The webinar was well done, and complete in half an hour.  This was great for busy professionals. Most of the information validated what I know about press releases, such as:

• Include the company name in the title
• Include keywords in the title
• Include links in the body of the press release
• Make those links appropriate to the anchor text
• Link to more pages than the home page
• Have a link appear early in the press release
• Have an “about us” section at the end

There was one tidbit of information that was new to me and will probably be of interest to our clients with blogs. When you distribute a press release, rewrite the information in the release as a blog post.  Use the same information, but make it more conversational, in the style of your blog. Then include a link in the press release back to the blog post.

Since the SEO goal of distributing a press release is to bring visitors back to your site, this is a great idea!  It also allows you to leverage that newsworthy item into more fresh content for your site, another SEO win!

Originally Hubspot was planning to offer a similar webinar on a weekly basis.  They have since reconsidered, and will offer these on a monthly basis. I plan to sit in when I can, and pick up more tips to share and put to use for our clients.

Regina Sillitti is Project Coordinator for Dinkum Interactive.  She has worked in programming,  design, business analysis and quality assurance. Her background in design and data processing give her a unique perspective on client – tech translation. You can reach her at regina@dinkuminteractive.com.

Regina Sillitti is Project Coordinator for Dinkum Interactive. She has worked in programming, design, business analysis and quality assurance. Her background in design and data processing give her a unique perspective on client - tech translation. You can reach her at regina@dinkuminteractive.com, or find her on Twitter, @ReginaSillitti.

Facebook Fan Pages

Truth be told, I haven’t traditionally been a fan of Facebook as a user but that’s changing. Originally I had a personal account that enabled me to stay in touch with friends and family, not to mention keep an eye on my children. When it was suggested that I immerse myself in Facebook and its Fan Pages, I thought, really? Me?  Are you sure?

Consequently I’ve been “bitten” by the Facebook bug as both a user and a marketer. Now as Administrator of Dinkum Interactive’s Facebook Fan Page I’d like to invite you to Fan us. What can you expect of me and the Dinkum Fan Page? It will be a veritable mixed grill including:

• Social Media Observations
• A Heavy Dose of SEO
• Some Business Marketing Insights
• Daily Conversation and Opinion
• And a Touch of Philly Flavor…

I really look forward to cultivating our Facebook community and I hope that you’ll join us. As time goes on, I’ll be blogging a little more about our Fan Page and you will begin to see some changes regarding contests, promotions, speaking engagements, etc.

Please join the Dinkum Interactive Fan Page We’ll offer a great deal of useful information that you can use to increase your sales and improve your business. You won’t be sorry you did.

Thanks & I hope to see you on the Dinkum Facebook Fan Page soon.

Kelly Dunning

Social Media – The Winner

Social media was the winner. Thankfully, we’ve be talking a lot about how smaller business can use the likes of Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc… to get the biggest bang for their marketing investment. Case studies are no surprise and we’ve been working on presenting a few more on the blog. I was interested to see that interest in analytics was pretty low, especially when so few actually use them to effectively…

First of all, thanks to everyone that took the time to participate. In the future, we’ll be working on offering more information focused on social media, case studies and SEO basics with a few “red herrings” to throw in besides.

If you have some additional topics that you’d be interested in seeing, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments. Moreover, we’d also like to hear about some of your experiences too.

Bill Rowland

Living down the street, I’ve grown to know Rick Simmons through frequent early morning run-ins walking our respective pets. Rick anointed me as “The Mayor” of our neighborhood because I’m often caught speaking with someone in the neighborhood. Over time, we became friends and shared the details of our lives, occupations, spouses’ jobs etc…

One day Rick stopped by and said that I need to work for him.  After thinking about it for about 10 minutes, I said “let’s try it”.  I was always impressed with Rick’s general knowledge, but after I started to work with him I truly appreciated his level of marketing expertise, internet and otherwise. I was totally blown away!!!

Rick communicates with people really well and I’m excited about working with him. I especially enjoy watching his dynamic presentations. At one recent seminar, Rick easily translated all of the technical jargon of search engine marketing and social media tools into meaningful concepts that excited every attendee. I was so impressed, that I even mentioned my experience to a close friend. After meeting with Rick, she was impressed too;  she soon became a Dinkum client.

I guess the bottom line of my first post ever is – if you ever get a chance to meet Rick Simmons or have the opportunity to listen to him present, you won’t be sorry.  It is worth every penny!

Kelly Dunning

I recently had a developer question me as to what went wrong with his SEO efforts, which prompted this post. So I took a look at the site and the code. Solid. Very solid. Heavy CSS, all meta data in place quite obviously around a singular keyword strategy, keyword-rich “pretty” URL structure, accurate robots.txt information and a whole lot more…essentially everything i look for was all there. I took a look at his off-page strategy and well, there wasn’t one. The site had been live for a while and only a handful of links. Now, I don’t do guarantees but I was quietly confident that if they start a linking strategy, they will at the very least, start to see the website ranking on search engines.

