Blogging for Business

Filed under: Blogs,SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , , , — Felipe @ 28 Jan,09

Have you noticed how you automatically give huge credit and respect to a lecturer or a company trainer for being more knowledgeable than you? You are prepared to listen and take on board exactly what they have to say on a particular subject?

So does it not make sense to find strategic ways to get in front of your clients and teach them things from your business perspective? When you lecture or write authoritative articles to your prospective clients, you have instant credibility with them and become the “expert” in their eyes, gaining their trust.

You don’t have to be a teacher, just be creative and organize a function that your target market will enjoy reading about and want to come back to you for more.

How can you do this? How can you catch your target markets’ attention and promote your website and business at the same time? Easy – A BLOG.

A blog is a bolt on to your website, designed to incorporate an identical look and feel to the original website and the great thing is, you don’t have to be technically knowledgeable to use one. In-house training and 1 years support is included in the price, around 45 minutes training required to use the back office and a further 30 – 45 mins or so, for our SEO team to teach you how to use the Blog as a powerful marketing tool.

So go on, invest in the future. Get Blogging!

For more details, contact Julie Randlesome at THUK, BEDFORD

How SEO & Blogging Helped Barack Obama Become President

Filed under: Blogs,SEO — admin @ 21 Jan,09

As we reported in our last post, Barack Obama’s effective use of the internet in his marketing campaign was a key factor in him gaining the support of youth.

And not only did Obama use the internet, he used every online marketing tool there is, including blogging, search engine optimisation (SEO), social media and of course his website.

SEO:

When you search for the terms “Barack” and “Obama” in any of the four main search engines you will be amazed to find that the presidential campaign website of Barack Obama at the top of the list.

This will have been made possible by a very clever SEO team working for Obama, who carried out the correct techniques in optimising his website. For each page there is a different title tag, descriptive Alt tag descriptions are used on most of the images and the header tags have been written effectively.

Blogging:

The President’s team also realised the importance and growing popularity of the blog and how it would appeal to a wide audience of readers on the net.

Obama’s team made sure that the blog was always active and continuously posted relevant articles everyday. Sometimes posts received more than 325 comments within an hour of being posting. This reveals to what extent the blog is active and just how many people are going back to read it, which is clearly a lot!

Then of course there is the official website which is the core of the whole online marketing campaign. The Barack Obama site is designed well, easy to use and therefore appeals to the young as well as the old.

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post said this:

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.”

I think this could well be true!!

Barack Obamas’ Online Marketing Campaign

Filed under: hedgehog digital,online-marketing — admin @ 20 Jan,09

There is no doubt that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was a marketing genius, one only needs to look at the recent surge of Obama inspired marketing to appreciate this. But what made this campaign so phenomenally successful?

The campaign team used traditional marketing methods such as the radio, television and direct marketing, effective because they understood their audience and delivered crisp relevant messages to them.

What was more effective however was how Obama embraced not only the internet as an affective marketing tool and mobile technology to mass communicate his message, he also embraced the millennial audience; in fact 66% of 18-29 year olds voted for Obama which amounts to a huge majority. Co-incidentally Chris Hughes the co-founder of the social networking site Facebook, left Facebook to run Obamas online marketing team and together they created one of the most successful marketing campaigns to this date.

Millennials are the first generation to have never known a world without the internet; SMS texting is second nature and communicating online is a day to day occurrence. They have grown up in a world where they can see that anything is possible and achievable. Millennials are not just listened to but, because they are special, their opinions are taken seriously by their elders and because they are natural online content creators, they are highly influential.

Obama understood this – his campaign had a relaxed and informal tone so he could be relatable to all – old and young alike, and all the while he reiterated the same positive messages. He wanted people to believe in not just his abilities, but more importantly their own. His slogans of “Yes We Can”, “Hope” and “Change has come to America” always echoed this same message and in turn he left Americans and citizens worldwide inspired and ready to embrace change.

Google Still Proves to be Top of the Search Engines

Filed under: online-marketing — admin @ 20 Jan,09

According to Nielson Online, 64.1% of searches were performed using Google in November 2008,  16.1% using Yahoo!, 9.1% using MSN and 2.3% using Ask.com.

J.P. Morgan recently conducted research to see what factors (if any) would encourage a switch to an alternative search engine. Interestingly, 45% of respondents said that if better search results were achieved with an alternative search engine they would change, yet as you can see from the table below 38% would not switch over at all.

