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.

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.

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.

PR releases form an integral part of any marketing campaign. They were used before the world was online and are used even more now in the digital age.

PR submissions can be such an effective way of getting really decent links and increasing link popularity that only a foolish SEO ignores them. However, though you can get great backlinks from PR releases and boost your rankings nicely, the effect can be rather temporary. PR Releases, by their very nature, are only in the ‘limelight’ for a limited time. So how can you increase the longevity of the effects of PR release backlinks?

Getting high quality PR release backlinks

The first hurdle is getting the links, and getting good links. It’s no secret that one superb quality link from an excellent source is worth putting the effort in for. There is little benefit, especially long-term, in gaining hundreds of mediocre links. With backlinking, it really is quality over quantity and that can be quite a challenge to take on with the new broader online target audience. Gone are the days when it used to be enough to be enough to send your PR release to one or two news wires and consider it a job well done. With the copious numbers of media sites we have today, you have to do a lot more with your PR release to achieve the results you want. You have to earn those backlinks and learn quickly how to pitch for each type of online submission.

As with all content created for the web, the target reader must come first when writing begins. Just the same as we do not write for search engines first, we do not write for backlinks first in a PR release. You cannot afford to lose focus of the purpose of your copy – why you are writing it, who you are writing it for and what effect you want it to have. A little extra time invested at this stage will pay dividends later.

The best backlinks are created between content that is extremely relevant and useful, even educational. This is no less true for PR releases. Yes, the primary function is promotion, but that does not negate any ability to make them tick all the boxes. It is keeping this in mind when writing your PR release that will mean the difference between a whole lot of links that do little and a few links that do masses for your website. The chances of longevity of the effect on your rankings will also improve through the relevance of the information contained in your PR release. A PR release that really makes the grade can get picked up by news sites/social media sites and warrant a live link and a place in the archives so it’s worth getting this part of the process spot on.

Writing the release the right way can even afford you the opportunity to archive the article on your own website, creating permanent content and keeping a backlink to your site. Maybe you will be fortuitous enough to get a mention on a highly relevant blog, securing not only a nice link but a long-lived one.

If done right, and you get decent backlinks, you get a decent effect on your rankings. However, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing your rankings climb and then plummet because what you have actually been working on the last few weeks is a ‘quick fix’.

So how do you keep the rankings longer?

We’ve touched on some of the more obvious ways you can maintain the effect from good backlinks to your PR release – making the content archive-friendly, useful, and with a broad appeal, but what else can you do?

When trying to increase the duration that your PR release backlinks are effective for, what you need to do is increase the length of time your PR release has ‘currentness’. If your PR release becomes outdated, so to will the links associated with it. The tricky bit is maintaining that currentness and that’s where backlinking directly to the release url comes in handy.

Once your PR release starts to lose this ‘currentness’, i.e. when it starts to become yesterday’s news, it’s time to start backlinking to its url. Usually, press-worthy releases naturally attract links on the day of their release and for a few days following. After that, press releases tend to stop attracting links simply due to the fact that they drop down in the ‘latest news’ sections of PR sites, having been replaced by ‘newer’ press releases. Whilst press releases can often rank high themselves, this high ranking is often short-lived due to the sudden decline in link velocity as they fall down the pecking order. Hence, if you start backlinking consistently to your press release, you will give the impression of continued newsworthiness. Your press releases will rank better for longer due to the fact that you are building links to them continuing their relevancy. This, of course, has the knock-on effect of pushing your main site higher through virtue of being linked to by your press releases, which in turn attract ongoing links as part of your SEO campaign.

Recently you will have noticed CoffeeKicks blogposts taking a distinct social media slant. Since the recent Panda update, it seems many of us are finding that our social media presence has a definite effect on our search engine rankings.

Yet with so any spocial media platforms out there, it come become quite a job to constantly maintain our twitter, facebook, linkedin, bookmarking alongside our constant blogging and standard seo activity.

One thing I have found works well for me is to look at what I want each of my social media accounts to focus on and then decide how I can best update that platform with information. I the use RSS feeds to post to my social media accounts according to the focus I want each of these accounts to bring.

When I say ‘focus’, I simply mean ‘what is this individual social media account about?’ ‘Who, or what, is it seeking to promote?’

