Many things have changed for me over the last few months and, as such, its time to close the doors on this blog.

I have thoroughly enjoyed writing Coffeekicks and interacting  with everyone who visited the site. I’d like to say a big thank you to you all for visiting and reading over the last two years.

Coffeekicks was very much about SEO and Organic web marketing, going forward I will be focusing more on a more rounded approach to web marketing and branding. If this interests you, please do visit my new site at www.philbyrne.co.uk

Hope to see you there soon!

If there’s one thing in my professional life I’m as passionate about as internet marketing, it’s remote working. My wife and I left the UK three years ago and have been lucky enough to experience life in 6 different countries now, all thanks to the wonders of remote working. I’ve learnt a lot in that time, much by trial and error. There’s been many up and downs but overall, I can honestly say becoming ‘location independent’ has brought so much choice and freedom to my life, I whole heartedly recommend it to everyone I meet!

There are many great eBooks out there that offer solid inspiration and motivation in creating a remote working lifestyle. What I found to be lacking what the presence of an eBook that broke down the exact applications, technologies, stratgies and techniques that make a 100% location independent lifestyle possible. So, I’ve written that very eBook from the many experiences I’ve had in all of the places we’ve been lucky enough to live across the last 3 years. If you are interested in remote working and location independent lifestyles, I hope you’ll be kind enough to check it out here:

http://www.liveworkabroad.com/head-in-the-clouds-the-location-independent-office

Web marketing is not always about getting clicks to your website: it can also be used to improve your brand awareness. As your website starts to appear in more searches, even if you are not getting many clicks you can be sure that your brand recognition is improving.

Another way that you can achieve this very effectively – and with very little investment – is through CPC.

If you don’t like the thought of paying for advertising then don’t go just yet! The technique I’m about to show you will not cost very much at all. Indeed, you could even carry out a successful campaign without spending a penny.

CPC for Brand Advertising

Firstly, here’s a very quick overview of CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising. These are adverts which appear in response to certain conditions (for example, the keywords used in a web search or the subject of a webpage), and the advertiser only makes a payment when the advert is clicked on.

You will see them as the sponsored results listed at the top and down the side of a Google search results page, as well as within Facebook and on certain websites within advertising networks (the biggest of which is the Google network).

Wherever adverts appear, the advertiser has chosen specific keywords or demographics that they want to trigger their ads, and the aim is normally to attract as many qualified clicks as possible.

We are going to use the same technique, but turn it on its head. Instead of trying to attract clicks, we are going to use CPC for brand advertising. We want people to see our company name and become familiar with our brand whilst making their searches or surfing the web so that they can associate our name with something positive – all without us having to pay for it.

My Childhood Football Team

Let’s use my childhood football team, Carlisle United, as an example.

People searching for Carlisle United online are not going to be looking for my company. They are more likely to be looking for information and news on their favourite football team.

However, I could easily write a quick advert to appear for these keywords in a Google search, so that when someone searches for ‘Carlisle United’ the first thing they see is a message of support from my company or a quick message congratulating them on a recent win.

There are no other competing ads, so there is a good chance that they will at least notice my ad.

The aim is to associate my brand with their football club, just like many larger companies are doing when they buy advertising space on the football pitch each week which might cost them thousands of pounds.

As long as no one clicks on my ads, I don’t pay a thing. And even if I do attract some clicks, the sums involved are likely to be very small.

The Possibilities are Endless

This is just one example I threw together. You could use the same idea to support a charity like Oxfam, an important local event or campaign, or a national event like the Olympics.

Whatever you choose, try to focus on keywords which are slightly more specific so that your ads have fewer competitors (preferably none) and stand a better chance of being noticed.

Using the Display Network

As well as creating ads that target searches, you can use the same technique to make your ads appear on actual websites – often bypassing other expensive advertising options.

By creating a banner add for Google’s Display Network, your advert can often turn up on large websites which charge hundreds of pounds or more for a standard advertising slot, meaning you can build brand awareness for free.

Facebook Options

You could also look into targeting users on Facebook. Going back to our example of Carlisle United, you could choose to target everyone on Facebook who is a supporter of the club, and then create an advert to show up on their profiles.

