Articles for December 2014

E-cards With a Difference… A Very MOM-y Christmas 2014

MOM Xmas Tree imageLast year marked my first Christmas as a self-employed freelancer with my own clients… which meant that I approached the whole idea of sending out Christmas cards in very much of an “oh F*@K!” manner: I hastily bought a box of cards, wrote in them in my hilariously horrendous handwriting using a dark green biro (to match my business’ branding) and fired them off to my clients’ postal addresses.

It was a sucky effort.

Even before December 2013 rolled by, I had the idea of doing something different… something special in place of traditional Christmas cards. Now I ain’t no fancy designer, so creating a slick, physical, deliverable item was out of the question. I always liked the idea of doing something that involved an online/digital element though.

This year, I put more thought into it and created Christmas e-cards in the form of custom landing pages on the morganonlinemarketing.co.uk website, which took on two different aspects…

Type 1 – Individual e-cards for clients & other folk

So, as mentioned above, the main aspect of the e-cards took the form of custom landing pages for individual recipients. They’re all orphaned pages (meaning that nothing else is linking to them, internally or externally) and they’ve also been noindexed, meaning that they won’t be picked up by the search engines.

Here’s an example of one. Each one contains a personalised message to the recipient – which beats having a generic message across the board.

MOM Individual Xmas card example screenshot
(Click to enlarge)

So far I’ve created about 20 of them. Beyond clients, they’ve also gone to people who’ve referred me work and who have done me favours or helped me out over the past year. I can also quickly knock one up if someone sends me a card or e-card, so I can potentially avoid that awkward moment that can happen where someone sends you one and you don’t get chance to send one back. Quite handy.

Type 2 – The "welsh ice bauble" challenge…

I also created another e-card page, but this one wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. It had a secret, ‘Easter egg’ quality to it (and no, I’m not getting my holiday seasons mixed up)…

One of the guys/gals at Welsh ICE (my office/co-working space) came up with the brill idea of giving every member/company a Christmas bauble for the ICE Christmas tree to decorate and customise ourselves. Some people tied it in with their business: e.g. SPORTTAPE wrapped theirs in some of their tape and RecRock covered theirs in branded plectrums.

I wanted to follow suit, so I decided to create a page for it – similar to the above individual/client e-cards – except that this one could be indexed by Google…

For my bauble, I coloured it orangey-gold and drew green lines on it (to try and match the revised logo – the star of the tree) and stuck a label on it with a Google logo and the phrase: "welsh ice bauble"

Click to read more!

The Golden Rule for Leveraging SEO from your PR Activities

Over the past few years, SEO and PR have become more and more entwined. Links from good, high quality websites are important for SEO, and PR can really help to get those links, especially in the form of press mentions. I often say to clients that they should treat the likes of the BBC and the Guardian as the ‘holy grail’ of link building – getting links from sites like those can be like SEO gold-dust.

While SEOs have become more PR-savvy, we haven’t necessarily seen the same thing with PRs becoming more SEO-savvy. When I worked for Confused.com way back in 2010, I worked with some great colleagues in the PR team who truly ‘got’ SEO (shout-out to @KellysDavies and @PRVix!), and I was excited to see how other PR folk would progress in a similar way over the years – but to be honest, I’ve personally not seen as much movement as I’d hoped or expected… Econsultancy have written a few articles about the phenomenon over the years, who – even as recently as a year ago – are still seeing the same thing.

So if I were to give one bit of crucial advice to PRs who want to help their clients’ SEO with their PR efforts, it is this: when coming up with a campaign, try to create something that people (and the press) have no choice but to link to.

PR image
Now I know what you’re thinking… “But that’s obvious!”

…Not necessarily though. I’ve seen some PR campaigns that do not seem to keep this in consideration, as I will explain in more detail (while providing an example to the contrary) below…

The notoriousness of the press

The problem with press websites is that some of the major press websites are notorious for avoiding linking out if they can help it. I worked at Confused.com – whose name is a URL itself, for goodness sake – and they still wouldn’t get linked. Here are some recent examples. And while some speculate that brand name ‘citations’ (i.e. non-hyperlinking mentions) may still hold some SEO weight, it can’t be that much – and even so, for businesses that have a commonly-used name (e.g. “Horizon Solutions”), it may be difficult for Google to ascertain whether the citation refers to the Horizon Solutions in the UK, the Horizon Solutions in the US, or the Horizon Solutions in Canada, for example…

Click to read more!