Cutting-Edge Social Insights

On April 2, Victoria Edwards wrote a popular piece for SearchEngineWatch titled “Screw Link Building, It’s Called Relationship Building!” In the piece, she discusses case studies from Jo Turnbull and Erin Everhart that ruminate on the concept of link building and how the practice is more modern, acceptable and profitable when it includes, or is converted entirely to, relationship building.     Edwards writes, “What do you want out of a personal relationship? Loyalt [...]

With the growing importance of social media in the Internet Marketing Mix, it is important to know how your social strategy stands against your competitor’s social strategies. To get access to this information you need to analyze the “shareability” of your competitors content. Here are 3 metrics that give you quick and in-depth insight into the social media marketing techniques that are used by any site. 1. Total Shares A great metric that tells you how your site is standing, from a soc [...]

Brainstorming for content can be really difficult at times especially, when your job requires you to write about various niches at a short notice. Though there are many tools like discussion forums, content curation sites, social media platforms, social bookmarking sites, etc. that can help to overcome this problem. Using a lot of tools can be overwhelming. Hence, I have come up with some of my favourite tools that can help to do an effective brainstorm for content ideas. (more…) [...]

Content, data visualisations and social media are hot topics in the digital marketing industry currently. Brands are focusing on increasing engagement with their fans, customers and users. Facebook is of course the most widely used platform to interact and create social buzz around potential and existing customers. According to research by Buddy Media, retail brands that write a post in less than 80 characters on Facebook tend to receive 66% higher engagement as compared to longer posts. [...]

* Welcome to our weekly linkbuilding technique column! Back when I first started out to use the Internet around 1997 it was all about hypertext. Hypertext, the interconnected text containing links where you do not have to structure reading in a linear way with numbered pages that follow each other. Instead you can use links like some wormholes to end up on the other end of the world within an instant. Links made a huge difference and we willingly embraced linking out as the early Web ent [...]

* In our weekly link building technique column I'd like to stress relationships again. Connecting with people is crucial as websites do not link, people link. Of course there are automated links as well but most of them aren't worth it. The best links are editorial links by real people. Who you get editorial links from? "Editors" obviously. On the Web there are all kinds of editors. They can be webmasters bloggers journalists curators social media users content creators busi [...]

* A few years back I used to get popular on Delicious with my resources lists for SEOptimise. Delicious has been already neglected by then as their owner at that time, Yahoo didn't really invest in it. Nonetheless when a post got popular and thus entered the Delicious it still got around 1000 - 5000 visitors but more importantly it got many more Delicious saves which resulted directly in links on websites, often automatically. Later on, Delicious abandoned the front page concept and moved th [...]

* Earlier this week one of my favorite link building blogs, SEER Interactive, has published a post on why Google +1 votes are not a good ranking signal. The post by Wil Reynolds recapitulates 10 years of history of ranking factors in search to make its point. It all sounds very convincing unless that it is not true. The old school SEO thinking does not apply here in the case of Google +1 which rather has to do with social media than search. I'm far from a Google fanboy but the +1 votes, e [...]

* Social sites come and go. I've been active on social media from around 2007. This was already the second or third wave of social media services. At first sites like Delicious Slashdot Friendster were all the rage. They were already almost forgotten by the time I started connecting with people on social media. Digg has replaced Slashdot and MySpace was already more popular than Friendster. I've been mostly participating on StumbleUpon and later joined Twitter to move most of my ac [...]

* Somewhere around 2005 SEO practicioners have started to hail social media sites like Digg as the new holy grail of link building. Others even started to use a new acronym for this new way of getting numerous links and high website traffic fast: Social Media Optimization or SMO. Today everybody does SMO in some sense but almost nobody uses the term anymore. Social Media Marketing or SMM seems to be a bit more popular by now but similar to the SEO/SEM differentiation it reflects paid advert [...]