Again, this performs the same function of associating your brand with something positive for free, or at least very cheaply.

Cheap and Effective Marketing

This technique is cheap and very easy to set up. Have a think about possible events, clubs, teams, campaigns or charities you might like to use to build your brand awareness, then set up a campaign in Google or one of the other advertising networks.

Check to see if you are getting any clicks, and if you are receiving too many and spending more than you want to then you can simply change your keywords or stop the campaign completely and try something else.

However, if you receive no clicks then you have just found a very cheap way to carry out brand advertising for your company.

After the last two big Google Search Algorithm updates, some people have been theorising that maybe Google wanted to make SEO so much more difficult that people would naturally migrate over to PPC! Maybe thats true, maybe it isn’t. What is true however is that, as well as enhancing their search engine, Google have also been enhancing their adwords interface.

Keyword adverts on PPC are perhaps the easiest way to get your website promoted online. You can have them up and running in minutes. There are many guides on how to do this and no doubt many people who will offer their experiences of using the standard text advert on Google’s search network. However, in this blogpost I’m going to look at the lesser known part of adwords, the display network.

There are two reasons that the placement network can offer the web marketeer new opportunity:

1. It takes more effort. To use the placement network properly, you must create your own image ads. This takes time, effort and cost.
2. People don’t understand it. Keyword text ads have always been the focus of Google Adwords. Image ads are a relatively new addition and as such, the placement tools are consistently changing and expanding.

Both of the above points mean that people tend to shy away from the placement network and focus solely on the standard Google search network text ad.  This reduces competition on the placement network where PPC costs are generally around 50% cheaper than the search network. The display network also offers one big opportunity for the online marketeer in the sense that by placing your image ads on relevant sites, you are effectively buying space on websites that pull the exact traffic you want to promote yourself too. Often this traffic comes form sources outside of Google search and hence your exposure via the display network is often a lot more varied. The downside to the display network is that traditionally click through rates are much lower than the better known search network text adverts. A lot of the reason for this however I feel is down to the fact that the display network is ‘different’ to the search network and hence shouldn’t be treated with the same approach. So, with this in mind, how should we go about starting to use the placement network?

Make Those Image Ads
Text ads can be placed on the display network but there are also opportunities to use up to 15  image ad sizes too.  If you create all 15 sizes the more opportunities you have to be placed. Current image ad sizes are:

300×600
300×50
728×90
450×50
120×600
320×50
250×250
336×280
200×200
300×250
468×60
300×1050
160×600
480×70
425×600

When uploading your image ads to your adwords campaign, its recommended that you create a separate campaign for your display network marketing, outside of your standard search network setups. This will allow you to monitor more effectively the effect of display v search advertising on your business and in addition allows you to better gear each side of your Google advertising for maximum effect.

Automatic and Manual Placements

On the placement network, your ads will be placed both automatically by Google and also within the specific sites you enter into adwords as positive placements. Lets deal with both of these one by one.

Automatic Placements

Automatic placements refer to the sites that Google places your ads on, relative to the settings you put into your display campaign. This is the biggest part of your display network advertising and hence it is important to make sure your settings are as tight as possible so Google’s automated display network system places your ads where you most want them.

Firstly, to help Google do this, add topics and interests to your placement campaign. There’s lots of confusion online about what topics and placements actually mean. I took advantage of an offer from Google Adwords Engage team to ask a few questions to help clarify a few things about adwords. I can clarify that when assigning topics to adwords we are asking Google to find websites that relate to the topics we set. Interests on the other hand relate to the browser, and hence assiging interests to our adwords means we are asking google to find people browsing onlnine that like the interests we assign.

You can select broad and narrow targeting for your placement ads. If you are in a competitive and well known niche, target your placements as narrow as you are able. One way to do this is to NOT add any keywords to your placement campaign. This way Google will only place your ads when your topics and interests combine. On the other hand, if you are in a smaller niche (or you don’t get enough impressions) expand your placement possibilities by adding keywords later on. If you have created a separate display network campaign to sit beside (and not within) your search campaign, this will be much easier to do.

