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Sky News Restricts Employees’ Twitter Use

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2012 3:39 pm SEO News

Sky News has emailed all of its employees advising them of its new social media guidelines, which forbids the reposting of messages on Twitter from anyone who does not work for the broadcaster.

The email was sent to all Sky News employees on Tuesday, and outlines new policies which forbid reporters from retweeting posts from rival reporters on Twitter, or posting about issues not related to their professional activities.

An excerpt of the email, which has been seen by The Guardian newspaper, says: “Do not tweet when it is not a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work.

“Where a story has been Tweeted by a Sky News journalist who is assigned to the story it is fine, desirable in fact, that it is retweeted by other Sky News staff.

“Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.”

Having gained a reputation as being at the forefront of digital developments, Sky News has used social media platforms such as Twitter to break news on worldwide events such as the Arab Spring uprising and the UK summer riots.

A spokeswoman for Sky News said yesterday: “Sky News has the same editorial procedures across all of their platforms including social media to ensure the news we report is accurate.”

Facebook will Introduce Ads to Mobile Apps

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2012 10:50 am SEO News

Android, iPad and iPhone users could see ads on their Facebook apps as soon as early March. This is due to the company’s aim to introduce an additional revenue source before going public.

Sources say that the social media giant has already liaised with various advertising agencies to discuss the matter. Facebook started its ‘sponsored stories’ campaign in December 2011. Featured stories will appear in your mobile news feed, much like the Twitter apps promoted tweets programme. This means that Facebook advertisements will mix in with posts from friends and relatives.

In Facebook’s paperwork for its Initial Public Offering, filed Feb. 1, the company pointed to mobile as a potential revenue source and even furthered that a lack of a mobile ad campaign could actually harm the company’s success. It is estimated that nearly half of Facebook’s 845 million users access the site via their mobile devices.

In a report published by the Financial Times a source said that Facebook would incentivise advertisers to link within Facebook rather than divert users to another site.

Facebook will hold an event for marketers in New York Feb. 29, so we can expect announcements of new ways they can use the social network. Facebook is yet to unveil Timeline brand pages, although that move is anticipated in coming weeks as Facebook rolls out Timeline for all users.

Would the appearance of ads on your mobile Facebook app discourage you from using it? Would you even notice? Let us know by adding to our comments section.

Facebook App Attempts to Beat Cancer Before it Starts

By Andrew Redfern @ 6th February 2012 10:47 am SEO News

Could the online community help to combat the worldwide cancer epidemic?

Two of the world’s leading cancer prevention groups are hoping so. That’s why in honour of Saturday’s World Cancer Day Stand Up for Cancer and the Union for International Cancer Control launched a Facebook app which they hope will generate a digital buzz to increase the fight against the disease.

With the Facebook World Cancer Day App, users are encouraged to commit to making a change in their life, or the life of a friend; a change to prevent cancer. Amongst the changes that the app suggests, you’ll find many of the commonplace behaviours many of us are already aware of, such as eating green vegetables, exercising regularly, reducing alcohol and cigarette intake as well as wearing sun tan lotion. Other options include helping a friend quit smoking, committing to learn more about cancer or donate money to cancer research.

The Facebook app, which was introduced along with multi channel video and social campaigns, will aim to raise awareness about behaviours which help to prevent cancer. The group claims that one in three cancer deaths could be prevented through these measures.

The app also allows you to make your pledge in honour of somebody you may have lost from the disease or somebody who has been affected in another way.

Last year, 67,000 Facebook users donated their status to World Cancer Day and the social media phenomenon continues to play its part in the battle with cancer.

Hit Search expands footprint at Liverpool Innovation Park

By Andrew Redfern @ 25th October 2011 5:14 pm SEO News

Hit Search has expanded within Liverpool Innovation Park following extensive growth since its launch four years ago. The company, which specialises in search engine marketing, outgrew the Baird House offices and has moved to a purpose built office in the Park’s newly opened Maxwell House Business Centre.

Set up in 2007 by co-founders Andy Redfern and Andy Donaldson, Hit Search now boasts a 16 strong team and regularly ranks within the top SEO agencies in the UK.

Andy Redfern, director of Hit Search acknowledged the role of Liverpool Innovation Park in its rapid growth. He said: “As a start up, we were looking for somewhere to offer us flexibility in terms of contract length and also an environment which compliments what we do.

“Being at the Innovation Park meant we were surrounded by a number of other forward-thinking companies in the digital sector who we could work with and share valuable leads and contacts.”

Dr Mark Tock, Innovation Manager at Liverpool Innovation Park, said: “The Park’s flexible offering and proactive approach in fostering the relationships of its occupants is what builds successful business.

