Blogstorm

On Thursday 14^th of March, the top minds from Branded3 travelled to London to impart their wisdom concerning the future of SEO, Social Media and digital strategy.

With two talks outlining future-proof SEO strategies, two talks on the conduct and measurement of social media and one insightful digital landscape overview, attendees were armed with the tools and tactics they need to survive in an ever-changing digital world.

The videos of all five talks are now available below. To receive a free copy of the slides from the day, sign up here http://www.branded3.com/events/seminars/ and for any further information, please get in touch!

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Finding highly trafficked blogs for your target niche while trying to create the best possible long-term blogger relations plays an essential role in boosting up your search engine presence and authority. However, it doesn’t come easy; you have to invest time and effort in an outreach strategy.

Fortunately, you can do something about this regardless of your experience in the blogging field. Here you will find some of the most efficient tools and methods for successful blogging outreach:

Outreach through directories and blogging communities

Technorati

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Branded3’s Digital Futures Seminar takes centre stage at The Barbican Centre in London today – and you can follow all the day’s talks and insight in our live blog. 

Industry experts Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice will be speaking along with our newly-appointed Managing Director David Crawford, Head of Creative & Social Andrew Machin, and Social Media Strategist Georgia Halston.

Here’s a run down of today’s schedule:

10:00-10:15 - Introduction from David Crawford

10.15-11.00 – The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies, Patrick Altoft – This session will focus on the newest aspects of SEO which are either driving results now or are going to help future-proof your SEO strategy.

11:15 – 12:00 - The Importance of an Integrated SEO Strategy, Tim Grice - Tim will delve into recent Google updates, advising on the many pitfalls companies may encounter.

12:00 – 12:30 - Q&A session

13:15 – 13:45  - Latest Google Algorithm Update

13:45 – 14:30 - Five Digital Trends for 2013, David Crawford - As we approach the end of 2013’s first quarter, David will take a look at how the top digital predictions for the year are shaping up and, more importantly, what we need to watch out for and concentrate on over the coming months.

14:45 – 15:15 - You’ve been invited to the party, Andrew Machin – Why do so many brand social media accounts act so anti-socially? Andy looks at how brands can discover how to build, engage and influence through social platforms.

15.15 – 15.45 – Getting ROI from Social Media, Georgia Halston - Georgia takes a detailed look at why investment in Social Media is a justifiable spend for your business and what return on investment you can achieve from effectively utilising its channels.

15:45 – 16:15 - Q&A session

That’s a flavour of the day ahead – and you can join the conversation even if you’re not here at the Barbican by using #B3Seminars on Twitter.

Get involved and join the digital debate!

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Branded3’s Digital Futures Seminar is just around the corner and we can’t wait for what is guaranteed to be a fun, insightful and valuable day. We’ve only got a few tickets remaining, so we thought we’d help you out in making up your mind and convincing you that our Seminar is well-worth the small investment.

Taking place on Thursday 14^th March at The Barbican Centre in London, the Digital Futures Seminar promises to teach you everything you need to know about future-proofing your online strategies. Covering SEO, social media and digital; the day is a must-attend for anyone working within online marketing and is sure to equip you with all you need to know to develop strategies which stand the test of time.

So, if you still need a bit of encouragement to peel yourself away from the desk and venture out in the cold, here are five reasons why you should buy a ticket right now:

1. Value for money: The cost for a ticket is just £95, when you compare this to the price of many other industry conferences, you’ll see that ours is by far the cheapest. But this certainly doesn’t reflect a dip in presentation quality, the very opposite in fact. You see, this isn’t a money-making exercise for us, we just believe that in an ever-evolving industry like ours, it’s key to encourage transparency and knowledge transfer between experts so everyone can stay one step ahead of the game. We enjoy what we do and we just want to share it.

    

2. We’re in London: To celebrate the launch of our new London base this year and provide a much more accessible location, we’re holding the March Seminar at The Barbican Centre in London. This is a fantastic venue which plays host to a whole heap of creative events and better still, it’s really simple to find!

    

3. Get advice from experts: With the likes of Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice speaking, you know you’re getting the highest-quality advice. Not only have Patrick and Tim founded and ran two of the most successful blog in the Search industry, Blogstorm and SEOwizz, they’re both regularly invited to present at the biggest marketing events around the world. As well as this, you’ll gain Social Media insights from our Head of Creative & Social, Andrew Machin, who has years of brand experience having worked with the likes of John Lewis and Energizer Group. Our newly appointed Managing Director, David Crawford will also be sharing his digital insights for the future. Having worked alongside brands like Bentley, HSBC and UPS, it’s fair to say you’ll be listening to the voice of experience.

    

4. You’re in good company: We’ve hosted a few Seminars now which have proved really popular amongst in-house brand teams. Take a look at who’s attended before:
   

    

5. Good food and good chat: Don’t worry about forgetting breakfast before you leave home to grab the tube, we’ve got it covered! When you get to The Barbican Centre, we’ll have coffees and pastries waiting for you. All of this, plus lunch, cakes, refreshments and drinks is covered in the price of the ticket, so leave your wallet at home! Couple this with a bit of networking with interesting people on the side and you’ve got yourself a cracking day out of the office.

    

So, what else do you need? Get tickets booked for you and your team today, you won’t regret it. See you there!

Considering how fast Google is at doing most things whether it’s indexing new pages or updating rankings for breaking news the whole process of merging Blogstorm into the Branded3 site has been an eye opening demonstration of just how slow a domain migration can be.

We migrated the content on blogstorm.co.uk into the Branded3 website with 301 redirects and a change of address notice in Google Webmaster Tools on 20th November 2012 and here we are almost 2 months later with 1200 pages still indexed according to a site:blogstorm.co.uk query and 687 according to Webmaster Tools.

