everything should be fine – users will have access and companies will stay out of court.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, see: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/) was formed in 1994 to tackle a variety of important issues including Accessibility. It exists as an international advisory panel and think tank, creating a bunch of technical guidelines to stop the world wide web from becoming the wild, wild west. One of its missions is to advise us on how to design for Accessibility, and its guidelines are published under the acronym WAI (the Web Accessibility Initiative), which can be found at http://www.w3.org/WAI/.

The guideline has three best practice checkpoints (called ‘Priorities’) which act as a ‘how to’ style checklist for web developers. They’re based upon a measurement of impact on Accessibility, and they are:

• Priory 1: A web site MUST pass this level, otherwise one or more groups will find it IMPOSSIBLE to access information on the web site.

• Priory 2: A web site SHOULD pass this level, otherwise one or more groups will find it DIFFICULT to access information on the web site.

• Priory 3: A web site MAY pass this level, otherwise one or more groups will find it SOMEWHAT DIFFICULT to access information on the web site.

To keep things simple, if you can pass Priority 1, then you’ll be servicing a wider audience and enjoying all of the commercial benefits previously mentioned. And the good news is that this isn’t difficult or expensive. WCAG v1.0 basically requires that you make your content “understandable and navigable”.

Here’s what it means to satisfy ‘Priority 1’ requirements (you can read this guideline in full at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/):

“Content developers should make content understandable and navigable. This includes not only making the language clear and simple, but also providing understandable mechanisms for navigating within and between pages. Providing navigation tools and orientation information in pages will maximize accessibility and usability. Not all users can make use of visual clues such as image maps, proportional scroll bars, side-by-side frames, or graphics that guide sighted users of graphical desktop browsers. Users also lose contextual information when they can only view a portion of a page, either because they are accessing the page one word at a time (speech synthesis or braille display), or one section at a time (small display, or a magnified display). Without orientation information, users may not be able to understand very large tables, lists, menus, etc.”

A Word About Your Audience

At this point it’s worth painting a picture of who you’re designing for. As already mentioned, you need to be thinking of older, less technically equipped, less experienced, and/or disabled people (or a combination of these things). Your audience in many cases will be using a variety of ‘Assistive Technologies’ – or gadgets to help them access your content. These can be described as follows:

Screen Readers: software applications that ‘read’ web pages and files to their users

Screen readers do what they say on the tin – they ‘read’ whatever’s on the user’s display back to them. They do this in two ways: firstly through audio (and speech synthesis) and secondly via Braille outputs. Users with disabilities may use a combination of both. All screen reading technology has a method – a way of translating web page and application code into speech or Braille – and this tends to be via a process known as ‘linearization’. Linearization basically means taking the screen content and reading it in a linear fashion, from left to right and top to bottom. Different screen reading technologies may have different capabilities on this score, but by and large this rule holds. This is important to understand, because a linear ‘reading’ of a web page is very different from a standard interaction. When we view a page we never read in a linear way. Instead we zip around the page, scanning madly until our eyes rest on whatever it is that holds our attention. Therefore, a ‘screen read’ experience of a web page is fundamentally different to a normal visual experience.

Talking and Text-Only Browsers: web browsers that either ‘read’ pages or render them in plain text format

A good example of a talking browser is IBM’s Homepage Reader – an extremely functional and cost-effective solution for many with disabilities. Like a screen reader, it also ‘linearizes’ the page experience. Text-only browsers, as you might expect, render web pages as text and strip out any images or stylistic formatting. This is the web at it most rudimentary, but using one to view your own site can be extremely informative: it’ll tell you at a glance how well you cater for many Accessibility requirements (all of which we’ll look at later). A good example is the Lynx browser. Talking- and text-only browsers are readily available and cheap. They should be a standard implementation and testing tool for web developers that are designing for Accessibility.

Screen Magnifiers: software applications that increase the size of whatever is displayed on screen

Screen magnifying applications enable users with standard monitors to ‘zoom in’ and magnify to different proportions. It’s a simple concept, much like using the spyglass feature in an image processing application. Windows XP and Vista bundle a Magnifier application within the standard operating system package.

In addition, a variety of specialist input devices will be used, and it should be assumed that a mouse will not be a standard tool for navigating around the screen (keyboard strokes may be the dominant method).

Web Accessibility Guidelines at a Glance

With this in mind, here’s a quick run through of the WAI guidelines for ‘Priority 1’:

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
2. Don’t rely on colour alone
3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly
4. Clarify natural language usage
5. Create tables that transform gracefully
6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces
9. Design for device-independence
10. Use interim solutions
11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines
12. Provide context and orientation information
13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms

Web Accessibility Guidelines Explained

Now let’s look at each of them in more detail… In this section we’ll describe the guidelines in basic terms, and in the following section we’ll look at the various technical approaches you can use to address them.

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content

This guideline asks you to ensure that when visual and auditory content is used to convey information and/or meaning, then alternative text-based content is also provided. A good example of this is providing alternative text descriptions for photo images or graphs. In the case of animations or video, a transcript should be provided. These text descriptions can be easily parsed by screen readers and Braille displays, and can be presented visually (in a variety of sizes) on displays and paper.

2. Don’t rely on colour alone

Or, to be more exact, don’t rely on colour alone to convey information…. because this may render it inaccessible. For example, some web sites use a coloured ‘tabbing’ design convention to denote sections within a site in the same way that tabs are used for separating hard copy filing systems. Now, this is fine if the tabs are accompanied by words (For example, Amazon, who uses tabs to denote different product categories) because screen readers and other assistive technologies can process the information, but if the colour alone is used to convey the tab’s meaning then users of all stripes will have trouble figuring out what they’re for. In addition, attention should be paid to ensuring that foreground and background colours are clearly defined as they may not provide sufficient contrast for some users.

3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly

This requires developers to abide by a set of best practices when coding a web site. The guideline asks for cascading style sheets (we’ll look at these in detail later) to be used at all times, which makes for better, cleaner code (by separating content from presentation), and for coding conventions to be followed precisely so that content can be read more easily by assistive technologies such as screen readers.

4. Clarify natural language usage

This point simply asks developers to make it clear, within their code, which language the content is to be presented in – English, French, etc – so that assistive technologies can make the distinction and render the content accordingly.

5. Create tables that transform gracefully

In basic terms, this rule asks that tables be used for sensible things (such as displaying rows and columns of data) as opposed to being misappropriated for other uses. For example, tables are often used as a quick (and lazy) method of controlling page design layout. This requirement is necessary because assistive technologies make assumptions about how to interpret data within tables, and if they’re used for things like page layout then this will confuse them and their outputs.

6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully

This guidance is necessary to ensure that when a new piece of technology is applied to a page (for example, a whizzy new Ajax interface) then it will still remain accessible to users whose tools (browsers, screen readers, etc) are not yet able to use it.

