Posts by Darren Jamieson

Adding regular content to your website keeps it ticking over with fresh, updated material so that Google knows to revisit it regularly to get the latest information for its index, but it’s not the only reason to add content to your site.

No, by adding news and blog posts to your website on a regular basis, about information pertaining to your industry, you’re ensuring that your website becomes a resource for your industry. It will rank within Google for a myriad of longtail search results – results that you wouldn’t have thought of optimising for and results that will bring you traffic.

For example, I was asked for a quote by Sky News yesterday for the news story surrounding the huge losses ITV suffered last year and their impending sale of social networking website Friends Reunited. Sky wanted to run a feature about how Friends Reunited had lost the battle to Facebook, making a mockery of the £120 million that ITV had paid for it less than four years ago.

The reason Sky News came to me was because of a blog post I had written last year about Friends Reunited becoming free to use, but how as it had already lost its market share to Facebook, it was too little, too late to save it.

I had not optimised for ‘Friends Reunited’ or for ‘Facebook’, as both phrases are highly competitive in the SERPs (search engine results pages) but because I had written about the two sites together, they created a longtail search phrase, the search phrase ‘friends reunited facebook’.

This, coupled with the high volume of quality content, ensured that the website ranked for phrases such as this, without even needing to optimise for them. It was then found by a journalist for Sky News researching the story, who requested a quote on the subject, furthering the brand.

So while writing content on your website does have the advantage of making sure your website gets indexed by Google regularly, remember that the quality of the content is equally important. Don’t get hung up on using your keywords and remember to write about news related to your industry. You never know where it will lead and what links and enquiries you will garner from it.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

With the huge rise in user-generated content and freedom of the web, internet users have much more control and power than ever before. This means that ail the hard work that goes into search engine optimisation, PR and marketing activities can be undone with a single negative forum thread or blog post. With ontine reputation management, there are several easy ways that businesses and individuals can ensure Google and the other search engines display positive content.

1. Make the most of social networking
   Creating a profile on sites such as Linkedln and Facebook can help reach a wider audience. Niche social networking sites are often overlooked. Find ones that are relevant to your industry.
2. Boost positive pages through SEO
   By optimising positive reviews, posting media coverage on a website and having a welloptimised blog, you can help ensure Google displays the content you want people to see. These practices should be adhered to regularly, not just as a reactive measure to negative online content.
3. Monitor forums and review sites
   Google Alerts will flag up any instances of specified keywords (such as your company name), ensuring that anything negative can be counteracted and positive stories or postings can be optimised.
4. Embrace social media
   Social bookmarking is a way to store and share web pages, so links to these sites are saved on the public internet. Use sites like del.ici.ous, StumbleUpon and Digg.
5. Update your blog
   Blogs that are regularly updated with interesting and relevant content wilt be placed higher in the rankings. Search engine spiders place more importance on btogs with fresh content, which helps to manage online reputation by ensuring that a btog is ranked highly over any other potentially negative content. Blogging also provides the opportunity to increase incoming links and build relationships.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

source: issue #187 .Net Magazine