HitTail works simply by capturing what keywords are driving visitors to your website and then using it’s algorithm it gives you a list of keywords topics for content creation. The list of topics are based on what keywords it’s algorithm feels have enough search volume but also based on current traffic your new content topics will likely rank highly for.

The benefit for web masters is that this data is proprietary and you are getting insights into content ideas that your competitors will never have access to.  In a world where exclusivity and unique content wins the hearts and clicks of users you can easily scale up your content marketing activities with a platform like Hittail.

One click to Order Content

Hittail has expanded it’s product features and now if you like a suggestion you can quickly click the “order” button to order a custom 400 word article based on that keyword.  They advise it will be a 2-3 day turn around and for $19  that’s fairly decent value considering the ease of ordering.  There are some further details you need to provide such as article title, article category, what is the goal of the article, a comment box for topic clarification and if you want to publish the post under your own name.

The best feature I see if the goal field which gives the writer a guide on what purpose you are having the article written for.  The options are informational, product reviews, encouraging reader action, or establish the post as an authority on the topic.

Integration with Basecamp

Just a few days ago HitTail announced a new feature that allows integration with project management platform Basecamp. The feature reduces the manual effort of keeping HitTail content to-do lists synchronised with Basecamp.  This looks like the first of many steps to increase the efficiency of HitTail as a content marketing platform.

Since HitTail has just launched an “Integrations” page you can expect far more platforms will be coming soon which would likely include a few SEO or Social platforms.

Get Started with a 21 day Trial

You can get started with their platform fairly quickly and easily and I recommend trialling the HitTail “pro” package as it gives you all the advanced functions and 10,000 unique visitors should be enough for most blogs initially.  You can also use it across a number of your websites as they offer unlimited domains to be setup and tracked independently within your master account.

Razorfish Offerings

• Strategy & Planning
• Advertising & Branding
• Interaction Design
• Emerging Media
• Social Influence Marketing
• Search (Paid & Organic)
• Email
• eCRM
• Web Analytics
• Technology Architecture & Development

Razorfish Portfolio

• Mercedes-AMG
• Ford Syn
• Honda Formula One
• Audi
• Nissan Europe
• Visa
• Oxfam (GB)
• Roche
• CNN
• Conde Nast
• Microsoft
• Netflix
• Sony
• TED
• The New York Times
• JCPenny
• Levi Strauss
• AT&T
• Carnival Cruise Lines
• Northwest Airlines
• Starwood Hotels
• Taj Hotels

Razorfish Office Contacts

Razorfish New York - 19th Floor, 1440 Broadway, New York, NY 10018

Razorfish San Francisco - 2001 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94133

Razorfish Berlin - Stralauer Allee 2b, 10245 Berlin, Germany

Some of Amnesia Razorfish’s Projects/Clients

• Microsoft
• Pepsi
• World Vision
• Tourism New Zealand
• Mountain Dew
• Lonely Planey
• XBOX 360
• IKEA
• Aussie
• Levis
• Ancestry.com.au
• Land Rover
• Channel V
• Expeida
• BT Financial Group
• Carnival Australia
• Hotels.com
• Citi Bank
• Channel 9
• Amway
• Starwood Hotels & Resorts
• eTrade Australia
• KwikKopy
• Smironoff
• Lynx
• Liptop

Strategy
Media Planning
Media Buying
SEM (AdWords)
Search Engine Optimisation
Facebook Campaigns
Creative Concepts
Experience Design
Visual Design
Identity Design
Motion Design
Technology Solutions – Intranet, CRM, Mobile App
Enterprise Web Analytics
Emerging Technology – Microsoft Surface

Amnesia Razorfish by the stats:
Ranked as Australian Strong Leader by Forrester Research in 2009
AdNews Digital Agency of the year 3 years running (06-07, 07-08, 08-09)
2009 Keynote speaking events at AIMIA, IAB, Adtech, Microsoft, Australian Gov Broadband summit.
Webby award winners 2008, finalist 2009
Over 25 awards in last 4 years
Approx 75 staff (Sydney)
Founded in 1998 by Iain McDonald and Terry Carney
Certified staff for Adobe, Microsoft and other technologies.

Amnesia Razorfish Contact Details
3/30 Windmill Street, Millers Point, Sydney NSW 2000 (02) 9380 9317
6/28 Freshwater Place, Southbank, Melbourne VIC 3006 (02) 9380 9317

Setster is suitable for

• Acquiring new customers
• Retaining existing customers
• Managing your customers
• Billing and invoicing your customers

What is Setster?

Setster is an appointment management platform that you can quickly add into your existing website without any coding and keeps customers within your website.  Setster is designed to convert your website visitors into bookings 24 hours a day and free up your time to focus on your business.