“Andy and the team at Hit Search were able to complete negotiations, undertake significant customisation of the premises and move into the new premises within four weeks. This is just one example where we support our clients from the early stages to enable hassle-free growth so they can get on with running their business.”

Hit Search has taken residency in the Park’s Maxwell House Business Centre which offers immediate access to networking facilities as well as having its own boardroom and breakout space for customers and clients.

Liverpool Innovation Park, which includes Wavertree Technology Park, forms a key component of Merseyside’s knowledge economy.

Liverpool Innovation Park is operated by Space North West, a joint venture between Ashtenne Industrial Fund and the Homes and Communities Agency. Liverpool Innovation Park was part funded by the European Regional Development Agency (ERDF).

Broaden Your Range of Services to Boost your SEO

By Andrew Redfern @ 21st October 2011 8:30 am SEO News

So the age old search engine optimisation (SEO) quandary is the compromise between unique, keyword rich text content for the benefit of the search engines, and then everything else, which is why you need the search engines to find you in the first place, so that users can do just that: use your site. That’s the goal here. We’re all fighting for the number one place in a Google search for our chosen keywords, via better SEO, but we’re only optimising our search performance to optimise the number of users that land on our site. We’re doing it for the users.

If you want more users to find your site, and to inhabit it, give them more reason too. Don’t just provide a plethora of text based SEO bait for the search engines themselves. Instead, broaden your entire range of services to give the users more and more reasons to use your service. Introduce video, podcasts, news, blogs, social content and more, combining all of these various means to give the human users every reason to choose your site over a competitor. It doesn’t matter if your primary aim is to sell t-shirts; create a t-shirt podcast, viral videos, t-shirt messageboards, competitions and more. Not only does this provide you with more SEO bait to draw in potential buyers, it also gives you more SEO opportunities to rank within the search results. Thanks to Google’s blended search results, high ranking images, videos, news stories and more can appear in the first page of general search results and not just niche results (such as all news results, all video results or all image results).

Furthermore, from a perfectly relevant, non SEO point of view, once you have your target audience landing on your site, you want them staying there for as long as possible and not bouncing to another site straight away. You’ll succeed in this by giving them as much reason to stay as possible.

Improve SEO Performance by Seeing the Bigger Picture

By Andrew Redfern @ 19th October 2011 8:35 am SEO News

Our aim in the search engine optimisation (SEO) game is to engineer our site to encourage the major search engines to categorise the site in searches for our relevant keywords, then help us to rank highly for these searches too; preferably on the first page and ideally at the very top. As we’re doing so, we understandably need to review our SEO progress and see how we’re doing; see where our pages are ranking. But it is important to remember that we may be missing the bigger picture, and only seeing a set of search results customised to our personal preferences.

I’m referring specifically to Google’s personalised search results, which can be a great idea for your average internet user, but rather misleading when tracking SEO. Google’s personalised search results use additional criteria to rank search results, which go beyond the basic factors to produce a list of results that the search engine believes will be of greater benefit to you individually. It uses complex algorithms which take into account the sort of sites you visit and with what frequency to tailor results to your needs, but the problem this present to search optimisation is that when you review your work you are not seeing the same results as the average user. Since the site you’re working on may appear higher in your personalised results you may not be doing as well in the rankings hunt as you think you are.

In order to combat this and to receive the same general search results as everybody else, simply log out of Google whilst carrying out your Google search or append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar. This way you can see the same results as the general public and get a better idea of how your SEO strategies are being implemented.

SEO Proof Your Video Content

By Andrew Redfern @ 17th October 2011 8:30 am SEO News

Search Engine Optimisation is extremely reliant upon the application of relevant keywords or key phrases, embedded within passages of quality, descriptive and unique text. While most of us might visit a particular website to enjoy the videos contained within it, those videos won’t help it to be rooted out by the search engine crawlers.

These complicated algorithms take the search words punched in by the user and scour the internet for these keywords or key phrases, then order their returns on the basis of relevance to these words, authenticity of the information, popularity of the site and a number of other criteria used to decide the ranking of each page.

For this reason it is crucial to your search engine optimisation campaign to accompany any video material with plenty of descriptive, keyword rich text because it is this body of content that the search engines rely on to ascertain the relevance of the video to the search criteria. It could be that the search engine user could benefit greatly from your video, and might even be looking for that video in particular but without keyword inclusive headings, descriptions and accompanying information the search engines cannot locate the information.

You cannot underestimate the value of relevant text content upon every page of your site if you are trying to improve search engine optimisation, because whilst it might not be as aesthetically pleasing to the user once they are on your page it is integral to the majority of users finding the site in the first place, by engineering the page to appear prominently within search results.

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