First 10

What is a Google Nofollow tag and why should I care?

Chris Soames — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:45:05 +0000

Using nofollow tags to support SEO

Nofollow tags are important in SEO, but I find many marketers I speak to haven’t heard of the approach. That’s understandable since you would only expect SEO specialists to be aware of them. However, I think they are a useful concept to understand as a “hands-on” marketer, since they will effect conversations you have about buying media or understanding the way links in social media work.

Nofollow tags explained

A nofollow tag is a basic piece of HTML. Appended to a hyperlink, it allows webmasters to control whether search engines follow a link or not. For example, the following URL on a page of another site allows search engines to visit Smart Insights’ website and credit the website with the link; each link is scored by the search engines, supporting SEO: Visit Smart Insights Here’s the same hyperlink, now including a nofollow tag (highlighted in red): rel=”nofollow”>Visit Smart Insights The inclusion of a nofollow tag instructs the search engines NOT to visit the site or rather not to ascribe credit to boost the ranking of the destination site based on the link.

A summary of what Google has to say on nofollow links

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

Three ways to use nofollow tags support SEO

Paying for adverts and/or links to your website. While you would obviously never do this to boost your SEO , using a nofollow tag means you can pay for links on sites you believe will deliver quality traffic without running the risk of being penalised by search engines for buying links.
Link to competitors without supporting their SEO. Although you won’t want to link to direct competitors, you may sometimes have to link to SEO competitors.
Forcing indexing and crawl prioritisation of your own website. Nofollow tags can be used to ensure search engines prioritise links to your important content rather than to generic power pages, such as Sitemap, Contact Us and Registration. This use of nofollow tags, sometimes known as “page rank sculpting” is most relevant to large websites.

See our internal linking post for more information and a reminder of the importance of editorial links.

Tactical SEO considerations from marketing campaigns

These are other implications of nofollow which may affect your campaigns.

When an agency adds comments to blogs, forums or social media, these will generally be nofollowed, so there is no SEO benefit. This is true for most links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Links in blog post articles are “dofollowed” so do support SEO and make guest posting a popular SEO activity.
Links are not always about the ‘credit’. Wikipedia includes nofollow tags in all its eternal links but still receives a lot of traffic. Relevant links are still effective in traffic generation despite the inclusion of nofollow tags.

Nofollow tagged social network links are still of great SEO value

Despite the fact that popular social networks include nofollow tags in most of their external links, social networks still have an important role to play in SEO; as well their contribution to other key aspects of digital marketing strategy, such as consumer engagement. Links from social networks help to establish your brand is active and well shared. Links from social networks help to build your ‘Social score’ – a key to SEO success. Checkout this video of Google’s Matt Cutts describing how links within Wikipedia and other social networks are of no SEO ranking value since they use nofollow tags.

Content marketing on the rise

Chris Soames — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:13:25 +0000

A new infographic to help you create content people want to share

Content marketing facts from the infographic

26% + of B2B marketing budgets are invested in content
79% of marketers use article publication as a tactic
52% use video
62% of companies outsource their content marketing
Brand awareness and customer acquisition are the two main goals of content marketing

Blueglass Interactive’s new infographic combines tips on the type of content that works and features examples from brands who are making it work.

Content marketing infographic

Dan Bosomworth — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:59:46 +0000

Inbound, content or social marketing – here’s the blueprint

We’re asked a lot about the basics, the framework or the blueprint for content, inbound or social media marketing. Well – here’s our answer in the form of an infographic. I wrote a lot more detail about this here on the Smart Insights website, too.

A blueprint for content marketing

Danyl Bosomworth — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:00:06 +0000

An infographic explaining how inbound marketing works together with content marketing

Whether you call it inbound marketing, social media marketing or content marketing, we’re broadly referring to the same thing; at least that’s how we see it. Dave and I believe that inbound marketing starts with considered, quality content, well published and promoted that, in turn, drives the inbound benefit through sharing and search. The ‘free bonus’ is that you’re link-building and gaining social signals for search engine optimisation as well creating great content – something so often over-looked and under-valued.