7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes

In some cases, moving content can be a barrier to Accessibility – it can have a detrimental effects such as obscuring the rest of the page for people with cognitive or visual disabilities. This includes presentation styles such as moving, blinking or scrolling text (eg, a ticker tape). As such, it’s recommended that you provide users with tools to turn off this type of content easily.

8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces

If a function of the page has its own interface (for example an interactive game that sits within an entertainment site) then it’s important that it is device-independent in terms of functionality and control. For example, an interface should not be built solely for use with the mouse, because people with physical disabilities may not be able to use it. And, if the interface can’t be made accessible, then an alternative accessible solution must be provided.

9. Design for device-independence

Like the point above, you should ensure that the user can interact with your web pages with their preferred input (or output) device – mouse, keyboard, voice, etc.

10. Use interim solutions

Of all the guidelines, this point is probably the most open ended and demanding. In short, it requests that developers build sites with the limitations of assistive technologies in mind, such that if a piece of new and unsupported content is used then an alternative means of Accessing the content is also provided. Fortunately, the scope of this can be limited: rather than requiring an in-depth knowledge of every possible assistive solution, you can keep on the straight and narrow by conforming to current browser capabilities because assistive technologies tend to stay in sync with them. In other words, if you know the limitations of past and present versions of Internet Explorer and design your functionality accordingly then your site ought to work fine. And, frankly, every web developer should have this knowledge.

11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines

This point is self-explanatory. We’ll discuss accessible implementation technologies and how to use them in the next section.

12. Provide context and orientation information

Treat your web site as you would if you were designing a traffic flow system – signpost it clearly and wisely. This guideline simply asks you to provide context and orientation information to help users get around your site (and not to assume too much on their behalf!). You can do this by grouping certain page elements together and providing contextual information about the relationships between them. For example navigation schemes should be designed as whole pieces of content so that they’re obvious to access, and they should be clearly supported by signposts such as ALT text descriptions.

13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms

Navigation is such a key part of your site that it’s worth a whole focus of its own. The WCAG guideline states that you should “provide clear and consistent navigation mechanisms – orientation information, navigation bars, a site map, etc – to increase the likelihood that a person will find what they are looking for at a site.”

14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple

This recommendation should be standard practice for every web site. It asks that every page should be made “clear and simple so they may be more easily understood.” This adds up to a tick list of effective web design: ensure that page layouts are consistent, render graphics is an easily accessible format (and with alternative text-based descriptions), and deliver your content in language that’s easy to understand.

A Kitbag: Things You Need, Your Foundations

An Overview of What You’ll Need

Back to basics. Content is only accessible if it can be ‘viewed’ by everybody. Here’s what we’ll need to build accessible web pages:

• HTML and XHTML
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Some Javascript and Java
• Flash
• PDF’s
• Video (Quicktime, Windows Media, etc)

And that’s it. In fact this stuff is the bricks and mortar of every web site, accessible or not. Contrary to conventional wisdom, building and designing for Accessibility is NOT restrictive. You can use Javascript and you can use Flash. The difference is that all of these things need to be implemented with care and attention to detail – something that the web design community is not necessarily noted for.

Your Foundations…Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

As the W3C suggests, the right way to build a web site is to use cascading style sheets (CSS) to define how a page is presented to the user (in terms of look and feel), whilst your HTML will describe the page content and structure (in terms of words and images and where they’re placed on the page). As a foundation for sites, this approach has evolved over time to counteract the problems associated with hardwiring content and presentation together (some of which are outlined above). The latest versions of XHTML (v2.0) has removed all styling attributes such that in order to present a page, a developer has to use CSS.

The reason this is so important to Accessibility is that assistive technologies such as screen readers are programmed to focus on page content rather than page styles so that users can use their assistive tools to tweak the content to their own needs. For example, some browsers will allow you to view sites through your own style sheets – say with all text in a large Ariel font to enhance readability. And so the technical discipline of well structured style sheets forces developers to create clean HTML (and good styling) so that a page will make sense even if the style sheet is taken away. (Again, it’s worth remembering that the web is an extremely open place where you can’t even control your content, let alone your users….. so you’d better build using good, clean code that doesn’t prevent this sort of thing. Besides, clean code and smart use of style sheets – particularly when used in tandem with a good CMS – should always be desirable.)

To recap, the wider benefits of CSS and content separation are faster development time and lower ongoing maintenance costs. In addition, you should pay attention to the longevity of your site – it’s far more likely to be around in two years time than the guy who built it, so it’s worth ensuring it gets built in a way that others will understand. Again, clean code, good annotation and above all the use of style sheets is essential.

OK, you have the foundation, now how do you build your site?

The Accessibility Commandments: How to Build for Accessibility (and Therefore Enjoy Other Good Things)

In this section we’ll take a quick look at how to best use each of the ‘kitbag’ technologies mentioned above as well as the Accessibility business benefits for each style of implementation. But first a disclaimer: this paper is designed to take the Accessibility debate into the boardroom. It’s not a technical ‘how to’ guide. So for all you technical readers I’ve annotated the following sections with links to related W3C pages where you’ll find all the coding resources you’ll need.

1) Accessible Images, Audio and Video

The Issue
The question of non-textual content is the mother of Accessibility issues. It covers: images, image maps, buttons, video, audio, and various other multimedia (such as Flash). In simple terms these are all things that use visual or audio information to convey meaning, and so they can cause problems for people with hearing or sight difficulties. The problems are, however, compounded when you begin to look at the way most assistive technologies work – such as screen readers – as these tools are smart but not smart enough to interpret a Flash demo or an image button that says ‘sign up here!’. The way they tend to work is to ‘read’ the text that’s provided in the page content and relay that back to their users. And there’s the crux. Good accessibility requires developers to supplement non-textual stuff with good, clear textual content that can make assistive technologies behave smarter.

The Solution
In short, the solution is to provide text equivalents for all non-textual content. For example:

• All images that perform functions (such as ‘sign up’ or ‘go’ buttons) must use ALT text to describe what they do. Further, these descriptions should be as specific as possible (think of describing the action performed by the image, not just what it looks like!)

• All images that don’t carry information (such as styling elements) should NOT carry ALT descriptions (because that’d just confuse things!)

• Charts and graphs should provide some level of description – as detailed as possible when dealing with complex representations

• Images that are used for linking (for example navigation ‘tabs’) should provide ALT text descriptions

• For more complex files and images, such as video or Flash presentations, it’s best to provide a transcript or summary of the content, so that users can at least get a grasp of what’s going on within the page.

In addition, all of the aforementioned ALT descriptions ought to be well written with one eye on how they’re to be used. For example, screen readers will read back all accessible text on a page, so you can afford to be concise where things are obvious to avoid repetition and boredom for users. Not everything will need to carry a brand name within it and phrases should be trimmed to convey meaning only – it’s all about functionality as opposed to copywriting creativity.