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Despite what you might have heard, conversion rate optimisation is rarely about changing the colour of your checkout buttons. In most cases the way to improve conversion rates is by making sites more user friendly to remove customer pain points as well as figuring out potential reasons why customers might not buy a product from you and making sure that all those reasons are addressed on the site.

For example if a customer is worried that a product might not arrive in time for an occasion you would have a detailed delivery page explaining what options are available. If you offer free next day delivery that should stop anybody being worried about delivery speed – if you only offer delivery in 3-5 working days this will mean people who are in a hurry might go elsewhere. Continue reading »

Tickets are now on sale for our Digital Futures Seminar, a day of invaluable digital marketing tips and insights which will help delegates future-proof their SEO, Digital and Social Media strategies – and this time, we’re in London!

Offering an intimate alternative to big industry conferences, Branded3 Seminars bring together a small audience in front of a range of speakers from Branded3′s talented team, most of whom are reputable figures within the industry.

Taking place on Thursday 14th March at The Barbican in London, the Seminar boasts talks from Search expert Patrick Altoft, Branded3′s Head of Search Tim Grice, our Head of Creative & Social Andrew Machin and our new MD, Digital & Marketing specialist David Crawford.

This Seminar is a must-attend for any online marketers in all industries, with delegates receiving world-class advice for their Search, Social Media and Digital strategies.

Priced at only £95+VAT per attendee, a Digital Futures ticket includes all refreshments and lunch, providing incredible value for money with delegates taking plenty of tips and relevant insights away from the day.

You can take a look at the Digital Futures schedule here, where you can also book tickets. With the amount of actionable insights offered and the value for money, tickets tend to sell out fast for our Seminars so book you and your team a place now to avoid disappointment.

If you have any other questions about the day, you can email seminars@branded3.com where we’ll be sure to get back to you.

Google has always made it hard to see link data. First they made the link: query intentionally vague and then when they showed link data in Webmaster Tools it only showed the first 1000 domains.

This was fine when we all just wanted to see our best links but when Google started to penalise sites for low quality links that they were not showing in Webmaster Tools because they were beyond the 1000 domain limit a lot of webmasters got pretty annoyed. It’s pretty hard to recover from a penalty if you are getting penalised for links that you can’t find anywhere.

How can you remove/disavow links you can’t see? Google, please can you show more than 1000 domains in WMT @mattcutts

— Tim Grice (@Tim_Grice) November 30, 2012

Luckily (assuming this isn’t a bug) Google has finally listened to our pleas and has just started offering us the ability to get way more than 1000 domains. We have had a few instances of 2500+ domains being returned via this method in the past couple of weeks. The interface has not changed and it does still say “1000 domains” but if you click the “Download latest links” button in the Traffic > Links to your site screen then you should see way more than 1000 unique domains. The other buttons still just return 1000.

Keep in mind you just get a raw list of links so you need to extract the domain in Excel, I use the “text to columns” function and split by a forward slash.

Thanks, Google!

The first week of 2013 has been a busy one for Branded3; it’s brought a new office in London, a variety of exciting new projects and clients and for me, finally making use of a site I spend an increasing amount of time on – SlideShare.

A presentation I created on how to make great presentations, managed to receive a staggering 85,000 views and made it onto the SlideShare homepage for days after! Obviously I was thrilled with this, but how did I do it?

For those of you who don’t yet use the site, it’s particularly great if you’re more of a vocational learner with a style more suited to visual content. Not everybody can read a chunk of text in a blog post and take it in, but understanding learning styles and behaviours is a whole different blog post!

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Since November 22nd we have been noticing a new trend with how Google applies algorithms to detect bad links. Earlier in 2012 the focus was very much around major penalisations where a site would literally disappear overnight for lots of keywords but the trend across November, December and January is very much about Google reducing the rankings of certain sites gradually week after week.

We all know that Google has algorithms to detect bad links and the evidence of this was very visible earlier in 2012 but with this latest change Google seems to have developed the capability to continually detect and devalue bad links as part of the standard crawl process, something they were never very good at before. The net result of this is that as Google completes a crawl of a website and the sites linking to it they can devalue those links in real time rather than waiting to roll out a major update such as Penguin or a manual link penalty. Continue reading »

Most people who buy a product online don’t make a purchase on their first visit and this causes problems for sites trying to track sales and allocate them to a particular channel. When you take into consideration different screens (work PC, laptop, iPad, phone etc) and offline conversions as well the problem gets even bigger.

The best quote I’ve seen about this is by Avinash Kaushik where he states:

If you happen to be in a larger company, say you spend more than $10 million on digital marketing per year, you’ll quickly see, having learned to be less wrong over time, that the question you want to answer with multi-channel attribution modeling is not “who gets how much credit” but rather “how can I optimally balance my digital marketing portfolio.”

Knowing who gets credit for each particular sale is largely irrelevant unless you are trying to prove ROI on a channel. The really important thing we need to do as an agency is increase the effectiveness of the overall search marketing campaign and drive more conversions. If SEO plays a role in assisting the conversion rather than driving the last interaction this is still a conversion path that we can optimise for.

The best way to do this is by understanding your customers & their search patterns and implementing a content strategy designed to optimise for secondary & tertiary conversions. Most people just optimise an SEO campaign for last click conversions but this really isn’t the best way of doing things. Continue reading »

This year has been huge for SEO; Google is finally clamping down on cheap, easy link-building and rewarding those sites with authentic, high-quality and engaging content.

The SEO industry is shedding its shady reputation and being recognised as a skilful online marketing art. Here are five of the most memorable updates the Branded3 SEO team were talking about this year:

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