Philip Sheldrake

SEO changing up its game… it’s called PR

// July 14th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Public Relations, SEO/SEM

My recent post "Where's your brain at? Where's your consultancy at?" was prompted by a fascinating discussion at the CIPR Social Summer session on the 1st July at which we debated aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and the PR profession's paralysing hesitancy to grasp the SEO nettle.

Well personally I'm excited not paralysed, and I keep a beady eye on great information sources such as SEOmoz and Search Engine Watch, and I'm posting today to highlight a couple of posts I've just found.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz's CEO, has written a super perspective that should be read by everyone interested in the ebb and flow of the SEO world, particularly as it relates to activity one might consider to be in the PR domain. "The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web" identifies three epoques to date of web linking activity: (more...)

Where's your brain at? Where's your consultancy at?

// July 2nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Public Relations, SEO/SEM

Do you 'do' search engine optimisation? If so, it seems you are most probably a SEO consultant because public relations consultants who 'get' SEO appear to be very thin on the ground. Not only that, but some argue that's how it should be.

Nixon McInnes’ managing director Will McInnes, ever the polemicist perhaps, asserted during yesterday evening's CIPR Social Summer conversation on SEO that to fuse the two disciplines would have to entail some kind of genetic engineering along the lines of a pig-monkey hybrid. (more...)

Visualise your SEO

// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // SEO/SEM

Tableau Software knows just a thing or two about data visualisation. A spin out from Stanford, the company won the CODiE award for best business intelligence solution 2008... it's amazing what the faculty of visualisation can do for your intelligence, or your PR as anyone who has followed my obsession with data visualisation in public relations will know I believe. (Previous posts on the topic appended.)

Tableau Software's Niels Hoven has posted about using visualisation techniques (and a nifty Excel plug-in from Microsoft) to delve into the content of rival websites to determine keyword effectiveness and make your final keyword selection. He even rounds off by employing visualisation to measure the effectiveness of your SEO work. Nifty.

All round interesting post and a worthwhile read for SEO hobbyists and pros alike.

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My related posts of yore:

• Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails
• Can you see it? Making influence visible
• Influence... it's a numbers game

The power of social bookmarking and how to use it in your organisation today

// August 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Communities/Social Networks, Public Relations, SEO/SEM, Website/New Media

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time.  Guess that's almost Google's raison d'etre, but have they got it right?  Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO)?

Google's highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank. Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website's content.  And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.

This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.

But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website? (more...)

Summize – Twitter sentiment analytics

// May 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // Digital Media Relations, Measurement & Analysis, SEO/SEM

Those of you who follow my blog will know I'm currently into Social Web Analytics. Here's my last post on the topic. So some interesting news from Summize's labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.

Simply go here and enter the brand or object name in which you're interested. Here's one I did earlier...

Does your campaign measure up to search?

// February 4th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Branding, Digital Media Relations, Measurement & Analysis, Public Relations, SEO/SEM

The evaluation of PR campaign effectiveness is controversial. Forget for a moment the inadequate practitioners that insist all PR must have a benefit so better just get on with it than devote energy to measuring it, and you're left with an array of evaluation processes as diverse as the number of agencies.

Return on investment

The most over-used term is ROI. And that applies to all marketing disciplines not just PR. For example, I posted last week about the winners of OnMedia's Best of Broadband Advertising awards, yet when you read the rationale justifying OnMedia's selections only three out of ten make an attempt to link the campaign to a fillip to the client's bottom line. "Creative" and "ROI" are not synonymous. (more...)