Positive Placements

Google will also aim to publish your ads on any of the sites you list as ‘positive’ placements. These are, of course, sites that display adsense and are right bang on your niche.

In order to add good manual positive placements right form the start, check all of the page 1 organic sites for your main kw targets, you’ll prob find that 2/3 of these are running adsense, make these your first positive placements. Next, enter your main kws into the Google Placement Tool to find relevant sites showing ads, make the best ones of these your second set of positive placements.

Negative Placements

As well as telling Google where we would like to see our ads placed, we can also tell Google where they should not be placed. A large part of running a good adwords campaign is the constant monitoring of where your ads are being placed and consistently adding more and more urls/settings to your negative settings to further laser target your advertising.

Right before your campaign goes live you can add your first negative settings by carefgully contemplating what countries you want your ads to appear in. If you’re looking to advertise to English speakers in the western world then you should probably add countries like India and the Philippines to your negative audience settings,  as these are English speaking countries outside of your target market who will probably take up a chunk of your advertising budget.

Once your up and running, let Google run for a week placing your ads where it wishes. After the initial week, check your automatic placements and see what work Google has up to. You’ll find a number of placements you do like and probably more you don’t! Add all of the latter as negative placements and you wont appear there again. You can view automatic placements in Dimensions within your panel, click on ‘automatic placements’ to view.  Export your list as a spreadsheet, open in Excel, visit the urls if you;re unsure and check out what the sites in question are all about.

Keep Reviewing

As well as looking for more negative settings each week, you should also run more and more keywords through organic search and the placement tool. These tasks will give you more and more positive placements to add to the mix too.

Follow the above and after a month you should have the display network working well for you.

It’s been a busy old time in the world of SEO…again.
Over the last few weeks a number of website owners have noticing their web rankings bounce around significantly, in mucha similar fashion to this time last year when Google first released the Panda update on the web world.

Do Filme Kung Fu Panda © by • Happy Batatinha •

Recently, Google has been uncovering and devaluing various methods by which people could ‘buy’ links. Some webmasters who subscribe to Google Webmaster Tools have even received emails warning them of having ‘un-natural’ links within their website profile. Some of these emails seem to even come with ‘penalities’ resulting in rankings drops for the offending sites – although there is great debate about whether these are penalties or loss of link power form devalued links. Google has actually been issuing such emails for some time, what has really changed is the number of emails Google is sending out. This article tells us exactly how much more focused Google are now on telling webmasters they need to ‘clean up their SEO’ to maintain good rankings.

Old Sites Might Be Hit Harder

Sites that have been online for a while may benefit from authority, but they are often more likely to have a number of incoming links from sites/techniques that Google now ‘strongly’ frowns upon. If we go back a couple of years, more SEO companies would have recommended buying links as such techniques worked and at worst were simply devalued. We may find that older sites begin to receive the dreaded GWT emails if they have such links within their profiles.

The Changing World Of SEO

For the first time in my life in SEO, we’re at a point where your method of SEO can have a detrimental affect on how Google see/ranks your end site. This fact is already beginning to change SEO. One thing to watch out for is the growing belief that ‘negative’ SEO may become an online marekting tactic, as Google now penalises websites for having ‘un-natural’ links, many are fearful that more ‘determined’ competitors will simply do/commission some negative link building to their site (instead of, or alongside, creating positive links to their own). If negative SEO does become an online marketing tactic that proves successful, I believe that will indeed be a sad day for the online world.

On the positive side, much of what Panda has brought to Google’s rankings is a good thing. It is much harder to now ‘buy’ your ranking, you have to ‘create’ it via content and content exposure. Search results are more useful and the browser better served on the whole. The increasing importance of content across all web marketing also means we have an improved, content rich internet.

It’s no doubt true that making your website rank well for target keywords is more difficult that it was 2 years ago (pre Panda). SEO is now more dependent on skills often outside of the SEO guy alone, eg content writing, social media etc. With SEO becoming harder and more expensive, this will also push more people towards PPC or other forms of online advertising. In many ways, you can look at Google’s devaluing of ‘paid for’ links as a ‘persuasive push’ to where people should be spending their money. If you spent the money from your paid links on PPC, your ad would still be live. Overall, the constant changes brought by Panda are good for the internet. But they are also good for Google – which is, after all, a public company with a responsibility to its shareholders.

