Published by Pete June 23rd, 2009
in Blogging, Link Building and Social Media.
The Networx Marketing SEO panel on link building is now over and Matt, Andy and I have done our part in (hopefully) educating a group of Brisbane business-people on how links work, why they’re important, linkbait, content, keywords, anchor text, social media and different ways to potentially gain links for their websites.
Well, not all the points mentioned in my last post were covered (a lot were, but we didn’t get to all of them) however a lot of other great stuff was discussed and (in my humble opinion) the night went really well. The following info may not flow perfectly as I’m trying to recollect some of the more interesting/important things before I go to bed and forget.
Questions started with:
Q. Is it better to get links from relevant websites that relate to my business?
A. Most definitely
Continue reading ‘Networx Panel – Updated Info on ‘How to win links and influence people’’
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Published by Pete June 22nd, 2009
in Link Building.
This-evening I’ll be speaking on the topic of links at a Brisbane Networking function. So in preparation, I’ve put together some notes on the things I’d like to cover. I don’t know if the questions on-the-night will allow me to cover each of these topics, so if there are changes, I’ll be back to modify this post and will also collate some of the info discussed by my fellow panellists Matt Burgess and Darryl King after the event.
I’ll also be making an effort to live tweet the event, so if you’re interested, follow me on Twitter or just keep an eye-out for anything with the hash-tag #networx
Also, as a perk for anyone reading this or who attends the event, SiteMost is offering a FREE MONTH of SEO services when you purchase a website audit and mention the promotional code Networx.
Continue reading ‘Networx Panel – How to win links and influence people’
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Published by Pete June 18th, 2009
in Blogging and Link Building.
The SiteMost blog has been a bit quiet lately although that doesn’t mean we’ve been quiet – in fact we’ve been doing things all over the internet, just not on the blog here.
The rest of this post is a run-down of what we’ve been up to lately and doesn’t contain any proper SEO-related techniques, tips or tricks… so if you’re ok with a few paragraphs of shameless self-promotion poorly masked by what I like to refer to as ‘achievements’ then read on 
… Otherwise check-back in a week or two when the usual blogging should resume.
A couple of months back we had a guest blog post feature on Canada’s premiere SEO blog – Search Engine People, about Google Trends and Insights for Search – read more here: What’s Hot Google.
We then headed down to Sydney to the best annual Australian search marketing conference / expo – SMX Sydney. Thanks to Kalena, Barry, Lisa and the team at Search Strategies I was fortunate enough to win a free pass by designing a promo shirt for the Search Engine College. You can read more about the two-day conference here, here, here, here and here.
Continue reading ‘Where have we been? Everywhere but here…’
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Published by Pete April 1st, 2009
in Usability and Web Development.
Just before composing this post, I was flicking through YouTube. As always, I went looking for a particular clip and before I knew it, half my morning was gone. Yet despite clicking on a lot of videos, I only really watched the start, perhaps a minute or two, before being distracted by another seemingly interesting clip.
On average, these video’s wouldn’t have been more than 3 minutes each, and despite some being entertaining, some funny, some educational the rest just plain strange, few of them were compelling enough to keep my attention to the very end.
This surprised me enough to Google some statistics on what could be considered an ‘average’ adult attention span. Knowing how reliable the internet is when it comes to proper factual information, I settled on the following as it seemed reasonable (and to be honest with you, I was distracted before doing any further research):
- Average continuous attention span of a literate adult:8 seconds
- Maximum possible continuous attention span for a literate adult: 30 seconds
- Average general attention span of a literate adult: 10 – 12 minutes
Continue reading ‘How to appeal to web users with a shorter attention span than a goldfish’
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Published by Pete March 24th, 2009
in SEO.
When you compete in a running race, there’s a few things that we generally assume:
- You have a functional set of legs and an understanding of how to use them
- You have (at the very least) a reasonable level of fitness
- And it helps if you’ve done some training and/or other preparation for the big race
None of the above points provide any guarantee that you’ll win – they simply mean you’ve got the basics to participate… but there are a lot of other smaller factors that we often don’t think about, yet greatly impact on how you perform in the race and whether or not you’ll even be allowed to run.