The use of ALT text and descriptive elements around content ought to be standard practice for every web developer. But when it comes to Accessibility, the difference lies in thinking harder about the meaning that’s conveyed by each description and how one may interact with it using a variety of assistive technologies. For this reason, it’s good to do some testing along the way, by running pages through screen readers, text-only browsers and the like. It’s also a good idea to have someone with disabilities use your test pages to give you more immediate feedback.

Business Benefits
If you follow the advice above then Google will simply love you. Why? Well, in a nutshell, good SEO works in the following way: Google (and other search engines) get to know you via the ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ that they send out to review your site. So the end game in SEO is to help them to understand who you are and what you do by providing as much practical information as possible within your code – preferably in the shape of the keywords (or search terms) that you’d like to be associated with. In practice this means ‘marking up’ your links, headers, tags and such with extra descriptive information. Google’s spiders will then ‘read’ this information and categorise you accordingly.

In short, SEO best practice asks you to provide descriptions of your content for the benefit of a bunch of software agents. Accessibility best practice involves providing descriptions of all your non-text content for a bunch of assistive technologies. It’s the same process….. only if you’re doing it with Accessibility in mind you can guarantee that the quality of this extra layer of descriptive content will be of better quality – after all, your writing for humans not software. So, in short, good Accessibility ‘marking up’ of content is manna for search engines.

Further Resources

W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C HTML Techniques
W3C CSS Techniques
W3C HTML techniques for images
W3C HTML techniques for audio and video
W3C CSS techniques for images

2) Accessible Colour

The Issue
One in twenty of your site visitors will have problems defining colour perfectly. So you need to pay attention to things like contrast and colour combinations.

The Solution
Basically it’s fine to use colour to convey information, but it’s not OK to use colour alone. I hinted at this earlier on using the example of tabbed navigation. Tabbed navigation that uses different colours to convey different product categories along with the labels ‘Books’, ‘DVD’s’, etc is fine, so long as the information on the labels is rendered as text or ALT text is used to describe them. But problems would be caused if colour alone were used for this kind of label, because it provides us with no meaning other than a visual distinction.

Business Benefits
This ought to be obvious. Our tabs example is one of extremely poor design execution. Who wouldn’t want labels that help users navigate around a page? The benefit of designing with accessible colours in mind is that you’ll end up with infinitely more usable web pages – pages that will be understood at a glance and fit for use by the widest possible range of people – young, old, new to the web and experienced.

Further Resources

W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C HTML Techniques
W3C CSS Techniques
W3C CSS techniques for colour

3) Accessible Tables

The Issue
…is twofold. Firstly tables are often used (wrongly today) for controlling the layout of a page. Secondly, they’re (rightly) used for displaying data.

In the first instance, the use of cascading style sheets (CSS) to control the look and feel of web pages should be mandatory – we’ve discussed the benefits in detail. This in itself will negate the use of tables, but if table use is persistent, here’s the problem: most assistive technologies read tables in a linear fashion, and this may bear no relation whatsoever to the way in which the content is rendered visually on the page. I won’t dwell on this point – the resources section here will point you to more examples and a deeper explanation of the problem. For now though, you should understand that when tables are used to help alignment of navigation schemes, main page banners and content cells, technologies such as screen readers and text only browsers will chew them up and rearrange their contents in an undesirable way!

In terms of using tables for the presentation of data, the crucial thing to care about is the way rows and columns are labelled. After all, financial results, software features and sports stats only make sense if you know what they’re referring to, because the meaning of a number in a row will depend on the label applied to it in its corresponding column header. As such, the aim is again to ensure that assistive technologies can ‘read’ your data table headings in a linearized fashion.

Now, when reading data tables we tend to skim them and pick out the information we care for. For example, we may be interested only in who Liverpool FC are playing in March, and not the rest of the year. Screen readers on the other hand can’t get inside their user’s minds in this way to make selective choices, so they read out data in sequence. For example: ‘Liverpool, January 5th, vs Arsenal, January 12th vs Aston Villa’ and so forth. As such, we need to ensure that our tables are rendered cleanly, with no confusion in sub headers that may throw assistive technologies off course.

The Solution
The way to design accessible tables, even when they’re multi-layered and complex, is to ensure that they are marked up and styled thoroughly (using CSS). By this, I mean to say that different headers within a table (the rows, sub-rows and columns) should carry appropriate header tags and not be rendered at the same level (ie, the same style). It gets more complex than this in terms of generating neat code, but I’ll leave that for your further reading. For now you should appreciate that accessible tables are all about using good, well marked up style sheets.

Business Benefits
Once again, the over-riding business benefit is the use of style sheets. By forcing developers to use them, designing for Accessibility ensures that future development costs, maintenance costs, and training costs (of new developers) can be limited by ensuring that page code is as clean as can be and that presentation is always separated from content. Again, a CMS will help here, which will bring the added benefit of enabling non-technical people to author your site.

Further Resources

W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C HTML Techniques
W3C CSS Techniques
W3C HTML techniques for accessible tables

4) Accessible Navigation and Linking

The Issue
Aside from the images issue, this is the other Accessibility classic. Think about this for a second – how often have you arrived in the guts of a web site after a Google search and felt dizzy and disoriented? I’m sure it’s happened at least once today. Now, imagine that you were either partially sighted, unfamiliar with the web, or unable to use a mouse fluently. Where to begin!?

The question of accessible navigation is therefore all about the ease in which users can get around your individual web pages. Sure, there will be persistent navigation aids throughout the site – such as your primary scheme (About Us, Products, Services, etc), but there will also be a multitude of unique elements on specific pages: for example, “Download Now!”, “Sign Up Here!”, “Add to Basket!”. In this sense, many of the elements already discussed will come into play. We need to ensure image buttons are rendered with alternative descriptions and that blocks of similar content are laid out in obvious chunks to help users around the page. Also, where image maps are used for blocks of navigation (ie, when large images are preferred to web text layouts), then they should also be marked up clearly with alternative descriptions.

In addition, you must consider how your text is rendered on the page. If you’re a magazine and each of your article pages has a headline and a sub head, how much text (navigation or otherwise) appears above them on the page? This is important, as assistive technologies will play back (or lay out) all of the page content, in sequence, from start to finish as it appears in the page source code. Now, imagine this in a text-only browser: your headline may be buried, in a single font size, underneath eight lines of extraneous text. We need to understand that many of the visual cues that are designed to help standard users become irrelevant, and hence inaccessible.