What Does This Mean Going Forward

The internet world is always changing. Given that many people nowadays access the web frequently from a tablet, or a mobile phone which inherently have smaller screens, the prominence of organic listings to PPC has been somewhat reducing for some time. On my HTC android phone, a search for most keywords delivers 3 PPC results and then 2 organic before I have to scroll down for more organic results. With SEO becoming harder, more involved, utilising cross skills sets and add to this the potential threat of negative seo – it makes more sense than it ever has to spread your online marketing to ensure you are never 100% dependent on one method of online traffic.

Are You Saying That SEO Is Less Effective?

Nope, This doesn’t make SEO less effective. High organic search engine rankings will continue to be, in my opinion, the most effectuive way of generating relevant leads for your business at least for the foreseaable future. They are more trusted and offer the strongest brand value for your business. However, SEO is most definitely more involved, expensive and less stable than it was pre Panda.

The growth of the internet over the last few years has brought a number of real competitors to Google, albeit outside of the traditional search engine world. Add to this the fact that almost every business advisor I have ever met warns against having all of your eggs in one basket in any aspect of your business. It is only therefore prudent if, like me you are an SEO focused marketeer, you make a promise to yourself to spread your skillset, knowledge and ultimately online marketing dependence outside of Google.

Go for the organic ranking, but remember to create it. Go for other forms of traffic too, the ones that make most sense for your business and niche, many of these you can ‘buy’. Mix them all up together and you’ll have a very strong online business.

Over the coming blogposts we’ll start to look at what online marketing methods offer the most complimentary mix with SEO.

With the substantial shift in SEO practice towards authority, original content and the like, there has never been more of a need to ensure that your content is seen to be exactly that – yours. As content scrapers keep us on our toes, we need to put measures in place to ensure we don’t give away our well-earned reward for our hard work.

We live in an impatient world. Everything happens in real time, where five minutes ago qualifies as the ‘past’. The problem with this full speed move into real time is that the web is yet to catch up. The internet, though as current a source of information as you can get, was not designed for real time – a fact that means some cash in, and some lose out.

One of the biggest issues with real time is that of content scraping. ‘Scraping’ is the term given to the practice of lifting content, word for word, from sites and passing it off as original content on the new site. With the lack of a real time web, this practice is worryingly easily done. It’s also easy to avoid.

To protect content, pings have traditionally been the main method of claiming authorship. A ping answers the question ‘is the any new content here?’ which then allows the content provider to claim their new content. The problem with this is that the request first needs to be sent for it to be answered. This is an annoyingly inefficient way of making new content updates and leaves potentially plenty of time for a scraper to get in there first.

What is needed is a way of notifying the search engines that there is new content the moment it is published, leaving scrapers no window of time to get there before you do.

Here is where fat pings come in. Traditional pings create an alert that there is new content but supply only the title and sometimes a snippet of the new content. Fat pings notify search engines of the entire content, word for word. By setting up fat pings, you ensure that your new content in its entirety is logged as yours, removing the risk of a scraper getting in and taking your well-earned credit.

Why is protecting your new content with fat pings good for SEO?

Quite simply, if you are seen to be the creator of the content you’ve published, you will benefit from the ranking effect. If you are seen to have copied that content, you won’t. The website that stole it and claimed it will.

Fat pings ensure that you stand the best chance of being seen as the original author and alerts Google up front rather than waiting to be looked at. So not only do you get the best chance of getting the full ranking effect of your new content, it will also be ranked much faster.

Setting up Fat Pings

Depending on where you host your blog, there are a few ways to set up fat pings. Perhaps the easiest way is if you have your blog hosted on Blogger or WordPress.com. Fat pings are set up as standard with these sites. If you use WordPress.org, however, you will need to install http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/*
*Remember to disable feed caching if you use any caching plugins.