Here is a breakdown of the results from the poll:

Factors that would cause search engine switching

 % of participants

All

AOL

Ask

Google

MSN

Yahoo

Other
Results that better match my search term

45%

42%

25%

48.6%

33.3%

43.3%

34.8%
Results that include video, web, music and other forms of information

11.5%

12%

18.8%

11.5%

14%

9.6%

13%
A more uncluttered easy to navigate site

26.5%

30%

31.3%

24.9%

36.8%

29.9%

17.4%
The ability to preview web content

22.6%

24%

25%

21.9%

22.8%

26.1%

8.7%
Faster response speed to searches

27.8%

36%

18.8%

25.8%

35.1%

29.3%

26.1%
Other

0.7%

0.0%

0.0%

0.7%

3.5%

0.0%

0.0%
Nothing, happy with current search engine

38.2%

30%

31.3%

37.5%

38.6%

41.4%

52.2%

 What factors would cause you to use a different search engine?

link your way to the top with the right anchor text

Filed under: Blogs,SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , , , — Felipe @ 16 Jan,09

Link building plays an important role in the success of an SEO campaign. When link building, every little helps, because a link is a link and all these links build up the link popularity of a site. In this post I’ll talk about the most important factor of a site’s link popularity, the anchor text.

Wikipedia defines anchor text as:

“…the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the Anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.”

I have a simpler explanation to it, a hypertext link is any text placed between the <a> and </a> tag also known as anchor tags, therefore the term “anchor text”, here is how  a hypertext link looks like in a HTML document:

<a href=”/search-engine-marketing.php”>SEO Bedford</a>

Where <a is the beginning of the anchor tag, href is an attribute of <a> and refers to a specific location of the web or within a website and “SEO Bedford” is the anchor text.

Making use of the right anchor text puts you one step ahead of your competitors, my advice here is to use your most competitive keywords in the anchor texts of your inbound links, sometimes you don’t have control over those links due to the fact that they are in sites others control.

My suggestion here is to constantly monitor who is linking to your site and contact the site owners or webmasters and ask them if it is possible to modify the link to add the correct anchor text.

All this process is not as easy as it seems, nowadays getting an anchor text link from another website, specially an authority site, is worth much more than gold due to its value from a ranking standpoint.

My last piece of advice is, ensure you do your keyword research to optimise the anchor text to its full potential and try various link building tactics, then stick to them and create unique and link worthy on page content.

New CEO of Yahoo is Announced

Filed under: Misc. — admin @ 14 Jan,09

American software manager Carol Bartz will be the new CEO of internet giant Yahoo.

The appointment of Bartz brings to an end the two-month search for a successor to Yang. Internet pioneer and co-founder of Yahoo, Yang gave up his CEO position after potentially lucrative deals nearing 50 million dollars with Microsort Corp. collapsed.

Bartz said,

“There is no denying that Yahoo has faced enormous challenges over the last year,but I believe there is now an extraordinary opportunity to create value for our shareholders and new possibilities for our customers, partners and employees. We will seize that opportunity.”

The Yahoo chairman, Roy Bostock, said that Bartz combined the right mix of technology experience, leadership and respect in the financial markets.

“She is the exact combination of seasoned technology executive and savvy leader that the board was looking for,” Bostock said. “She is admired in the [Silicon] Valley as well as on Wall Street for her deep management expertise, strong customer orientation, excellent people skills and firm understanding of the challenges facing our industry.”

Blogging Requires Quality Not Quantity

Filed under: Blogs,hedgehog digital — admin @ 08 Jan,09

In my experience of blogging I have found that authors tend to make the mistake of writing very long posts, then wonder why they have no time to update their blogs regularly.

The key thing to know when writing blogs is that 1. search engines are looking for keywords not how much you’ve written 2. people will get bored reading an article that is 500 or more words long.

Ideally a blog should be between 200 and 250 words with plenty of interesting content and keywords.

The keywords should be hyperlinked back to the appropriate categories for the search engines to pick up.

It is also important for your blog to remain interesting to encourage visitors to come back and read other articles.

This will in time encourage visitors and search engines to trust your website, resulting in a higher search engine position and more people visiting your website!

New SEO plugin “ClikStats” for WordPress

Filed under: Blogs,Design,Misc.,SEO,Website Development,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , — Greg @ 08 Jan,09

ClikStats was developed over the Christmas period by one of THUK’s development team “Adrian Callaghan” who was looking into furthering his knowledge of his wordpress Blog.

Adrian had an idea to make an SEO plugin, this allowed him to track the traffic going through his own blog to enable him to analyse what was clicked, who clicked it, where and when they clicked from (using the IP address). All this information is valuable to many ‘Blog’ users to find a more advanced and scaled down statistics.

ClikStats is available for free download from wordpress.org or Adrian Callaghans Blog – www.adriancallaghan.co.uk clickstats