The Solution
As mentioned before, where images are used to convey information instead of text, then explicit alternative descriptions should be used. Where navigation is concerned, these descriptions should hint at the actions they perform – eg, “Skip to Main Page Content” (which is a very important piece of navigation for those with disabilities). Assistive technologies are trained to describe links in distinctive ways to help users, so in this example, the user may hear: “LINK – Skip to….” or it may be read out in a different voice style to normal text.

Think also about how your content is rendered in the source code. If you’re using style sheets then there’s no reason that all of that other text bumph needs to feature above the page name or headline – the important stuff can feature right up at the top, so that assistive technologies ‘read’ it first.

Also, it’s possible to leave various navigational ‘markers’ within the page that are invisible to users who are NOT using assistive technologies – like the “Skip to…” link mentioned above, which is often hidden behind some white space in a page header. Take a look at the source code of any major news web site and you’ll probably see this in use. Why? Well, imagine you’re using a screen reader and navigating from home page to section page to news article within a magazine. Without these kinds of shortcuts you’d have the dubious pleasure of listening to the site’s ad banners, navigation schemes and various other content elements read out to you time after time before you reach the content you’re after. As such, “Skip to Maim Page Content” is an invaluable aid.

Business Benefits
Firstly, good accessible navigation requires the use of style sheets, whose benefits ought now to be very clear. Secondly, designing for accessible navigation forces designers to think through wider issues of usability. And, if your site becomes more usable for everyone then it’s likely to be more profitable. If creative types are asked to think deeply about how and where an “Add to Basket” image button is rendered on the page, then the result is likely to benefit everyone.

Further Resources

W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C HTML Techniques
W3C CSS Techniques
W3C HTML techniques for linking
W3C CSS techniques for text styling and position
W3C CSS techniques for Layout

5) Accessible Forms

The Issue
“Web Forms” may sound like a dull subject, but think about how dependent we are on them. A form is used on most web sites for a number of purposes:

• Buying stuff – filling out credit card information
• Signing up for stuff – providing your name and email address
• Creating user accounts – registering your address
• …etc

In other words, web forms underpin all forms of web commerce.

Now, think about how you last used a web form. Did you use your mouse for the task, to click between form fields (to get from “first name” to “surname”)? Probably. Now what if you couldn’t use a mouse efficiently?

The Solution
The good news is that there’s more than one way to control your movement around a web page. Try using your tab key – it’ll shift your control point between links on the page. When it comes to forms, this is also the case, you can skip from one cell to another with just a keystroke. In addition, forms will require an action button (“Go”, “Buy”, “Sign Up”, etc), and so can be made accessible by providing alternative text-based descriptions as already discussed.

The key to accessible web forms is, however, the text descriptions that are used to facilitate your data input and how they’re coded within the form’s containing table. As mentioned before, assistive technologies tend to ‘read’ source code data in a linear fashion, and each will have its own quirks when it comes to playing back that information to users. So, when it comes to forms, they had better be rendered in an accessible way, or chaos will follow!

How do you do this properly? Well, the easiest thing to do is to render prompting information amongst the code to help users understand that this is a form and not just a standard piece of content. This prompting info can also give guidance as to what is requested of the user for each form cell (eg “First Name”, “Surname”, etc). Often, you will want some form elements to be mandatory (eg, email address), and so this should be clearly labelled if forms are to be completed (and validated) successfully). Further, you need to ensure that tables are rendered cleanly and styled well – again using good CSS – so that they can be read in a linearized fashion.

Finally, forms need to report validation errors clearly, so that when errors occur, users know how to correct them. Just highlighting a phone number field in red isn’t going to help all your users. Instead, there are ways in which this error information can be returned with descriptions and links that take users back to the form field in question with a simple click or keystroke. (Check out the resources below for further information on how this can be done.)

Business Benefits
In short, accessible forms require smart use of style sheets because they’re usually rendered using tables. In addition, just like the points raised in accessible navigation and linking, designing for accessibility forces creative and technical staff to think through bigger picture usability issues that will help to make your forms more effective – such as, “What’s the best way to describe what we need in this form field?” Good answers to these questions will help all of your users and result in more successfully completed forms and a higher satisfaction level amongst customers. (How often have you wanted to throw your keyboard at your monitor when a credit card transaction form fails at the last minute for no discernable reason!?)

Further Resources

W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C HTML Techniques
W3C CSS Techniques
W3C HTML techniques for forms

6) Accessible Javascript

The Issue
…is a thorny one. Ask one developer what she thinks of the accessibility merits of Ajax (a new Javascript method that enables page content to change without refreshing the entire page) and her head will spin. Ask your lead developer what your web site would be without Ajax and they’ll probably quit immediately. The truth is that Javascript in itself is not bad for anyone’s health – it’s only harmful when the wrong kind of human is applied to it.

The benefits of Javascript are large. Faster page interaction (no waiting for reloads) and the creation of slicker, more application-like interfaces mean that the user experience is vastly improved. The downside of Javascript is also large. Here’s a few: pop ups, banner ads that float like annoying ghosts across your screen (seemingly always on car sites!), scripts that turn off some of your basic controls (like the ability to do things with a right click), browser-sniffing scripts that tell you things you don’t want to know (“You’re browser isn’t compatible, you must upgrade now!”). Overuse and/or misuse of Javascript is therefore an irritant for everyone. So let’s see how it should be done…

The Solution
Bad Javascript is bad Javascript implementation. Using dodgy, reusable code from bad libraries. Smearing irritating stuff across the page. You get the idea.

Good Javascript assumes the following:

• …that Javascript might be turned off at the browser end of things

• …the user owns their browser and so is always in the driving seat

• …page use and, meaning and content are not relayed exclusively through Javascript

• …you follow strict coding standards

Implementation of good Javascript requires a certain level of expertise and technical know how, plus an appetite for staying up to date (approaches such as Ajax never stand still!). However, for the purposes of this document, and much like the best practices discussed before, the key lies in separating out your code into constituent parts – in this case structure (HTML), presentation (CSS), and behaviour (Javascript). If you mix these up, you’re going to create problems for assistive technologies that need to parse the information. Further, you need to provide alternatives to your Javascript elements, in much the same way as you’d provide alternatives for image based navigation. The most responsible way of implementing it is, therefore, to assume that nobody can use it, and to give them signposts and other tools for getting things done. For further technical and real implementation advice, see the further resources section below.

Business Benefits
By separating out the various elements of code you’re again insuring yourself against an unpredictable future. Well structured, accessible Javascript will be easier to maintain by new people, and easier to upgrade and develop further. Of course, it also makes developers think of the bigger usability picture, which is always a good thing and ought to result in easier to use Javascript elements for all site users. But importantly, it’s something that ought to be encouraged. The benefits to user experience are too big to ignore – who wouldn’t want a slicker, faster web site? All you need to ensure is that it doesn’t lock some users out!