If you use Feedburner with your blogs, you will need to go to www.feedburner.com to activate ‘pingshot’. This gets Feedburner to ping Google every time it discovers new content in your RSS feed. However, be aware that it may not be wise to rely on Feedburner alone as there is no way of knowing exactly when Feedburner will look at your RSS feed so it potentially leaves a window of opportunity for a content scraper.

It’s easy and quick to protect your content and well worth the small amount of effort required.

For our first post in this fine, new year I thought we’d recap over some of what we discussed last year and outline the key factors that recent results are ‘suggesting’ will have most impact on your SE rankings over the coming 12 months.

2012 is shaping up to be the year that the ‘human’ aspect truly matters in SEO practice. Social media, superb content and a drive for authenticity are all looking to be the areas of best investment for SEO success in 2012.

Links from high-authority, human-edited URLs

The way links are gained and the impact they have can be one of the most changeable (and frustrating) aspects of SEO.

For the biggest potential impact from your link building, look for human edited blogs/articles directories/PR sites etc. Google seems to place a lot of value on sites that an actual ‘human’ has read and subsequently approved any links posted.

Given this, to gain such links brilliant and unique content is very much the order of the day, but what is also increasingly important is the positioning. Content also needs to be appropriate to the requirements of the human edited/high authority site, so take a little time to research your link targets and give them something they really want.

Social Media

SEO and social media have finally taken the plunge, currently living in marital harmony.

Social media as part of SEO really started to boom in 2011 and 2012 seems to be the first year that the two disciplines can no longer be referred to as separate entities. The heavy hitters (Facebook and Twitter) look to reign supreme, much as they have been, but 2012 may well see the continued rise )at least from an SEO point of view) of other social media platform such as ‘discovery engines’ like StumbleUpon and social news aggregators like Digg and Reddit.

And of course, there’s Google Plus. Not to be forgotten, (though easily done, it seems) it should be an interesting year for the social media newbie. Certainly, G+ is not up there with the heavyweights yet and is already upsetting its peers (see this recent article on the BBC). Yet there is no doubt G+ has masses of potential,  if only due to the fact that Google own it! For these reasons alone,  it’s going to be wise to start including G+  within your new year SEO strategy.

Social media continues to be great for getting new content indexed quickly but now it serves a second, high-impact purpose – that of gaining likes, pluses, tweets, bookmarks etc. This online interaction reinforces that human aspect that Google loves so much right now. As mentioned above, social signals are another form of ‘human’ interaction in and around your links.

Authenticity

Never has proving that you are who you say you are been more important than now. Authenticity is set to continue to be a high impact strategy in SEO for 2012.

Authenticity factors can run through almost every part of an SEO strategy. The more than you can show the online that that you are a real person the better. Integrate all of your blogposts/website articles with your social media accounts and ensure that any website you think well of is registered within Google Places, even if only to your own address.

Conclusions

The knock-on effects from the Panda algorithm changes have placed a substantial emphasis on the ‘human’ in SEO for 2012. The more human interaction you can get, the better, so go after those human edited links, likes, retweets, mentions, comments, and bookmarks.

This year I’ll be making some extra efforts to send all site subscribers a regular email covering a number of additional hints to my posts. One thing I’ll be including this month are some hints on how you can generate a regular supply of links in all of the above categories. If you haven’t already signed up, you can do so here.

2011 has been a quite an exciting year in the SEO world, here’s the year in blogposts:
http://www.coffeekicks.com/2011

I do think that, on the edge of the year, Google has managed to make it’s search results more useful and relevant to browsers, so well done to them! This in turn has greatly impacted how we plan and action all our online marketing. Going forward into 2012, if you keep these four words in mind, you should do fine:

Unique Content
High Authority
Authenticity
Social Exposure

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all Coffee Kicks readers a Very Merry Xmas and a Successful New Year!

Thanks for reading.

Phil

After my last post, ‘Discovering The Authentic Online You‘, a lot of people have asked me how to go about connecting their Google Plus profile with their websites/blogs and articles. I thought the best way to go about doing this was to create a video (2 videos in fact) showing the method that I find works best for me.

