Blogs
Last week social media giant Twitter launched Vine, a standalone app that allows for GIF-style video sharing on the platform.
The micro-blogging nature, characteristic of Twitter has not in the past leant itself massively to aesthetic value, especially in comparison to rising social stars such as Pinterest. In recent times, though, this seems to have evolved with more opportunity to exhibit images on your profile, as well as a far more structured format for image sharing.
That step further into video sharing sees the platform making the most of all avenues of content. With a twist on video, Twitter has produced Vine to make GIF style videos – a format so kitsch that it has now received a retro-style niche following. This is the same rise in popularity that we have seen with filter-based photography apps and platforms such as Instagram, which could attribute some of their success to the same roots.
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!
In early December 2012, Branded3 received news that our social media efforts with foods of the world restaurant chain, Red Hot World Buffet had received a nomination for the prestigious Eat Out Awards.
The awards are held by foodie magazine Eat Out and honour restaurants who are outstanding in their field and continue to grow their businesses. Branded3 client Red Hot World Buffet was shortlisted for the Marketing Campaign of the Year, a category that honours businesses which have sustained a successful marketing or promotional campaign.
Last week we held our second Brunch with Branded3 Google+ Hangout, in which Search and online marketing enthusiasts could ask SEO experts Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice anything they liked.
Being the first month of a new year, questions mostly surrounded Search predictions and trends for the year ahead. Tim predicted, quite understandably, that 2013 will be the year of content, however he was keen to stress that it’s not enough to just create great content, you need to have the resource available to correctly promote it too.
Tim also commented on the fate of spam websites in 2013, predicting that sites with low quality links will continue to drop off the top rankings.
Both Tim and Patrick touched upon the fluctuation in rankings they’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, with Tim advising viewers that a decline in rankings shouldn’t necessarily be associated with the Panda update.
Patrick gave some essential advice to both agencies and clients, explaining how fundamental a communicative and transparent relationship is to the success of an online marketing campaign.
Watch the video below to see the Hangout in full and if you’d like to see a particular Digital topic covered in our next Hangout, feel free to email it over and we’ll see what we can do.
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!
Dedicated Brunch with Branded3 room? Check. Two industry-leading SEO experts? Check. Plenty of coffee and muffins? Double-check. Yep, we’re all set for our second instalment of Brunch with Branded3 this morning at 11:30am, and we can’t wait for you to join.
If you’re stopping for a cup of tea and a bite to eat this morning, coincide it with our hour-long Google+ Hangout in which Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice will be answering all of your SEO and Search Marketing questions live.
Patrick and Tim will be leading the Hangout and will be joined by nine Search enthusiasts for what looks set to be an interesting discussion.
Follow Branded3 now on Google+ so you can watch the Hangout live in full, and you can still register here if you want to be sent a link to the video afterwards.
If you’re watching the Hangout, don’t forget to leave us your questions for Tim and Patrick on our Google+ wall, or simply tweet us using the hash-tag #B3Brunch for a chance of getting in answered within the session.
See you at 11:30!
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 »
The announcement of Facebook’s newest feature has had the world of social media abuzz with rumours and predictions. The world’s largest platform has finally found a use for the deluge of data they have collected over the years and much like the Google Knowledge Graph, the Graph Search works on a basis of connection, from one piece of data to the next.
In order to make sense of the huge treasure pot of social information harboured by the platform, the Graph Search creators at Facebook have divided all information into four categories; People, Photos (and videos), Places and Interests.
The Graph Search bar is far more advanced than that on offer currently and is designed to give highly precise search results. The Graph Search is presently in Beta and is only open to a few thousand people, unsurprisingly, in the USA. You can sign up to the waiting list and get more information on the functions here.
Join us in our second instalment of Brunch with Branded3 on Thursday 24th January at 11:30am, where we’ll be discussing all things Search and answering your questions.
Better still, as a thank you to the nine participants chosen to get involved in the Hangout, we’ll be sending them a free muffin to extend their Brunch experience! Register here for your chance to be chosen as a participant.
Due to popular demand, the hour-long Google+ Hangout next week will be led once again by Search experts Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice, giving you the free chance to ask them anything you like about SEO.
Our first Brunch with Branded3 Hangout was a great success with questions focusing mostly on link penalties and the disavow tool and we’re looking forward to the same great turn-out next week, too.
If you’d like to get involved in the discussion for yourself and ask Tim or Patrick a question, then simply register here and we’ll let you know before the Hangout if you’ve been selected.
Don’t worry if you’re not though, as you can still watch the live Hangout in full as it takes place on our Google+ page, just make sure to follow us so you can see it!
You can also tweet us your questions live during the session using the hash-tag #B3Brunch or leave a comment on our Google+ page and Tim and Patrick will try their best to answer them all.
So if you fancy a spot of Brunch with our SEO experts next week, and possibly the chance of a tasty free muffin, simply register now and we’ll see you on the 24th!
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 »
Our development team is always keen to hear about new ways to improve efficiency and reduce the time it takes to code without compromising on quality. For example, if there’s a way we can use fewer keystrokes when writing code or executing commands, we’re all for it!
Have a think about which tasks you find yourself repeating every day, and how you could streamline the process to knock off a few seconds or even a few minutes off. It could be simple tasks such as:
- Opening your vital applications and helpful utilities
- Accessing your projects directory
- Adding entries to your hosts file
- Opening your Shell Profile / PowerShell Profile
- Accessing remote servers
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve kicked the New Year off in style by opening a brand new office in London!
Expert Search Strategists from our industry-leading SEO division are heading up the London team, offering a much more accessible base for our southern-based and European clients.
With plenty of our valued clients based in the capital; a move to London has always been inevitable for Branded3; and after another fantastic year of growth for the company which has included the acquisition of plenty of European clients too, we’ve taken the jump and set up shop in the big city.
Our London base will be a hub of Search & Digital strategy, with most of the execution being carried out in our Leeds head-quarters.
Our CEO Vin Chinnaraja, comments on how the London office fits into Branded3’s bigger picture:
“A London base has always been on the cards for Branded3, and the launch is right on target for our plans to expand into Europe.
“This is a really exciting phase for the agency and it marks the start of many more future office openings.”
With a new office in the Farringdon area of the city, we’re encouraging any neighbours to pop by and say hi!
We’ll be making more appointments in the coming months and hope to grow the expert team considerably over the year, with a move to a more permanent location in the capital by this summer.
If you’ve got any questions about the new office or want to get in touch with the London team, feel free to drop us an email and we’ll be happy to get back to you.
Latest from B3Labs
- Another milestone reached for Branded3 as it’s acquired by the
St Ives Group - The latest media consumer findings & what they mean for digital marketers
- Talk to Branded3 at @BuyYorkshire in Leeds next week!
Latest from Blogstorm
- Watch @Tim_Grice talk all things Penguin 2.0 in June’s #B3Brunch
- Content can kill your site: How to fix it
- Search expert @Tim_Grice talks Penguin 2.0 in a G+ Hangout this Thursday