Further Resources

W3C Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C HTML Techniques
W3C CSS Techniques
W3C HTML techniques for scripts
W3C HTML techniques for applets

7) The Other Content Consideration: Accessible PDFs

One other important constituency is of course PDF’s, Adobe’s popular document sharing file format. Leaving aside content that’s embedded in the web page, PDF’s represent a significant part of what we make available on the web – from annual reports to white papers, brochures and maps. I won’t dwell on the issues and solutions here because PDF’s are in fact extremely accessible, but you have to know how to author them properly. As such you’ll find a comprehensive Accessibility ‘how to’ in Adobe’s product manuals and support forums.

Conclusion

To be blunt, the commercial case for Accessibility is a no-brainer. By designing for it you extend your audience reach, attract more traffic, reduce your development and support costs, free yourself up for doing new things in the future, and, number one, you make your site more usable for EVERYBODY. A developer (and a designer) working for Accessibility will guarantee you more sign ups, more purchases, and more happy users. What more could you want!?

In terms of implementing Accessibility it’s important to firstly dispel a popular myth – that it’s expensive. It’s not…or more importantly it doesn’t have to be. If your technical team tells you it is then this ought to give you a clear message about their core capabilities. Accessibility best practice is simple web development best practice. Of all of the things we’ve reviewed here, we could drop the word Accessibility and you’d still have a best practice cook book for building great web sites.

So can we summarise best practice? Sure. To build a great web site that does all of the above (and serves a really important but often neglected audience – the LESS able), you need to do the following:

• Separate your presentation from your content. (Or should I say liberate it?) This opens the door to a new way of developing which will save you time and money and give you more flexibility. This means using cascading style sheets (CSS) in a strict but elegant way to ensure your site can grow gracefully (and it’ll also help in the bad times if your lead developer decides to walk out).

• If you publish new content more than a couple of times a month then use a Content Management System (CMS). It’ll help you separate the C from the P, and it’ll save you time and money in important production areas. It’ll also keep you’re Accessibility initiatives (and your SEO initiatives) on track because you’ll be able to lock down what people can and can’t do in running your site.

• Above all, employ the best web developers your money can buy. If they’re worth their pay they’ll approach Accessibility not as a problem, but as part and parcel of doing a great job that they’re proud of.

After all, designing for Accessibility is not rocket surgery, it’s good development practice and it makes plain commercial sense.

Let’s face it, effective search engine optimisation (SEO) counts for a lot. Just about every purchase involves a Google search at some point, oftentimes at the very beginning.

If you’re website doesn’t come out high in the Google rankings, it’s time to get to work. You can hire expensive consultants, spend a lot with the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) agencies… or you could read this paper and do it yourself.

It will give you a simple set of non-technical guidelines for improving your web site’s performance in all major search engines. Regardless of your level of familiarity with the subject, it will arm you with new thinking on how to tackle the your SEO challenges more cost-effectively.

In short, this paper will help you to ‘SEO like a Pro’ – without major investments in external consultancy services… because SEO is not a black art. It’s simple. There, we’ve said it. Now we’ll show you how to do it.

Framing SEO: What it is and How to Approach it

For the sake of this paper, we’ll refer to Google as our target search engine. Google enjoys an overwhelming market share as the most popular search engine, and the principles that drive it are largely employed by other search engines – eg, Yahoo, MSN, etc. We’ll work to the premise that what’s good for Google is good for the rest.

We also need to make a distinction between ‘natural’ search and ‘paid for’ search. Natural search results are those returned by Google in the main (white) content area of your browser. ‘Paid for’ search results are those returned in the highlighted content cell at the top of the page and the sidebar to the right. They’re referred to as ‘Sponsored Links’ by Google and are generated, as you’d expect, on a paid for basis – ie, the more money I pay Google, the higher my ‘Sponsored Link’ will appear in a listing.

This paper is all about enhancing your natural search performance. Obviously, this is the more strategically important of the two as these results are perceived by users to be ‘unbiased.’

Why Search Matters

Before we describe the core principles of SEO, it’s worth considering why it should be so important to us.

Regardless of what type of business you’re in, your web site is now your primary point of contact with customers old and new — and the majority of these interactions will be mediated by a search engine, because ‘search’ is how we happen to navigate the web.

Your goals ought to be to exploit the way Google is used to:

• Drive relevant and qualified traffic to your web site; and….

• Learn more about how people perceive your products and services via their search behaviour

Note: the primary emphasis here is on understanding people, not technology. You first need to grasp how people are using Google – the technology stuff comes later, and relates to how you’re able to align your web site with these usage patterns. In short, we’re talking about understanding the language that people use to search for you, and the psychology behind this.

As such, SEO is first and foremost a marketing activity, not a technical activity. It works on the basis of helping search engines find you via the provision of superior web site content and adherence to solid web principles. Over time, this practice should also help you to better understand how and what you’re selling, as your SEO tactics will need to be guided by the language and behaviour of the people who are searching for you.

Everything else is of secondary importance when it comes to enhancing your Google rankings. Importantly, this means that ugly web sites may perform better than good looking sites. From a design perspective, your challenge is to ensure that the look and feel of your site is compelling enough to retain interest, whilst at the same time adhering to the implementation practices that we’ll describe below.

Another important point to note is that SEO for SEO’s sake is a bad idea. Your goal should be to attract qualified users to your site, not just any old rabble. This is because the flip-side of increasing traffic is that it carries specific costs – such as rising bandwidth and the amount of resources that you apply to the effort in the first place.

For example, a mobile network infrastructure company that Velocity works with needs to attract prospects that are interested in their specific technology – people who are interested in ‘femtocells’ as opposed to ‘mobile phones.’ If we were to optimise the site on the latter search term, we may well increase overall site traffic, but we would be unlikely to increase the company’s revenues.

So, to ensure that your SEO work is cost-effective, your primary aim is ‘conversion.’ You’re really only interested in generating the traffic that generates a sales lead, downloads a white paper, signs up for an event or registers some other form of interest in you.

For this reason, your SEO efforts ought to be focused on the web pages that ask people to register, buy, download and subscribe….as opposed to your homepage. (Directing users to your homepage will result in unnecessary wastage (or drop out) as they will undoubtedly find something else to do other than click through to the pages that really matter…..although, of course, you may also want to encourage general browsing).

In sum, our advice is to treat SEO as follows:

• SEO is a marketing exercise, not a technology exercise, and should be done by marketing people.
• Understanding and practising good SEO is first and foremost about understanding how your users behave when searching, and then applying this logic to how your web site is constructed.
• Your approach to SEO should be governed by conversions – to purchasing, etc. Therefore your home page is NOT your most important web page, your conversion page is.

SEO Principles: the Complex Bit

When someone conducts a search, Google presents them with a series of links based on relevancy to the search term. Obviously, it’s your aim to feature at the top that list so as to incrase the chances of having people click through to your site.