The Content Marketing model infographic

This Content Marketing model was developed at First 10 Digital when working with a client who wanted to understand the full process for her team. We hope our infographic will help you plot your success too.

Content marketing blueprint

People liked it so much we thought it deserved a more polished design with Smart Insights input – so here it is along with a few notes. Have a look, and please let us know what you think.

A simple model that still requires hard work to implement

While not making light of the reality of hard work involved in considering how to integrate this model with your wider plans, including ongoing social and search marketing, I hope the simplicity of this process still really jumps out. We’ve have much more detail on how to apply it to create a content marketing strategy here:

Recommended Guide: Content marketing strategy Our 88 page Ebook features a workbook format with checklists and examples that makes it quick to scan to develop a strategy and apply the practical tips and tools. Download our content marketing strategy guide.

Excellent branded content

You’re not in the game without it, I’m afraid. It’s easy to over-egg the channels, especially social media, yet even social media experts will tell you that without the objects around which to socialise and share there is little chance of interaction or sharing. And, for most of us, the best object is relevant, quality, branded content (by definition that’s not quick or easy!) that’s exceptionally well seeded.

Develop a connected hub

This may be a fascinating and well considered hub like American Express’ Open Forum or something relatively simple like Eloqua’s much applauded and popular Revenue blog. Don’t over state it – it’s still a blog but it’s a brilliant and relevant one. Design your hub in line with other assets, think about the positioning (how great is Elqoua’s Revenue proposition considering they sell marketing software), and then get your quality content on there. Oh, and ensure that your content is easy to share – a simple share bar is the easiest way to do this, then think about embedding Facebook comments if relevant, if not Disqus. The high end will consider the awesome but extremely pricey Gigya, or cheaper Janrain.

Publish and promote

This is the crucial step, the bit that really is hard work. How and where to seed with influencers in your market, the portals and the bloggers who have the credibility and reach that you need. And, don’t forget the social networks, communities and forums where your audience is already talking about related stuff. ‘Free’, no, ‘Easy’, no – since when was great marketing ever easy though?

Spark interaction

All that content needs to drive somewhere, to your content hub most likely, although the idea of ‘fulfilment’ can take place anywhere, really. Suffice to say that in return for making it worth someone’s while to interact with you,you capture new potential customers and, more importantly, their permission to continue an ongoing dialogue that moves them, presumably, towards the sale of a product or service. The focus is on the relationship, which is why email and social media combine so well. Relationship building or interaction takes place wherever your audience is, in social network, on your site, etc.

Sell

I toyed with omitting this from my blueprint list but, at the end of the day, it’s the commercial reason we create valuable content. If you’re offering a solution your target market finds very valuable, then content marketing is simpler for you. Focus on providing valuable solutions to your target market, don’t pitch and scream about your products off the bat. People are looking for solutions, not your product or service. Offer them what they need and want – the secret to effortless selling.

Free SEO prizes

The issue of miss-selling of ‘SEO’ by so many of the agencies plying this trade is almost too tempting to ignore here. In my experience these agencies are often guilty of making what’s actually quite a simple process (I did not easy!) seem like a dark art. I’ll avoid the temptation to pursue this now and keep my supporting thoughts to myself until another time! If you succeed in creating great content, you should benefit from two free bonus prizes in relation to your natural search marketing:

Free prize #1 – If you (or your SEO agency) follow this content marketing process, I hope its ability to drive link-building is evident. The most important factor in gaining the desired search rank is: develop content worth re-sharing and worth linking to!!
Free prize #2 – Your quality content, well marketed on the most relevant sites, ensures that you develop a brand footprint in Google and Bing that’s wider than the one ordinarily enjoyed by your domain.You don’t have to directly rank for everything; indeed, this is increasingly hard to do.Imagine an extreme example – the BBC website picks up on your content and publishes it, quantum leaping you up in SERP visibility. Who equates to the BBC in your market?For example, a Gap travel company might strive to have content worthy of Lonely Planet or relevant specialist blogs or forums, such as niche opportunities in volunteer travel or snowboarding.