For instance, if you turned-up on the day of the race completely naked or with a bomb strapped to your chest – the only race you’ll be running is away from the cops.
Another random consideration could be your running shoes. While a comfortable pair of shoes isn’t necessary to run, if you were wearing Dutch clogs, you’ll perform a lot worse than someone wearing a pair of Nike’s.
Continue reading ‘On your mark… Get set… SEO!’
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Published by Pete March 16th, 2009
in Social Media.
I’m a big fan of Rube Goldberg and his convoluted machines that would trigger dozens of tiny processes to perform a very simple task.
When chatting with a friend recently, it made me realise that social media works in a very similar way to a Rube Goldberg Machine.
Before I explain the relationship between the two, it’s important to note a few small things about social media.
From my experience, a lot of businesses don’t quite grasp the concept of social media. Some will create a Facebook page or a Twitter profile and think simply by creating it, they’ve done their part and can cross ’social media’ off their list of things to try… and then they wonder why it doesn’t appear to be working for them.
Then there are the companies that go to the other extreme. The ones that tweet everything that happens from arriving at the office, saying good-morning to the staff, making a coffee, reading emails etc. While they may technically be ‘using’ the social media tools, they aren’t really sharing anything beneficial – and they too will wonder why they aren’t achieving the results they were hoping for.
Continue reading ‘Social Media – The Rube Goldberg Machine of the Web’
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Published by Pete March 5th, 2009
in Link Building and Social Media.
Often when we think about the concept of link building, we usually consider things like – contacting relevant websites and seeing if they’d be interested in give you a link, submitting to directories, purchasing ‘editorial endorsements’, creating articles or other topical pieces of content for linkbait etc. etc.
But there’s a whole world of offline linking potential that we ignore simply because it’s not online
Not online? I hear you thinking… If something isn’t online, then how can it possibly gain me links… and why is a Search Marketing company telling me to do stuff outside of the Interweb?
They say we come in contact with over 3000 product endorsements every day – be it billboards, magazines, radio, TV, etc. Some of these endorsements stick with us, others don’t.
Continue reading ‘Linkbuilding Offline’
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Published by Pete March 3rd, 2009
in Uncategorized.
This is just a quick note to advise that SiteMost’s Brisbane SEO Blog is moving to a slightly different location (instead of the URL being http://blog.sitemost.com.au, it will now be http://www.sitemost.com.au/blog ).
We’ve been meaning to do this for sometime, so we figured now was as good a time as ever.
Hopefully the change-over should be fairly seamless, but there is a chance that we could lose some subscribers due to a change in RSS Feed address. The new address will be: http://www.sitemost.com.au/blog/feed/ so please check your readers and if required, I’d appreciate it if you could update the details.
Thanks
Peter Newsome – SiteMost
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Just read an interesting post on Ben Wilks’ Blog about SEO and Social Media.
Basically Ben comments on a thread over at WMW which indicates that social media is a waste of time and doesn’t yield a great deal of SEO value.
I both agree and disagree with this.
But before continuing, it’s important to understand what SEO is and what it isn’t.
Continue reading ‘The blurred line between what is SEO and what isn’t’
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Published by Pete February 10th, 2009
in Blogging.
Back in April last year I was contacted by Bo McGath, an Honours student in Communication and Cultural Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia.
Bo was researching the experiences that blog readers have with their favorite blogger for her Honours Thesis and asked if I’d be willing to assist by providing some information and feedback based on my blogging knowledge and experience.
Being the search geek that I am, I was delighted to help.
When talking with Bo (via email) she pointed-out that there has always been an ‘unofficial’ assumption, backed-up by a lot of the literature on blogging, that blog readers are bloggers and vice versa.
So instead of focusing on this, she was going to take a slightly different approach – conducting research into the kinds of relationships that are developed when the readers of blogs do not maintain a blog themselves and do not know their blogger of choice offline.
Continue reading ‘Experiences that blog readers have with their favorite blogger’
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