Why use Setster?

Setster is setup to work with Quickbooks accounting software to track the whole process but also offers integrations with invoicing platforms like Freshbooks. As most businesses are concerned with no shows, they offer turnkey e-commerce for prepayments or deposits to hold bookings.

What features are included?

There are a number of fairly advanced booking and scheduling features included in your monthly subscription cost including:

• email verifications and confirmations
• synchronise online calendars
• sms notifications on booked appointments
• automatic appointment reminder
•  accept partial for full payment
• add padding between appointments for travel/setup
• send marketing and promotional emails to clients

What plan is right for you?

Setster does offer a 15 day free trial plan but does offer 4 subscription packages suitable for every type of business starting at $19.95 per month.

• Personal Appointment Management
• Business Appointment Management
• Corporate Appointment Management
• Enterprise Appointment Management

What have you got to lose?

If you are thinking of spending thousands on developing a custom booking module, why don’t you trial Setster and increase your revenue by selling your spare bookings online!

The important thing to understand with SEO is that rules for ranking are constantly changing. What placed you on the first place of Google a year ago doesn’t apply anymore and what you do today will change in the future. It is vital that you stay on top of these changes because if you don’t, your site will get harder and harder to find. Yes, that means that you will have to continue to tweak content in the future if you want to stay on top.

What is Website Content?

You probably know that all the text of your site is content but so are photos, videos, tags, your sitemap, comments, affiliate links, etc. When content fulfils the basic need that the visitor has, they will stay on your page. However, if you don’t grab their attention or provide them with the information that they are looking for quickly and in an easy-to-find way, they will move onto the next site. Why should they struggle to find their way around your site when others allow them to get their answers easier? Therefore, your site needs to be clean, informative, rich in SEO and reader-friendly.

Prime Real Estate

Everyone knows that you need to be on that front page of Google to really get the good action but don’t overlook optimizing for Bing and Yahoo who are strong contenders when it comes to targeted traffic. In order to get the position that you want, your content has to be properly optimized. If you can’t do this or are uncertain, hire a freelance writer. The little money you spend will be well worth it when your SEO web content lands you in a desirable position.

Of course, if you have the time, writing SEO content is not nearly as difficult as you may be imagining. Once upon a time you had to irritate your readers while screaming your keyword or do little ticks like put keywords in bold or italic, this is no longer necessary.

Search engines rank based on quality content today. You only need to use your main keyword and a few variations where appropriate and then make sure your title is related and bots know what you’re talking about.

Sometimes getting a better rank is as simple as freshening up your content. Most sites are automatically set up to ping your new content to search engines.

Make sure your content is interesting, free of errors, factual and informative. If you are just throwing content out there that isn’t actually teaching your readers anything of value, you are no better than the rest of the sites and there’s a reason why you’re ranking poorly. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to make changes! Sometimes you need to revert back, other times your changes are a giant step in the right direction!

This guest post is provided by Neil Jones head of marketing for eMobileScan. Based all around Europe, they run a host of web stores all dedicated to providing their customers with solutions that will help to cut costs and increase productivity. Included in their product list are units like the Motorola MC75 and the MC9190

Comments are content, and fresh content is far more likely to aid your Search Engine Optimisation efforts, which in turn should help increase conversation through the extra search exposure.

However, the big question is how do you consolidate this chatter about your top quality content onto your own site? We outline some of the key areas to look at in order to create a strategy that will drive the conversation over to your website.

Listen

• Make sure that you know what is going on in the world of social media. By keeping your ear to the ground and knowing what’s trending on Twitter and what people are talking about on Facebook you can create relevant content that fits with the current online chatter. If people are already talking about an issue they are far more likely to want to read more content based on it, so the likelihood of them coming to your site is far greater.
• Use tools to track Twitter and Facebook trending topics and find out what people are looking for on search engines to create interesting, timely content.

Participate

• Make sure you participate in conversations with other people’s content and not just your own. By answering questions and posting insightful comments you boost your own credibility, and there’s always room to get a cheeky plug and back link in there.
• Make sure that your comments and links are relevant; no one will waste their time with anyone who has a reputation for spamming.
• When commenting on your own content remember to thank people who have taken the time to read and comment on your content. Try to build a relationship with users to ensure that they come back.

Ask

• Try to drive conversation by asking questions. You want your users’ opinion and by asking open ended questions with multiple answers you can try to start a debate amongst your users. Debates are great ways of adding fresh content to your posts and offer new points of view on your chosen topic.
• Ensure that you finish your posts by asking a question so your users feel that their opinions are appreciated and respected.