12 Ideas for Marketing using Pinterest

Danyl Bosomworth — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:24:20 +0000

A short guide to help review if and how you use Pinterest

Prompted by interest in my first post on the marketing opportunities for Pinterest a couple of weeks ago, I thought a more considered ideas post might be useful. So I’ve summarised the key points that I feel are relevant to consider if you’re set on taking your brand onto Pinterest. I’ve not got into the mechanics of how it works, others do it better already. First things first…

A reminder – what is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a platform for crowd sourced visual content grouped into topics (mostly lifestyle at the moment). From a broader perspective, it’s a social network that allows users to visually share new interests by ‘pinning’ images or videos to their own or others’ ‘pinboards’ (a collection of ‘pins’ that have a common theme). Maybe this cartoon explains it best (source) it’s addictive! Crucially, Pinterest has a huge visual emphasis, a lot of shared mood-boards is how it first stuck me. It represents a collated view of a person’s lifestyle or set of interests. The benefit to the user is that I can discover ‘people like me’, and so stuff I might like. Pinterest’s objective is to connect everyone through the things that they find interesting. Oh, and once you’ve registered with your social network of choice, you can upload directly to it, use a bookmarklet in your browser or via a mobile app, so it’s easy stuff.

Gorgeous design

The design of Pinterest is pretty unique which is adding to its appeal with non-marketing-or-tech-geeks, Mashable covered this here – essentially the user benefit is that it’s pictorial and panel orientated, highly visual and easy to move around different topics. Text content is at a minimum and you’re not forced into a linear, reverse chronological order browsing. This makes it the opposite, from an experiential perspective, to most blogs, Facebook or Twitter.

Before you dive in

Two important questions…

Have you got enough time and resource to take on another social media outpost? It’s best to not have magpie syndrome and just dive in because you can, resources for all of us remain at a premium, no matter how hot Pinterest might sound right now. Of course, worst case, you can create an account and trial it, but consider the reality of pitching time into another outpost in the social media mix since you’ll probably have to steal that effort from somewhere else. More importantly…
Does your brand have a natural place within Pinterest? Is it a relevant part of your strategy right now? I ask this since Pinterest, as it stands at least, is all about lifestyle content and I’m assuming it always will be weighted that way. Real people sharing real stuff that they’re interested in. Of course you can come up with ideas to bridge into that (more on that below), yet I’d sense check if it feels natural for your brand at this time? If you’re already creating relevant content for a blog or a social media marketing plan then it may be a natural, low-effort step for you. The main users right now are 18-34 year old upper income women from the US, so did think about that.

It’s also worth remembering that Pinterest is much bigger in the US compared to the UK and presumably other European countries. Still, where the US leads on social media, the rest of the world often follows. This infographic tells the story well.

So you think Pinterest is worth exploring for your brand?

Great – it’s seriously on the up as the fastest growing site, ever! This post by Techcrunch covered how the site has surpassed 10 million users after only 9 months. That’s the fastest growth ever for a standalone site. Users aren’t spending that much time at the site just yet — about 90 minutes / month, compared with 7 hours for Facebook. But it’s clear that Pinterest is a huge phenomenon. Most interesting when you consider the hype around Google+, Pinterest has also taken off among non-techies/geeks/marketers first, unlike Google+.

Ready to dive in? Our tips for Pinterest marketers

1. Register with a business email (and Twitter) on account set-up: Once you receive an invitation to sign up for Pinterest (it’s still invite only!) use the same email address you use for your business Twitter profile, then sign-up with Twitter in order you can easily share your new pins through your Twitter account. Pinterest doesn’t offer a connection to Facebook business pages, so Twitter it is. Of course, choose your company name as your username then add a company description, logo, and a website link. 2. Don’t upset fellow pinners! The site naturally discouragse blatant self-promotion. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, great, just don’t use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.” [Read: get lost marketers!]. Think up creative ways to promote your brand on the network – showcase the lifestyle that your brand promotes. If you’re a footwear company like PUMA, a pinboard of PUMA shoes is a no-no. A pinboard of a people wearing them, especially famous folks like Professor Green, Thierry Henry or Aguero, ideally in cool places, would be much better for fellow pinners to interact with. 3. Be worth following with great visual content: To get started, spend time looking around, this way you’ll get some great ideas and a feel for how the network works. See this post here on some of the most successful brand who are using Pinterest effectively so far. Get your great, non-promotional content uploaded – see point 2! This way, new followers will have a reason to follow your pins; just as you would populate a brand new blog before you start promoting it. What images, graphics, info graphics do you have or could you easily get together? 4. Promote your presence externally:

Add the Pinterest follow button to your website and write a blog post to promote it.
Promote your presence on Pinterest through your other social networks by encouraging your followers/fans on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to follow your pins!
Consider a Pinterest contest (see below).
Start following users you think would want to follow you back.

5. Create a fan Pinboard: You can allow other users to contribute their own pins to your hosted pinboards, so involve fans and customers in your marketing as you would in any other social channel. Dedicate a pinboard to your top fans or customers – ask the customer to pin images that showcase your brand within their lifestyle. Does your product allow the user to look good, be better at something, feel better – get images the illustrate that, think of it as a pictorial testimonial. 6. Oh no, another dam contest: I know, I know. Marketers and their dam contests in social networks! Yet, they work to a point in making your brand shareable. In Pinterest it’s all about the images (and videos) – what pins of your brand, products, or services could people share on a board as a part of a contest – to get what exactly? Re-pin the top boards to your own Pinterest page and ask followers to vote on the boards to select the winner. Just keep it natural and on-brand for Pinterest and the pincers, remember Pinterest’s terms of use! 7. Demonstrate an expertise on a topic: Become the go-to Pinterest account for pins about a certain subject or topic relating to your industry. You’ll see this by looking around the network. Some people are really owning certain spaces and you’d have to say there’s an early, possible gold-rush potential within Pinterest at the moment to do just that. I like this graphic designer and their logo love board - a great, simple idea. What about other forms of design, art, fashion that are so immediately relevant this way, so easily done. Harder for those of us that need to find the lifestyle link – but the principal is their with a little imagination – more on that here… 8. Learn about your buyer personas: View pinboards of your customers, learn more about who they are and what they’re interested in. Use Pinterest as a tool for understanding the interests and needs of your ideal customers. Then… show your expertise within those areas, be valuable and interesting. Very simple, and very time consuming to do it properly. Yet that’s surely the opportunity. 9. Remember videos: Pins can be videos as well as images – worth remembering! Existing footage you can use, interviews, fun stuff? 10. Integration with other channels: Do you attend or run offline events that your fan base would find interesting to see behind the scenes? How about features around the best photos and video footage – this is good for those not attending and it helps you generate buzz and promote the next event you run or will be present at. Consider online integration too – you can use hashtags in Pinterest, if you use them then create a pinboard around it, tag it with a hashtag you’re using on Twitter and Google+ and help integrate Pinterest within the campaign. You can use your Pinterest account to promote a relevant section of your site this way – driving multiple links (traffic) back to your domain around a particular topic, theme or campaing. Assuming the content is good enough of course. 11. Showcase your people: How about a pinboard that showcases life around and in your organisation, whether day-to-day stuff or events, even parties. It’s subtle, basic stuff but every little helps. 12. Measure traffic back to your website: Make sure this is all generating results and proving it’s worth your time and effort. Whenever possible, include links back to your website and landing pages in your pins. Keep track of referral traffic and leads generated from Pinterest to see what resonates and what doesn’t. Just remember that as a social network Pinterest requires that you spend time to increase your following, engage with those followers, keep your presence updated, and generally add value to the eco-system. It’s not another magic bullet, of course. What are your ideas on using Pinterest – do let us know!

The best social sharing tools?

Chris Soames — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Questions to ask to make sure you’re following the best approach to social sharing

Social Sharing tools are the technology behind embedding of buttons and other widgets onto your website to encourage social sharing, recommending or bookmarking within your site and blog.

Despite their ability to spread your content, increase your traffic and even aid your SEO efforts, many sites are still ignoring or not using the right sharing tools. The infographic below from popular sharing service AddThis shows why it is essential to implement these tools effectively.

Why do people share content?