This much is clear. But to promote this likelihood, it’s necessary to understand how Google actually works.

Google uses its ‘PageRank’ algorithm to evaluate and sort its search results. Much like Coca-Cola, the inner workings of this algorithm are a closely guarded secret. However, its general working principles are well documented (see http://www.google.com/technology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank).

Google describes PageRank as something that “relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” In practice this means that Google “interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

In addition, PageRank also analyses the page that “casts the vote,” and assumes that “votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

In essence, Google practices a form of web-based karma, whereby it values your page more if it’s well respected – ie, linked to – by other web pages. So, the number one factor that determines your position in a Google search is the number of external web pages that link to you.

Now, if this were to be the sole determining factor, then we could all pack up and go home right now. Your job would simply be to propagate the number of linking pages out there on the web, whilst focusing on gaining links from the more important web sites (ie, from CNET, as opposed to the Kennel Club of Bow).

But Google is smarter than that because it “combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to a search.” What this means is that Google looks at how pages are linking to you and how relevant to the search term your page content is. In other words, there are good ways and not so good ways for pages to link to you, and – critically – the way in which your web pages are composed will have an enormous effect on whether or not Google thinks they are relevant or not.

This, then, is the technical bit. In order to influence Google and encourage it to view your pages as relevant, you need to know how it thinks….and, armed with this knowledge, you also need to tell people how to construct their links. We’ll deal with this shortly.

In the meantime, you should also note that your site must first be discovered, or ‘indexed’, by Google, and that Google does this via the use of software that crawls the web looking for, reacting to, and evaluating links (according to the PageRank algorithm).

This software is called a crawler, a spider or a search bot – but most commonly ‘bot’ for short. When a bot discovers your pages it ‘indexes’ them by storing a copy of them on Google’s servers. In turn, when someone conducts a search, it is these copies of your pages that Google presents to users as a series of links, ranked by relevance to the search term.

OK, so that’s all the science we need to know for now. It’s really not that complex. As mentioned before, the key to better SEO lies primarily in understanding how your users are searching for you, and applying this logic to the way that your site is built. You see it’s all about keywords!

Think Like Your Customers (Key Words Part 1)

The point of ‘keywords’ is to convince Google that you are what you say you are, and that you’re therefore relevant to a user’s search query. And it’s at this point that traditional marketeers tend to run for the hills or hastily organise a focus group…..because the only way to convince Google that you’re relevant is to use the exact same language as your customers and prospects.

Now, it’s worth reflecting for a moment on what this really means. Remember your last marketing summit, where senior management assembled with sharpened pencils and powerpoints to streamline your corporate messages? Well, skip that stuff, because Google doesn’t care for it – in reality, one company’s ‘personal messaging and productivity optimising platform’ is really just an average users ‘email software.’

You get the point…. The skill in identifying key words lies mainly in being brave enough to describe your products and services in the real, everyday language that people actually use.

Here’s a general formula to keep you honest: if the answer is X, then what was the question? Or, if I sell email software, what kind of questions might users be asking in order to discover me? Perhaps something radical like ‘email software for Windows’??!!

Naturally this is heresy for traditional marketing thinkers…..For where’s the differentiation? Where’s the USP? And here’s the rub – successful SEO depends on not being different, but on being the same. Or just samey enough if you practice it well enough. Because however unique you may wish to treat each individual customer, your customers don’t really want to treat you in a unique way. That’s just asking them to work too hard – to remember a different message or word for every company under the sun.

In cognitive terms, we merge concepts into groups and create labels for them – and that’s good enough. So, email is email and nothing more.

There are exceptions to this rule of course. If you are Pepsi or Budweiser then you have the marketing budget to bend minds and make people think just like you want them to. But, for the rest of us, we have to move with the crowd and identify ourselves in ways that are already part of your target audience’s psyche.

The trick is to find a sweet spot and go for it.

But where to start? Well, focus groups may be an idea, but a more cost-effective approach is to investigate your search logs to see how people have arrived at your site (ie, see which search terms they’ve been using historically). Or there are a number of freely available tools that can show you the popularity of specific search terms and associated data such as the number of pages on the web that contain those words.

Here’s another crude equation that can help (we use it here at Velocity): first of all, you need to establish whether or not your keyword is relevant by understanding how many search terms are conducted on it per month (let’s call this number ‘A’); then you need to get a sense of who you’re competing against, or the number of pages already out there that use that same phrase or word (B).

So, in order to establish how hard it will be to attract interest and rank well in Google, it’s a case of dividing the number of searches (A) by the number of pages that might provide a search result (B)….and perhaps making that number a percentage term to give you a notion of probability.

As mentioned, the tools listed at the end of this paper will get you these numbers, but what you need to discover is a place where your chosen key words can co-exist happily amongst the competition – giving you as much chance as possible to be discovered.

For example, the phrase ‘Open Source Content Management System’ is relatively popular as a UK search term (over 74 searches last month). Coupled with this, the phrase ‘Open Source Content Management System’ has a reasonable presence on the web (59 million related pages are indexed in Google).

As such, using our formula, the chances of a user stumbling across any given ‘Open Source Content Management System’ page is 0.0001%. By comparison, the term ‘open source CMS’ was searched for 130 times in the same period, and yet there are only around 6.5 million pages indexed with that term….meaning that users have a vastly improved 0.002% chance of finding any given ‘open source CMS’ page.

Now, don’t be put off by the decimal points here, because there will always be more web pages than searches (think about it, if there was only one web page per search, then SEO would be so damn easy….and I wouldn’t be writing this paper!). Just treat this as a simple way of establishing what kind of market you’re playing in and how hard it might be to grab peoples’ attention.

The next step, then, is to take this maths and apply a bit of science to it in order to improve your chances of getting spotted – ie, to change that 0.002% number into something more positive (since the previous formula was based on a very even playing field – without taking any ‘optimisation’ practices into account).

To give us this competitive edge we need to understand why, in the eyes of Google, no two pages are created equal and apply some smarts to the way in which we build our web site. In other words, we have to….

Think Like Google (Key Words Part 2)

We’ve already stated that it’s not ‘rocket science,’ so we’ll keep the technical stuff to a minimum. In a nutshell, all you need to do to make Google happy is ensure that your content is King (or Queen!).

As mentioned, Google is not human. It uses bots, not eyes, and so in general it prefers words to pictures (ie, jpegs, Flash animations and video).

It also likes your content to be updated as frequently as possible, to give it an excuse to come visit you more often and ensure that your page ranking is as up to date as it should be. And it likes to be lead very, very clearly through your content, just to make absolute sense of it and to be sure that you are what you say you are (again, there’s no scope for subtleties – you’re communicating with a bot, not a real human being!).

