And I’m certainly no Tom Cruise. Before I explain this issue it’s important to understand that a website is like the human body. Your health is not only based on your current routines (eating, exercise, etc.) but lifestyle choices you’ve made previously. If you stop smoking today you’ll still have a higher chance of getting heart disease for many years to come.

It’s the same for a website. Past black-hat or grey-hat practices may affect you in the future in ways you can’t foresee. As such, projecting ROI for new clients or prospects is impossible. Those who try to attempt it are simply guessing, while doing a good job of convincing the site owner of the accuracy of their predictions. Read More »

Like many of the digital folk reading this, I read a lot of blogs, books and pretty much anything that piques my interest. Hell, I’ve even been known to drop into the occasional Google+ Hangout. Doing the rounds, there is a common theme on approaches to content marketing.

Though the wording changes from article to article they generally all follow the same rule: use Google and some advanced queries to pull up websites that return [“KEYWORD” “submit guest post”]  or [“KEYWORD” “Write for us”] or something else along those lines. Read More »

It is not often that you come across a set of self help type career advice that makes a huge amount of sense and is very much worth sharing.

This Slideshare deck from billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is one such set of advice. It’s smart. Particularly if you are about to graduate or even if that day is a few years behind you. Read More »

Publishers of all sizes; bloggers, newspapers and even those Twitter users who track their Klout score know the value in breaking news and making headlines. Headlines earn page impressions and mentions. These translate into influence and money.

Making the headlines is tricky business though. It requires speed, connections and the ability to point the spotlight at your content or risk a swift second mover out manoeuvring you. Read More »

The growth of worldwide online audiences has risen dramatically with the development and increasing sophistication of ecommerce.  The global B2C e-commerce market was valued at €825bn in 2012 and it’s forecast that the online retail market will continue to grow throughout this year.  Sales through mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) have also seen continued growth, making up 12% of e-retail sales in 2012 – 150% increase on 2011 figures. Read More »

The debate over who ‘owns’ social media is one that will no doubt rage on for some time. In many ways the argument is arbitrary – does it really matter?  Nonetheless it is a battle that I occasionally get drawn into so let’s grasp the nettle.

PRs think that social media should fall under their remit, because they’ve been managing their clients’ conversations and reputations for decades. That’s all well and good, but what is the point of talking for conversation’s sake? Can PRs really measure the impact of social media? I’d argue, ‘no.’  Read More »

The World Wide Web is now allowing special characters in URLs which means crawlers now have a stronger signal to localize queries right down to regional dialects.

It is a sizable change to the WWW language landscape given that historically coding has been based on English Latin characters.

A recent update to the World Wide Web has occurred in relation to how we can display and read certain languages that were previously not accessible to us. The Internet was founded in English (modern Latin) a language lacking diacritical marks (special characters). The update has facilitated the ability to display special characters in the whole URL.  Read More »

Interflora had a bad week last week. Previously, the florist was easily one of the most high profile brands online in terms of search – as of Wednesday, Google has effectively wiped it off the internet, removing it from search results for common search terms like ‘flowers’ or ‘flower delivery’, and even for its own brand name.

While Google is yet to comment officially about why it’s so annoyed with Interflora, it’s not hard to guess why. It seems as though Interflora has been indulging in some suspect link-building, both by sending flowers and other products to bloggers and demanding that they link to them in return, and by buying advertorials without nofollow tags on newspaper sites. Read More »

This Valentine’s Day, divert your devoted stares and whimsical declarations of love away from your other half. Instead, turn your attention to what’s at the heart of all your digital marketing strategies – content. Read More »

ShareRank, a product recently launched by Unruly Media, purports to ‘predict the shareability of a video before it launches’. Through this system advertisers can seek to discern what type of video content is likely to prove successful – from a sharing perspective at least.

ShareRank purports to understand the relationship between viewer responses and actual share data and enables the identification and contribution of factors that impact on shareability. It’s claimed that this can correctly predict shareability 80% of the time, a figure that could go up as more data is added and the algorithm improves.  Read More »