Making the best use of Social Sharing technology requires content that is worth sharing in the first place. A great piece of research was conducted by the New York Times Consumer Insight Group on why people share online, well worth a read if you are creating content and wanting to understand how to encourage sharing. You can view the report here. The 5 reasons people share content the report highlights (in order) are:

To bring valuable and entertaining content to others
To define ourselves to others
To grow and nourish our relationships
Self-fulfilment
To get the word out about causes or brands

Which sharing tools are available?

This is straightforward. The are 3 main services are:

AddThis.com
ShareThis
Native service plug-ins – for example the Yoast “Social Buttons”

We recommend the third approach since the top two tools, while easy to use do not update to show shares from other sources such as social media management systems like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Using the native services of Facebook, Twitter and so on will check in real-time to see what the latest number of counts are. To help here, plugins are available for CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento etc. We use the Yoast “Social Buttons”since they are flexible and include tracking in Google Analytics and GetClicky.

Each social media site has its own range of share buttons and badges, they are very similar to widgets though focus on one application of course, for example Facebook’s “Share”, Twitter’s “Retweet” or StumbleUpon’s “Stumble” – and the button du jour – Google+1!

If you are however looking at systems that incorporate sharing with social login which helps create a much richer user experience you would look at services such as Gigya & Janrain, while they require larger budgets the service level, quality of product & features are impressive.

Which networks should you include?

According to social sharing plugin AddThis, Facebook is far and away the number one place where people share content through their widget, taking 39% of the pie, Gigya recently claimed it was 44% on their blog as well. The point is to consider that around 60% of shares are being made outside of Facebook – so at least include Twitter and with their recent improvements and the launch of “plus your world“, Google+. Others would be largely determined by your audience, B2B would absolutely include LinkedIn for example.

Is Pinterest on your radar?

Danyl Bosomworth — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:23:28 +0000

Social media’s rising star refers more traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined

According to aggregated data from Shareaholic, Pinterest has had meteoric growth, accounting for only 0.17% of referral traffic in July last year, whereas today it’s 3.6% of referral traffic. Similar to Twitter, not great considering its comparative age. Of course, Facebook heads the pack on 26.4% (4.3% via mobile!).

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a 2 year old social bookmarking site, it enables users to collect and then share things that they like or find useful, it’s driving increasingly significant amounts of traffic to retailers’ websites – which begs the question, should it be on your radar? Users create “pinboards” to collect and shares thing’s they’re interested in. Members can use Pinterest’s “Pin It” bookmarklet tool and iPhone app to save things they see online and offline, and explore and repin the images their friends collect via their personal newsfeeds.

www.pinterest.com

Which brands will win on Pinterest?

It’s hard to say at the minute, though as a consumer brand that targets women you’d have to be figuring out how to get involved. Women account for 58% of Pinterest’s traffic, according to Hitwise. The popular categories are home decor, food and wedding inspiration – at least those are the kind of popular areas for users at the minute (and yet it still drives that much referral traffic!). You can only imagine that it’ll grow much wider. What are your views on Pinterest? Have you used it as an end-user or for business?

Increasing website interactions with social media and content

Danyl Bosomworth — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:43:40 +0000

7 techniques to drive website interactions that generate leads and how to measure them

We find that there’s lots of discussion online about how to reach and convert audiences, but not so much about encouraging the softer interactions. We reference this as “Act” within the RACE framework, it’s about encouraging interactions on site or within your social outpost. You can think of Act in the context of the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, where you are encouraging those that are watching or “lurking” to contribute, to get involved. These are people most likely with a problem or question, maybe a passion for a topic area; your challenge is how you get them to contribute. These are the tactics I’m talking about:

Blogs
Social networks integrations
Widgets, tools and objects
Community
Content
Gamification
Review and ratings

The whole idea is to design specific communications techniques that encourage interactions on your websites or social outposts, an area we feel is more often over-looked. Social media is more often pitched as a means to gain reach, especially within the social networks. We thought it would be useful to kick off and share ideas as a means to gain traction and interaction on your website, and suggest how that in turn creates reach through brand assets being shared. Think of these interactions more broadly, as very practical ways to help increase participation and sharing amongst those visitors who most likely aren’t on your website to purchase, though you can make steps to earn permission to sell later. Interactions then are a means of:

Starting a dialogue on your domain – this eventually giving rise to a user registration, sales lead or transaction
Generating user-generated content – this can boost conversion through social proof and help with SEO
Encouraging the sharing of your brand – in the form of content, in the social networks
Sparking interactions between people – facilitating the discussion
Aiding in decision making – the site visitor learns or realises something of value, something inspiring ideally

Here are 7 ideas to get ideas flowing for your brand…

1. Blog interactions – let’s start simple with the most obvious and easily the most over-looked way to gain interaction. Assuming your blog has relevant and interesting content and is on a stable platform like WordPress, this is all about frequency and being topical – manage this process well, have a publication schedule to help you keep on-brand, on-topic and on-time. Insert actions, polls for example, to be taken. Encourage comments within the post, ask for feedback and link to other pages on your site, forum pages etc. Ensure every post is designed to do something. Measures:

Number of posts
Audience growth (unique and returns)
Conversions
Subscribers
Inbound links
Directory listing: Technorati, Alltop for example
SEO Improvements, traffic specifically – watch the key key phrases

2. Social network integrations – Whether enabling social sign-on, social commenting, embedding social sharing buttons or even Slideshare or Sribd code into a blog post – the goal is straightforward since you simply want to make sharing easy of your stuff from your site and into those relevant social networks, and of course traffic back to your site. Though most effective on a blog and home page, also consider rich landing pages that have useful video, and product pages. Social sign on is pretty important since it not only allows data capture (via the Facebook API) but makes it easy for users to interact using the network of choice, the bar to participate is lowered. There are many ways to allow interaction, especially via the Facebook API and you can get serious with tools such as Gigya and Janrain, these are independent tech web services that act as an intermediary between your domain and multiple social networks, an area of mass growth, no doubt. Measures:

Traffic from specific social networks
Friends on Social Networks
Site shares and re-shares measured via short URLs in tools like Gigya

3. Widgets, engagement tools or social objects – There’s 3 ways to say the same thing! It’s maybe confusing too, I prefer social objects from a marketing perspective since it describes the real purpose. Afterall, we design and build these tools to spark interaction, discussion and sharing because the user is happy with the result or outcome. There’s a big opportunity since calls-to-action tend to focus on generating leads and sales, this totally neglects people further up the decision-making funnel, softer calls-to-action encourage interactions (ideally without data capture) have their place and are where gaining permission to sell is the purpose. I come across very few client who are authentically trying to just earn permission to today in order they can sell tomorrow. In the social world these devices should encourage participants to share their results with others, the output, whether entertaining, funny, informative, insightful. Measures:

Usage of widgets (by count)
Posts/Mentions about social widgets offsite
Referrals from offsite widgets (if any)
Conversions
Inbound links

4. Growing your communities – There are a number of ways to create a sense of community, having a relevance and purpose is the key. The world doesn’t need another “forum”, it may however need a bespoke community Q&A around managing tax liability as an SME, maybe a crowd-sourcing ideas community that facilitates feedback to a whole industry. It has to have a purpose. I am convinced this is the future and a massive opportunity for savvy, authentic brands. More and more niche, super-relevant communities will seek to support people wanting answers and ideas to aid in their decision making. Imagine the sales potential for the brand supporting people higher up the sales funnel. Measures:

Registered users
Posts
Mentions offsite
Referrals
Conversions
Inbound links
Pages that rank on key terms due to user-generated content

5. Crafted content – Start with the customer or personas type, asking who your content is for, their unmet need is extremely important otherwise you risk creating stuff that you think is useful, but you’re not the buyer, they are. Be on brand but ensure your content is answering needs. Consider relevant formats especially video, ebooks and webinars since all spark interaction and are also shareable objects in the sense that I can easily comment and have an opinion about the usefulness of your stuff, or maybe just how fun I found it. Measures:

Page views (key pages only)
Audience growth (unique and returns)
Conversions
Inbound links