I honestly believe that SEO starts with a well-coded website but it is just a start. There’s a whole lot more that goes into achieving a good solid rankings and I’m more than happy to take on those responsibilities but I’m also happy that developers are now taking it seriously. So instead of having to spend half of our project time battling misguided and stubborn developers, we can actually focus more on what we really do…impact the bottom line.

Paul Fleming

Paul Fleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.

Rick is on the road again. On July 15, he will present “How Effective is Your Online Marketing Strategy” at Chamber University.  The presentation will be at the Mainline Chamber of Commerce in the Conference Center, 175 Strafford Avenue, Suite 130 in Wayne, PA from 3:30PM until 6PM.

Most people know that Internet Marketing is more that putting up a website. Many have not considered Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn as part of their Internet Marketing Strategy.  With 8 of 10 Americans now online, Social Media is crucial to your success.

Rick wants to help you “get it”. He will pace the presentation to meet the knowledge and skills of the attendees. You will walk out of this presentation with a much clearer idea of how to integrate important social media platforms into your Internet Marketing Strategy. And you already know that Rick presents will energy and passion, so what are you waiting for? The presentation is open to anyone with an interest in improving their Internet Marketing Strategy, so check it out!

Regina

Regina Sillitti is Project Coordinator for Dinkum Interactive. She has worked in programming, design, business analysis and quality assurance. Her background in design and data processing give her a unique perspective on client - tech translation. You can reach her at regina@dinkuminteractive.com, or find her on Twitter, @ReginaSillitti.

Who are these people, you might ask. And how can I tell who is responsible for any given post?

We are each part of Dinkum Interactive, and beginning with this post, we promise to add our name to the bottom of each post that we write. That way, if you need to know who to compliment, you may do that by name. If you need to know who to call to task, you can also do that by name.

And let me introduce myself. I am the project coordinator for Dinkum and have worked with the team for about a year. I get to speak with most of our clients and get to know them and their SEO needs. We chat over reports and blog posts, web design and copy changes, what ever is on the schedule for them at the time. I have the privilege of being the voice of Dinkum on a regular basis for many of our clients. What a great job!

After some gentle urging, I will also be a regular blogger here. I look forward to sharing what I am learning as I go along. So tell me what you want to know, and I will see what I can do!

Yours in transparency,

Regina

Regina Sillitti is Project Coordinator for Dinkum Interactive. She has worked in programming, design, business analysis and quality assurance. Her background in design and data processing give her a unique perspective on client - tech translation. You can reach her at regina@dinkuminteractive.com, or find her on Twitter, @ReginaSillitti.

I broke it down to the 2 main elements; On-page factors and Off-page factors.

The on-page factors involves things that you should do to your website to make it more amenable to search engines. They include:
Code Structure – We always promote semantic markup. Keep the code as clean as possible and make it easy for the SE’s to locate the content.
Meta Data – Be as descriptive as possible for the title tags. Make sure to include some of your higher level keywords. While the meta description and meta keywords don’t have the value they once did, we tend to include these as often as possible.
URL structure – this is often overlooked. Dirty URL’s or query strings are viewed unfavorably by SE’s. It doesn’t mean that they won’t be included in the search results but you will rarely see on ranked high on the search results pages. Changing something like www.example.com/lkp.asp?id=W432&d=BGA to www.example.com/nice-page can do wonders. It’s called a URL rewrite.
Content – SE’s love good content. While recommendations vary between how many words need to appear on a page to be worthwhile, we like a 200 word minimum. Break it up as well by using bold and italics and bullet points to improve readability for users.

Off page factors are the elements that contribute to increased rankings of a website that don’t require manipulating your own website. For this, it’s all about the links (and the more relevant, the better). Getting other websites to link to yours can be a tough, time consuming prospect. We have a few suggestions to make it a little easier.
Distribute articles – there are a bunch of content hubs out there that allow you to submit an article to their website. Many of these include the option of placing your URL (sometimes an anchored link) back to your website.
Optimized Press Releases – if you’re submitting your press release through the regular distribution channels, make sure you don’t ignore the online ones. Sites like PR Leap can provide a good opportunity to submit your release and offers the ability to place anchored links throughout in addition to the footer/signature area.
Link exchanges – a most hated element to acquiring links and certainly not as valuable as they once were. We suggest tapping into your existing network first.
Forum/Blog participation – you’re probably already doing it. Many forums offer the ability to include a signature when you post so take advantage of that and offer some good advice to others along the way. You also probably have some favorite bloggers that you read. Feel free to comment on their stuff, most offer the chance to include your URL when you do.
Social Media – a whole new realm of marketing, herre are more great places to spread the word (and your link) online.

As I said, this is brushing the surface. There are a lot of other elements that you need to take into consideration. I probably didn’t even make a dent, particularly with keyword research and selection but this was indeed just an introduction so that you will go away slightly wiser than before (hopefully). As my father always said, “teach a wise man something and he will be yet wiser.”

Paul Fleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.