As such, here’s some content rules that Google likes:

• Focus your content efforts on the pages that really matter. Pick a few and stick with them. They should be the ones that you really want people clicking through to as a result of a search. (This is unlikely to be your home page, and more likely to be your key products pages).

• More is more. Update your content as often as possible. Make it dynamic. Suggestions: write a blog; post press releases for anything remotely interesting (don’t save all the news for the annual report!); write opinion pieces and white papers (guess where this one’s going to appear soon!?); and if you have a ‘back catalogue’ of content (manuals, user guides, old articles, etc), then use it….anything to add to the volume of your content and the frequency at which it’s published!

• Where possible, let your site users take the strain of content production: create discussion forums for them; enable them to post reviews and/or comments to your pages; again, anything that adds to the volume of content on your site and its frequency.

• Use those keywords and use them well. Optimise your pages around your key terms in a sensible way, ensuring that humans as well as bots can read them. Common sense should prevail here – and you may find that you get penalised by Google if you ‘stuff’ your pages with too much key word content. As a measure, if your colleague can make sense of your pages then its good for Google. If s/he can’t then it’s not.

With this in mind, here’s some technical guidelines on how to implement your content:

• Try to make your site name and/or your index page a keyword. You can see this by the text that appears at the top of your browser – it will always give you the name of the page that you’re browsing. And if your pages have no name, then shame on you….name them! Ideally, your content management system will enable you to do this as an editable piece of content, and you won’t need to re-code anything at all.

• Help humans and bots to understand you by structuring your composite page elements consistently and elegantly. For example, your style sheets should have a clear delineation between headers, in terms of font and text size, and your images should all carry alternative text tags so that they can be read by machine readers. In addition, your links should also be labelled with descriptive title tags and scroll bar tags (ie, the text that appears in your scroll bar when you hover over or click on a link).

• Exploit your page structure in terms of key word usage. Your page is composed of a hierarchy of elements, as described above – page header, header styles, navigational links, images, bold text, etc. Like a human, when a bot scans a page these are the elements that make a first (and lasting) impression. Use keywords within them – embed key words in your navigational scheme, use keywords as page headers, use them as image ‘alt’ tags, etc…. as a rule, use keywords for as much of your descriptive and/or directional content as possible, and think in hierarchical terms – eg, a keyword as a page title is worth more than one buried in your page content.

• When thinking about how long your pages should be, again, think human. As a guideline, 300 words is a good length to keep each page – this makes them easy for bots and people to read. Any less text and it becomes difficult to optimise your key words without making the page look stuffed. Any more text and your content will become unwieldy – both to read and in terms of its production (of course, the creation of content is an overhead!)

• ….and finally, just because you’re publishing a web site, don’t be limited in terms of distribution. Get your content out there using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so that users can pick it up in formats other than directly via your site. RSS, for example, allows people to receive your content directly within their RSS ‘reader’ application of choice, without having to visit you. Publishing content in this way also allows other web masters to take it and re-purpose it for their own sites – ie, they can plug your RSS feed into their site, and (re)present it to their users….which should be encouraged since this will create more web pages that link back to you. In fact, ‘online PR’ also works in a similar way, and we’ll discuss this below…

OK, so much for the content production 101’s – all of the above advice is designed to help Google see you more clearly. The next thought is to help Google understand you….

Dress for Google: Some Content Optimization and Site Design Tips

As mentioned above, it’s a shame, but because Google is geeky by nature, it doesn’t always appreciate beautiful web sites. It’s just not wired that way.

Instead, Google prefers to take its time to get to know you via some formal design and implementation principles – and beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder because ugly sites can, and often do, win.

When it comes to site design, your aim is to engage Google’s search bots for as long as possible in order to help them to get familiar with you. Here are some things to avoid:

• Overuse of Flash: because Flash doesn’t subscribe to the ‘say it with text’ rule. Now, don’t get this wrong, because Flash is a wonderful thing – it helps to beautify and communicate – but don’t do all of your talking with it, because search bots can’t get at all those precious key words that Flash files contain within.

• Overuse of image files for key page elements: because, as already explained, Google bots can’t read images as easily as they can read text. Which is disappointing, because often your navigational labels may look better when rendered in a snazzy font with little icons by their sides….but if you go this route, you’re not helping Google to ‘read’ you.

• The use of files over web pages: for example, the use of a pdf download page rather than rendering all of that pdf content as html pages. As before, the trick here is to help Google to read you….and what Google likes to read best is html. So, whilst pdfs may be great for downloading, sharing and printing, why not render that content through a ‘print friendly’ design template? Or why not present both html text and the option to download as a pdf?

• Overuse of password protected zones: because, in the same way that you’re locking humans out, you’re also locking Google out. So, think carefully about the balance of content that you’re putting behind these firewalls. If you’re a magazine or a publisher you should at least put a snippet of your password-protected content on view to Google and the public. This way a sub set of the key words get indexed and become searchable. (Alternatively, you can always talk to Google about how to enable its bots to get behind your firewalls, without compromising your premier content).

In short, when it comes to good, SEO-friendly design, the things to avoid are all the things that are bad for general site accessibility…which means you need to try to present your content in a way that bots and other software programs (eg, text-to-speech apps) can ‘read.’

Further guidance on good accessibility design can be found via the W3C consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WIA) at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/. If you follow this advice then Google will love you!

Having listed the taboos, there are a number of design and implementation best practices to be encouraged. These are the type of things that encourage bots to spend more time indexing you and getting to know you.

For example: Submit your site map to Google, in a Google-accessible (XML-based) way. This way, Google can really get to grips with what you are. For further information, see: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318.

For page navigational elements – such as your main navigation scheme and title links for ‘push boxes’ (eg, a listing for ‘Latest Press Open Source CMS News’) – use key words wherever you can. As mentioned above, Google will view this stuff as carrying more ‘meaning’ than standard page text.

Also, try playing around with your navigation scheme – it may be beneficial to users and bots alike to have some level of repetition going on within the page. See http://www.salesforce.com for a great example of this. At the bottom of the page, they have a very subtle ‘quick link’ navigation scheme that repeats the main scheme…so that users can jump straight to ‘CRM News’ etc. And now look again at these links. Yup, Salesforce.com is a CRM application vendor. These links promote ‘CRM Support, CRM Events, CRM Investor Info’, etc…. all in the name of great SEO.

You should always encourage the use of human-readable urls. Once more, this helps both bots and humans to understand what’s going on on the page (from a human point of view, just think about how we receive links – often in the body of emails – and so http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/archives/category/blog is of much more use than http://www.velocitypartnersco.uk/about/4%$123-7 !!!). An extension of this thought is to build key words into your url schemes. Any decent CMS should enable this.

