Advice on SEO

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, SEO]. Courtesy of Lee Odden, who offers advice on how clients can stop themselves undermining investment in SEO.

10 Creative Traffic Building Ideas

[Tags: interactivepr, pr]. The Online Marketing Blog has a useful list of ideas for increasing traffic to your site, most of them revolving around posting to blogs and forums, and listing your blog where you can.

Interactive Promotiong using Web 2.0

[Tags: interactivepr, pr]. Here's some cutting-edge interactive promotion to aspire to: post-rock band Mogwai have developed a tour website that uses some great Web 2.0* technology to involve fans. To quote from the latest Matador Records mailing:

"we have harnessed the power of GoogleEarth-flickr-youtube mashup to Mogwai's tour bus via onboard GPS, a laptop and a scattering of cameras. See pics of the band lounging in their bunks. Read Barry's daily blog updates. Find exactly where the bus is at this very moment. (Franklin, Tennessee as I write this). Or upload your own photos and videos of the shows to the site.

"...Also click around the map to find links to Mogwai's fave eating spots, bars, BMX and skate parks plus much more."

*Web 2.0 definition: a horrible buzzword that is generally meaningless, but in this context means building on other people's technology (e.g. Google Maps, Flickr) to create something new.

Bad use of Flash

[Tags: interactive pr, pr, flash]. Here's an example of bad use of Flash - okay, the Habitat site may look lovely and use all sorts of fancy transitions, and it even runs off a database quite well - but if I'm a customer wanting to search for products, the last thing I want to do is wait to load up your fancy site - and, even worse, have a search function that has to load up Flash movies to display the results. I suspect Habitat lose quite a lot of impatient customers before that point, who can get results quicker elsewhere. Branding is important, but service is part of that, and if you take too long to serve your customers, even with search results, a fancy design counts for nothing.

Google isn't always the best option for advertising

[Tags: interactivepr, pr, SEO]. A clever bit of research by WebSideStory (*groan*) highlights the fact that you should look beyond Google when thinking about search marketing. Conversion rates at competing search engines such as AOL and MSN are much higher:

Median Order Conversion Rate by Major Search Engine at Business to Consumer E-Commerce

• AOL: 6.17%
• MSN: 6.03%
• Yahoo!: 4.07%
• Google: 3.83%