I say ‘the method’ as there are are a lot of blogposts out there on this very subject, each with it’s own little variant on how to best go about connecting your profile with your sites. Most of these focus on correctly installing authorship tags into your blog. I go through these too, but I’ve also included a method that utilises your work/website email address that makes the whole process much easier. Do let me know if this method works for you too and don’t forget to login into the members area to grab the html I use on my site and a link to the ‘html in author profiles’ plugin for WordPress.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The concept of authenticity in marketing is not a new one. It has always been there in the handbooks of marketing best practice and it has always been an important attribute of a successful traditional marketing campaign. It now looks like Google is well and truly embracing this tried and tested concept. Hardly surprising, given the sheer number of people (all kinds of people) putting content out on the Internet every day.

Google has done pretty well so far in their campaign to weed out the wheat from the chaff. However, with spam-happy ‘marketers’ become increasingly savvy to the current techniques that can often fool a search engine into ranking their sites, Google has had to up its game once more.

The next prolific ranking factor that looks set to take the world of SEO by storm is that of authenticity.

What is authenticity?

We know what authenticity is, and of course, we have always taken this aspect into account when putting content out there. We want it to have credibility, authority and trustworthiness, and authenticity tends to be lumped in with these traits. However, the previous practice of just ‘covering’ authenticity in content is no longer appears to be quite enough. This factor of ranking looks to be standing on its own two feet these days, requiring special attention in online marketing campaigns.

How do we know that authenticity is definitely a ranking factor?

We don’t. Yet. Right now, the authenticity debate is an on-going one among SEO professionals, spurred on by the increasing number of sites getting good rankings when they don’t seem to have done very much (in a purely SEO sense) for them.

More and more personal blogs are ranking brilliantly with no sign of any traditional on-page SEO. Dig a little deeper and have a look at one of these sites and what you will find is brilliantly written content and plenty of personalisation. You will get a real sense of who the author is with a personal profile and plenty of their own social media links.

So we don’t know that authenticity is a ranking factor. We suspect it is and we find evidence to back up these suspicions. We’ve been right before, so can we afford to overlook this overwhelming ‘gut’ feeling running through the SEO community?

How do you optimise for authenticity?

As with any new ranking factor, there is a large ‘trial and error’ aspect for how best to use authenticity to rank well, but the early trends and also information from Google themselves have provided some useful pointers:

Get a really good copy writer

Content is king. We know this. We hear it all the time and possibly as a result of this, we get belligerent about it. Any efforts going towards enhancing authenticity are worth very little if the copy is mediocre. Copy no longer needs to be really good. It needs to be fantastic.

But authenticity is more than just content. It’s not just about ‘what’ you write, it’s about ‘who’ is writing. People these days are incredibly discerning and need to care about what they are reading and it is authenticity that plays a massive part as to whether someone cares or not.

Be a real person

Both Google and visitors to your site want to know that you are a real person. Google wants to know who you are, what your expertise is and what you should be ranking for. Visitors to your site want to know who you are, why they should listen to you and where they can find more information about you. By showing yourself to be a real person, you answer all of these queries.

Google has always acknowledged that the Internet is full of imposters and false identities. As a result, they have started the authenticity ball rolling by connecting G+ profiles to ownership of websites, blogs and articles. These connections reassure Google of the authenticity of these site owners. It is worth following suit with other social media sites that you, as the author of your site or blog, can connect with. You’re not just trying to reassure Google, you’re reassuring your visitors. Authenticity brings with it trust, and trust is key.

Use local listings

Staking out your place in the real world, not just the online one does a lot to enhance your authenticity. If you have a business with a bricks and mortar office, you are already at an advantage. ‘Real world’ companies elicit perceived trustworthiness and authenticity much more easily than those with a purely online presence. Make use of local listings and local SEO practices.

Authenticity factors and the future

A move towards authenticity could be an extremely positive one. It is another factor that can be used to improve content for search engines as well as the user – a winning combination.

It could also start to address those Internet bashers who still criticise the medium for being full of imposters and untrustworthy characters. Google’s new move will push online authors to be more open, which can only be a good thing for the often mistrusted transparency of the internet.

Online marketeers everywhere can look forward to authenticity becoming a ranking factor. For many, authenticity is already there, it just need to be openly proven.