For example, I have three main sites that I update more or less weekly – this blog, my main travel site and my new blog on living and working abroad. Each of these three sites have their own Twitter account. Unlike most other social platforms, is searchable and open, ie you do not have to ‘accept’ people into your network. Hence people both ‘ask’ and ‘search’ EVERYONE on twitter for whatever they are seeking. Unless your a celebrity, people are unlikely to search for your name and hence Twitter by it’s nature is topic focused.

Facebook, LinkedIn and any other network that requires us to ‘accept’ people into our network is, also by nature, people focused. We cannot search such networks for ‘things’, we have to first connect with people.

Bearing these differences in mind can really help you make the best of your social media accounts. As said above, I run an individual Twitter account for each of my main sites. IN the next post, I’ll show you how I autofeed my Twitter accounts using the RSS feeds from each and the excellent Feedburner.

Today I’m going to focus on how I feed my Facebook and Linkedin Accounts with all of my blogging activity. The first thing to note here of course is that these two social media accounts are both focused on ‘lil ole me’, the person and author of my three websites. Hence, for these two accounts, it makes sense to feed all of my blogposts from all three websites (ie everything ‘lil ole me’ does) onto these two social media pages. There are two steps I take to achieve this:

Create a combined RSS feed of all your content

1. I take all three RSS feeds and blend them together into one overall ‘me’ RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes.

2. Next, I take this ‘me’ RSS feed and use Hootsuite to feed it onto my LinkedIn and Facebook profile pages.

If you would like to watch me do both of the above steps, please hop on over the Member Area, signup free and access the videos there on this very technique.

Negative reviews are never pleasant – but what about when those reviews appear on the first page of Google, outranking even your own website? It’s a scary prospect, but it happens all the time.

Protecting your online reputation is becoming a serious issue nowadays, and specialist firms offer various services to give you back some control over protecting your good name.

But SEO tactics can also be put to use to bury bad reviews and unfair comments, and this article provides you with three easy steps to doing just that.

How Can Negative Reviews Gain Such Prominence?

The reason negative reviews can appear so high up in the SERPs so quickly is because they are often posted to sites which have a high PageRank/authority, (eg www.ripoffreport.com). Google is an active promoter of free speech, but this sometimes makes it easier for undesirable information to gain a high degree of visibility. There’s no point complaining about that, however. The only thing you can do is take action and fight back using what you know of SEO and the internet.

Step 1 – Find the Offending Keywords

First you need to do some research into which keywords are bringing up the negative reviews. First and foremost, check your website/company/personal name (these are the most common) plus any keywords that are specifically important to your business. Also, check for common informational searches by querying your ‘website/company/personal name + review’ or ‘+rating’. Once you’ve found the offending keywords, use a keyword tool to find out which of them are generating traffic and focus on these ones as any without much traffic don’t really matter.

Step 2 – Create & Post Web 2 Articles

Next, write 10 to 15 articles optimised for the keywords which are, or can potentially, cause you the most problems.  Post these articles to web 2 sites such as: WordPress, Ezine Articles, Posterous, Multiply, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Webs, Weebly, Squidoo and any others you know of.

These sites have high homepage PageRank, meaning the domains will react quicker and more effectively to backlinks than most other sites out there. Many of them also allow you to use your keywords in your URL for extra SEO weight, such as ‘yourname.wordpress.com’ or ‘yourkeyword.weebly.com’.

Step 3 – Build Links to the Web 2 Articles

The next stage is to try and get these articles ranking high for your chosen keywords, and to do this you need to create links pointing back to the articles. There are many tactics for this, but what you are looking for is quick links that can be created without too much effort.

One tactic is to build super-quick links from domain information sites, while another would be to reuse the articles and post them to article directories using the keywords to link back to the original web 2 articles. Duplicate content is not an issue here – if Google deems the web 2 pages and your articles to be duplicate content, all it will do is work out where the content was posted first and give priority to that page first – which is the overall aim anyway.

Bury the Negative Reviews

That’s all there is to it! Over time, some of these web 2 pages will make it to the first page of Google for your target keywords, gradually consigning the offending website off the front page where it won’t mean much to anyone.

This is an effective way to help you respond to any online bad publicity. If you ever find yourself facing a similar situation then take advantage of SEO tactics to make sure the right results are appearing when people search for you or your company online. Finally, will a heart full of endeavour, the same techniques can be used to ensure that you control all of content of the page 1 listings for your most desired keywords – now there’s a mouth watering thought!