Cause Controversy

• While it can be risky, people love to respond to things they don’t agree with. If they agreed with the whole post then the likelihood of them commenting is low and chances of starting a debate are lower- what’s there to argue about when you’re all on the same side?
• Negative comments aren’t always a bad thing, as long as you respond in a proper and dignified manner and don’t turn it into a damaging mud slinging match.
• Ignoring or deleting bad comments is just a form of denial, plus people do notice when comments disappear. This can damage your reputation as much if not more than the comment, so don’t lose your online trust through not being able to take constructive criticism.

So remember- comments are content! Make sure you engage with your audience and keep in mind that people are more likely to respond to content that has already gained plenty of interest.

Image By @Scott McLeod on Flickr

There are other ways to drive traffic to your site and improve its SEO. So why not come and learn them straight from the experts at Brighton based Silicon Beach Training, where you can book yourself on one of our comprehensive and highly targeted courses such as Search Engine Optimisation Training and Android App Training courses.

Direction (Film/Movie/Ads)

• NAB
• Canal+
• Doritos
• Nike Running
• Orange
• Renault
• VB

Advertising Campaigns

• Tourism WA
• BT Financial
• Channel V
• The Chaser’s War on Everything
• MJ Bale
• Marcs
• Elle Macpherson Intimates

Contact Details

Level 2, 46 – 54 Foster Street, Surry Hills, Australia NSW 2010
+612 9211 7977
hello@gluesociety.com

Best of the Web

One of the oldest and most established directories available is Best of the Web! They also have their Best of the Web blog directory which is also one of the largest blog directories on the web, and offers you both a enhanced visibility in Google/Bing but an increase in the potential number of RSS feed subscribers. You can signup to the BOTW blog directory here but I recommend the one-time charge for the BOTW Blog directory submission as annual recurring charges can add up quickly.

Since BOTW has been around for so long and attracts so much traffic they also offer a BOTW category sponsorship product which offers you premier placement in your relevant category with not more than 3 ad spots per category. They also offer a free 30-Day Trial of their BOTW Sponsorship product which I recommend trialling and you can check it out here.

General Web Directories
Directory Journal is also a very high quality web directory that vets any submissions to ensure that it’s quality guidelines are maintained and sets a bare minimum submission guideline to weed out the crap and low quality sites. The don’t accept websites focused on adult topics, warez, racism and pornographic content. They have two primary listings one for regular and one for featured listings depending on your budget and how many links you are looking to build from a single directory.

I recommend the one-time charge for the Directory Journal Permanent Listing plans as annual recurring charges can add up quickly, you can check them out here.

Directory Submissions

There are a number of alternatives if you have a larger number of sites to deal with an ongoing SEO link building project with smaller budgets some solutions include services like directory maximizer.  Their service works with a number of small niche websites and directories and might be worthwhile as a small part of your overall link building project. Their service is different as they act on your behalf and submit to a number of directories you specified based on a board guide, so they may slightly faster but not as targeted as using Directory Journal or BOTW.  The upside of their services is that they do also offer a free ebook on guidelines and tips for SEO Directories you can download and learn from and do the process yourself.

Balance and common sense required

The biggest point around link building is that a high level of common sense and balance is required if your campaign is to be successful long term, there are no quick wins that last forever and also Google/Bing algorithms change everyday so what might work now may not be of any use next month.  It’s good to balance everything and don’t rely on a single channel for all your SEO activities as you might be find you are left out in the cold if one of those channels shuts down or stops working.  So go out check out some of the resources I have provided and be creative in your SEO campaigns beyond just directory submissions.

How to effective check site quality?
One of the biggest mistakes in link building is to acquire a link for the sake of acquiring a link, it’s not a numbers game it’s a quality focus.  This beginner mistake of just getting links for the sake of links can be avoiding if enough time is allocated to a project and client’s are resonable about expectations on velocity of link acquisitions. Growing your backlink profile too fast with low quality links can hurt your long term aspirations but also mean that quick wins are the only type of deliverable you will receive. One of the many tools to quickly sort the crap links from the quality partnerships is to perform a quick ranking check to analyze the value of a URL but also how strongly that URL is already ranked within Google. This gets complicated when you are dealing with multiple languages as what might be a high score in a French website might not be applicable when comparing against a English website, cross language link building is always difficult.  It can be very easy to pick up cheap and low quality links from foreign websites but the quality factors are often missing and you don’t have any real control over what other types of sites they might link to or what content they might be hosting.

There are also a number of tools like SEMRush that allow you to get a quick report on a competitor like Amazon.com, and you can see an overview of their organic keywords, any paid campaigns running along with estimates on how much you have to spend to get the same number of visitors, who are their competitors and even potential buyers/sellers of ads for monetisation/partnerships.  You can also look to platforms like RavenTools, OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSEO to gauge the quality of a website but this can be very time consuming if done manually for each and every link your plan on acquiring.