You should also encourage both users and bots to explore your site in more depth by providing what is known as ‘deep links’ on your key SEO pages. For example, present a listing of your last six blog entries on a key landing page (with headlines that are all optimised). This will prompt search bots and users to go follow them and index/read even more of your site content.

Metadata should always, always, always be optimised around key words and this should always be designed into your page layouts to maximise its effects. For example, if you use custom metadata for page descriptions – such as a press releases synopsis – then you ought to ensure that this is rendered as the intro text on the main press release listing page. This way, bots and users are told what the page is about before they go and click on the page link….and this content can be optimised accordingly.

The use of internal page linking should be encouraged, particularly when using key words as the link description. Again, as an important piece of page content, a link helps Google to understand what you’re really about and get to the pages that really matter.

OK, so that’s some basic design and implementation advice. Let’s stick with the ‘relationship’ metaphor for a moment, because the next element to consider is how to attract attention to yourself… and the best way to do this is to be promiscuous.

The ‘Give to Get’ Rule

Now, getting your name known around town and within Google is not as sordid as you might imagine. As mentioned above, the first principle of SEO is to increase the number of web pages that point to your site (or your optimised page). There are a number of ways to do this:

• Become notorious: spend lots of money on advertising via Pay per Click (PPC – to be covered in a separate, upcoming white paper), banners, offline ads, offline PR, etc…such that you capture the imagination of searchers everywhere through paid-for placement of links and have them search for you – robot-like – in the language that you prescribe.

• Become even more notorious: monumentally succeed or screw-up…such that everyone writes about what you’ve done online and links to your web site. (Actually, this might be the sordid option!

• Become charming: encourage lots of other web masters to link their pages to yours. This is otherwise known as a partner or reciprocal linking plan, and is encouraged highly. It takes time and effort, but using the ‘good web karma’ / Google PageRank logic that we previously mentioned, it can be hugely beneficial – in the sense that working hard to make the BBC link to you will have a positive pay off. (Whilst working less hard to persuade the Kennel Club to link to you is of dubious merit.) Whichever route you take, always try to ensure that the reciprocal links are relevant – ie, the BBC should only be a target if you are a in a related industry. And remember what Google described as its ‘sophisticated text-matching techniques’ because accepting links from nefarious sources on the web (there are plenty on offer) does not tend to pay – for example, setting up or participating in ‘link farms’ or cloning your sites into ‘rings’ that all point back to the same source using the same content. Our advice is don’t do this because Google will find you out. (This is in fact your second sordid option!)

• Become smart: use some freely available tricks and tools to get your name out there as much as possible and have pages linking back to you.

We’ll focus on the final option. Here are some low maintenance and cost-effective ways of punching above your weight and generating links back to your web site:

• Submit your web site to Google, and other major search engines (see the ‘Tools’ section at the end of this paper for links and guidance on how to do this).

• Add your site url to the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/add.html). I won’t elaborate here – but it’s important because Google uses it as the basis for some of the ways in which it indexes sites.

• Submit your url to as many free business directories as you can (eg, Yahoo), and as many paid-for directories as you can afford (eg, the Yahoo Shopping directory). For all of these submissions, your aim is to get listed, and hence create another web page with a link back to your optimised page (reminder – this may not always be your home page, but your action or ‘conversion’ page).

• Encourage your team to maintain their own web properties and have these link back to your site. For example, have people refer to your site via their e-cademy profile page, or via LinkedIn, or SoFlow, or FaceBook. Have them build a Squidoo lens (http://www.squidoo.com) that links to you….Encourage them to maintain their own personal blogs and to say complimentary things about your products and services, and have them link to you using appropriately (optimised) language.

• Issue your press releases via free online distribution hubs such as ClickPress, PRLog and others, and fill your press releases full of links to your key pages. (Note: this is an entirely machine automated process, and, unlike normal PR, its goal is not to generate media coverage but to generate new web pages with links.) See the ‘Tools’ section below for a list of online PR distribution services.

Further to this, you should note that there are good links and bad links, as already mentioned. Here’s an example:

• Good: Visit Velocity for their magic <a href=”http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/papers“>tech marketing white papers </a>!

• Bad: Visit Velocity for their magic tech marketing white paper,<a href=”http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/papers“>here</a>!

• You don’t need to understand too much about html to tell the difference, other than the fact that example 1 optimised the link around the phrase ‘ tech marketing white paper,’ whereas example 2 optimised the link around the phrase ‘here.’

Now in terms of these links’ value to our business, example 1 is better because it’s imparting some level of understanding and association within the code, whereas example 2 tells us nothing of who and what Velocity is all about.

A great example of how this plays out can be seen by Googling the phrase ‘click here.’ You’ll notice that the Adobe Acrobat download page comes out on top. This is because people have been placing pdf’s on their page next to a link that tells users to ‘click here’ to get Acrobat Reader if they don’t have it already.

Now, this is a fun example because just about everyone already has the application. But personally, I’d be kicking myself if a partner web site decided to link to my product in the same way (by using ‘click here’ as the descriptive element of the html) because I know that when people search for a tech marketing white paper, ‘click here’ is not the term they’re going to use!

So, it’s important to ensure that external and internal links are constructed properly, and that where possible you can influence web masters to do it your way, using your keywords.

So much for design and implementation and getting your name and links out there. There is one other significant way to help boost your SEO, and that’s….

Conclusion: Start Now!

To summarise, most of the things we need to care about in SEO are the same things we should be doing to make our web sites more accessible and more readable (and I would say enjoyable) for everyone.

The key here is that good SEO requires an absolute devotion to ensuring your content is kept on track at every possible point – and this means placing key words in page headers, navigation labels and the like, as well as describing your products and services in a language that makes sense to normal human beings.

The design and implementation tips that we mention ought also to be common practice to any decent web developer / designer, and the fact that a content management system can help make this stuff second nature ought not be a surprise.

So, to conclude. SEO isn’t a black art. It’s not even a grey area. It can be practised effectively by everyone and, to cover the key elements, this needn’t be an exercise that requires a stack of cash or a bunch of overpaid, under-aged consultants!

Useful Tools

• O’Reilly PDF guide to SEO

• Google Toolbar (to measure a site’s PageRank)

• Alexa Toolbar (to measure a site’s comparative performance)

• Overture Inventory (for investigating key word popularity)

• Google Analytics (for measuring your site’s performance – eg, top pages, search terms, etc)

• Opentracker (as per above, but with some extra cool tools – eg visitors by company)

Useful Web Sites/Online Tools

• http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/

• http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/key word-density/

• http://tools.seobook.com/

• http://tools.seobook.com/general/key word-information/

• http://tools.seobook.com/competition-finder/index.php

Useful Publications

• SEO Watch

• SEO Book

• Search Marketing Gurus

• SEO Moz

Online PR Distribution Hubs

• ClickPress

• PR Leap

• PR Log

• Sane PR