6. Gamification – A fast emerging area for the rest of us now that the bigger brands have pioneered, it’s now more accessible than ever and to some extent more affordable. To engage consumers, social gaming can be a great way to encourage interaction and so reach. The WildFire Promotion builder, for example, shows the types of engaging promotions that can be created in the social networks such as Sweepstakes, user generated content, coupons, Pick Your Favourites, Trivia and Quizzes, Instant Wins and Voting around topics. Again, tools like Gigya enable scores against such interactions, which enables leader boards and a sense of kudos – that being the key driver in gaming mechanics and ultimately why it’s fun to share and compare. Imagine combining gaming mechanics into your onsite community to add another dimension and lighten the experience. Measures:

Participants
Mentions offsite
Referrals
Conversions
Inbound links

Wildfire App

7. Product reviews and ratings – The popularity of TripAdvisor, Amazon reviews and retail site Reevoo show how we love to give our opinion. This form of user-generated content is fantastic in terms of assisting conversion and contributing to SEO, so it’s a must-have for retail sites. Think about how you encourage and share comments. We think Firebox is a great example – they offer spot prizes for “amazing” contributions and these days all comments are in Facebook to encourage amplification. You can add mass credibility with independent tools such as Feefo. Measures:

Reviews (by count)
Conversions

Remember email, too, that’s Enewsletters and other email offers – we know many consumers and business people alike will subscribe to email if it offers unique value or convenience to them. Email is a great way of encouraging participation in many of the types of site or social network engagement we’ve described above. Make sure you make the most of email contact to encourage social interactions. Of course so much of the above is all content for email which will drive subsequent interactions as a result. What are your thoughts, anything we’ve missed?

Job Vacancy – Web Developer

Stu Miller — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:30:54 +0000

Fancy joining our growing team?

We’re currently looking for a versatile, hands-on back end web developer with WordPress experience to work on our growing range of projects. Experience is important, but what we really value are talent, motivation, versatility and character. You must be able to work well independently and within a small team. You must be a fast and willing learner, fearless in asking the right questions, and resourceful in finding the right answers. We are a small, close-knit team – you must be excited about working in an environment with other smart and motivated people.

You’ll be a PHP/mySQL developer with 2-3 years commercial experience, preferably in an agency environment but that’s not as important as having the skills and ability to juggle multiple projects!

Key skills

PHP/mySQL – experience with writing quality, documented and well structured code and database queries
WordPress experience – important one, this – you’ll be able to demonstrate an ability to develop themes and plugins using the latest version of WordPress

The full Job Description is attached below with a lot more information – should you fit the bill, you’ve got until March 23rd 2012 to contact us on hello@first10.co.uk.

Grab the full Job Description

Strictly no agencies, please – you’ll be wasting your time (and ours) by contacting us, so please don’t. Thank you kindly.

SEO Agency Research 2012

Chris Soames — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:00:09 +0000

If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO or are an SEO – this is a must browse

Earlier in January, you may have seen a useful piece of research completed by SEOmoz that looked into the costs and service structure of SEO agencies.

I’ve included that below, but the main reason for this post is to alert you to this excellent summary by Dan Barker (one of our Expert commentators) which features the UK and, in my opinion, is far clearer and so useful.

You can checkout the full post and research on SEOmoz here.

Turning to the UK data, from Dan, the most interesting for me, which prompts questions you should ask of your agency are…

What services do you provide? Surprisingly few do content creation or promotion – surely a core 2012 SEO technique. A surprising number don’t provide link-building recommendations
What charging models do you use? Fixed price is offered by 51.9%, so if you’re paying on an hourly basis you may not be getting the best deal. Pay per performance based on rankings or traffic is relatively rate (sub 10%) but revenue share is higher.
How much do you charge? This gives a nice map to see whether you’ve got a great deal or not, but as we all know, you generally get what you pay for. Don’t you?
How long have you been operating? Over a quarter have been operating for less than 2 years. I’d never recommend an agency with this little experience. SEO is a craft acquired over many years. If the main people have more experience then this is fine, but it shows that its still a lucrative area.

All data by SEOMoz, Graphic by Dan Barker

Here is the original SEOmoz infographic covering a range of countries.