To buy or lease backlinks?
One of the big issues with AdWords is that many clients see it as an open cheque book they are always paying every month, but SEO done badly or in competitive industries can be just as expensive. Leasing backlinks can be a compounding problem as your need to keep pay more each month as you grow your backlink portfolio as you continue to play catchup with your competitors. A far better solution is to buy back links as part of a longer term agreement or partnership between your sites. If you swap your backlinks in and out each month this can potentially send signals to Google that something might be up with your link building process and will likely flag your website for an inspection by their quality team.

A far better strategy is to look at long term partnerships or one off agreements that mean you are not renting links for short-term gain but rather looking at a long term partnership with relevant websites and directories.  You can certainly look at following Google/Bing guidelines when acquiring links and a number of websites will ensure any sponsored/promoted links are nofollowed to reduce the influence on rankings, you should always be looking to acquire links that drive actual real traffic and visitors.  Focusing purely on links from an SEO perspective can be short sighted so focus on what might be more expensive and better quality links can ensure that you get sales/visitors from the link not just a bump in your rankings. If you are acquiring links you want to ensure they are on quality websites will continue to drive visitors for a long period of time.

Again you can look at SEM Rush reports to get a gauge on how much you should be allocating for a link building campaign and think long term not short term and use a platform like Scribe to measure and improve your website content to get the biggest bang for your buck. Look at established competitors they focus on long term and don’t lease backlinks for a few months, they look at securing these links forever if they can.

What is the biggest failure in link building?
One of the biggest failures in link building is not matching the client’s budget and resources to the task ahead. You need to consider outsourcing link building if you don’t have the internal expertise or experience doing it for a large scale project. You need to take a whole bunch of external factors into consideration before jumping into the deep-end if you want your link building activities to succeed. A large reason for a failure in link building is tied to a poorly structured link building campaign and a failure to match the link building activities to relevant content within your website. There is no valid reason why you should be building links for “example topic” if there is not real content within your website that match to that link, it only wastes effort and annoys any visitors that visit your site via that referral link.

If you are trying to go head to head with a online travel site like Expedia, you need to evaluate the task and match the end game to the budget. Expedia is already one of the biggest online travel websites but is also one of the biggest spenders when it comes to SEO with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent each each which has allowed them to build up around 2.64 million backlinks.

What are your options for outsourcing link building?

You have a number of options that you have options to outsource some or all of the task to buy back links to your marketing agency but make sure you avoid using any automated software or spammers that email your from Gmail addresses offering links from just $49/month….

How much should I spend on SEO?
There are a few ways you can calculate how much you should look at spending on your SEO activities to match or exceed your competitors, and platforms like SEMRush do help you estimate some of the cost if you were to buy that traffic. How much you should spend on Link building can be an easier task to calculate but can also result many times in a “how long is a piece of string” as some industries/verticals are very competitive.

I quickly tested visiting the same website from Bing and it showed my normal website but the same search query from Google.com.au was showing a different version and not the WordPress site. So this ruled out that it was my WindowsPhone showing a mobile version of the WordPress site it was actually an entirely scrapped version of my site now powered by Google.

I had assumed there was something wrong with my site and I didn’t think too much of it until today towards the end of SMX Melbourne when I finally had a chance to look at the issue in more detail.

I checked the same search query result in Google.com.au on my friend Mike’s iPhone and it was showing the website correctly as it should be, but the same search query on my phone again showed the scrapped Text version of my site.

The scrapped version of my site started with a message at the top of the page reading “this page adapted for your browser comes from www.flights-au.com.au and is not endorsed by Google.”

The base of my webpage shows a Google search box, with links back to Google search results or Google home. There is also a disclaimer that reads “Formatted for mobile viewing by Google”. You can  see the screenshot of it below.

My website is now also being served from this URL and not from the actual website URL. The big issue is that Google has scrapped my entire site removed any advertising banners and removed all of the CSS styling the template offers. The other issue besides robbing publishers of onsite advertising revenue it also means under reporting of actual website visitors within Google Analytics as there is no tracking script on this mobile version.

Google does advise that they might serve your website here, but if you don’t want Google to transcode your site you must specify by adding in an extra meta tag into your <head>.

<link rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” href=”alternate_page.htm” />

This issue appears to be happening to all visitors using Google.com.au mobile version and is not dependant on the website quality, keywords or the CMS. It is Google scrapping your content and serving on it’s own even if you set your mobile browser to load desktop versions of websites.

If you think about the growth of mobile search traffic and the amount of visitors using mobile Google this problem is quite a significant issue and seems to be focused on WindowsPhone users and not iPhone users. This is most likely going to be an issue for anyone trying to monetise their website but don’t have a specific mobile ready website….