In case you haven’t already heard, top SEO experts from around the world collectively say that the top 5 ranking factors for global websites are:

1. Keyword focused anchor text from external links
2. External link popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
3. Diversity of link sources (links from many unique root domains)
4. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag
5. Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains

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It is quite easy to get advice on how to write a decent press release, from what to do with the first 100 words to best practices for your boilerplate.

It is harder however, to find the secrets to optimising your press releases for online distribution.

So we decided to share 10 suggestions from our experience in advising clients on how to get greater mileage from their PR efforts here: (more…)

The media has been abuzz about the Twitter phenomenon, especially after it announced its plans to monetize its platform.  Just last week, CNBC did a story on the announcement and talked about some ways in which large companies use Twitter. Its website gives some interesting (but unfortunately old) examples of consumer brands using Twitter for customer service, direct marketing,  customer engagement, and the like.

Unfortunately, B2B brands were missing from CNBC’s list of examples. Are professional services firms going to catch up?

We decided to take a look at how B2B firms use Twitter, by picking a small sample group and conducting a quick comparison online. Do they tweet as a corporate brand or as individual people representing the corporate brand? Do they have separate Twitter accounts for their thought leadership? Do they have dedicated Twitter accounts for different industry groups or for recruitment? Here are the results (see chart). (more…)

The announcement by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in late 2009 that they will be accepting non-Latin script for domain names marked a milestone in the history of the World Wide Web. Said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and chief executive, “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

Such domain names will be known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) i.e. domain names that include characters other than the letters of the basic Latin alphabet (the 26 letters “a-z”), numbers 0-9, and hyphen “-”.

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How have corporate blogs evolved? Not very much is probably a fair assessment.

According to the Fortune 500 business blogging wiki, as at the end of 2009, 79 or 16% of Fortune 500 companies have a presence in the blogosphere. That is up from 27 companies, or 5%, in 2006. That’s an almost 200% jump. Admittedly, that’s a very impressive increase. But when you think about it, that means 421 of some of the largest companies in the world, or 84%, have yet to jump onboard.

In another survey done by Forrester Research in 2008 (the latest research available on the topic), the number of business-to-business (B2B) companies that took up blogging actually dropped from 36 in 2006 to 19 in 2007. (more…)