The questions ranged from how they got in to SEO to what they consider to be the best linkbuilding method in terms of ROI. You can read all their collected answers on the 01100111011001010110010101101011.co.uk blog here.

Barry has also been invited to present at the upcoming Think Visibility conference in Leeds on March 3^rd, where he will be speaking on advanced SEO for ecommerce websites. Other speakers include Google’s Pierre Far, Dan Harrison from WordPress Doctors, Anna Lewis from Koozai, and many more. Tickets are still available to book online here.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

SDG, based in Armagh, is one of the main suppliers of a wide range of essential products to the Building and Construction Industry in Ireland.  We have been working with SDG for over 10 years and were delighted when they approached us to re-design and build their new website to more accurately reflect the wide range of services and products on offer.

This was no mean feat, considering the site contains over 250 pages and covers not only the main company (SDG Construction Technology), but also 3 additional divisions within the organisation (SDG Acoustic and Vibration Control; SDG Precast Technology and SDG Structural Waterproofing).

As well as including links to the company’s social media sites, we will also be working with SDG on their SEO and digital marketing strategies. The site went live this month and we look forward to continuing to work with SDG throughout 2012.

Click here to visit the site and see what we did.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

Having designed and developed a new website for Lagan Construction in 2011, we were delighted to hear that they won a £45 million deal yesterday to deliver civil and building infrastructure works at a major new energy-from-waste plant being developed near Ipswich.

The contract was awarded by recycling and resource management company SITA UK in October 2010 to CNIM/Lagan JV as part of their £1 billion PFI deal with Suffolk County Council to develop an energy-from-waste facility to manage the county’s residual household waste.

Lagan Construction will work with their French based process partner CNIM on the project at Great Blakenham which has an overall construction value of £150 million. The scheme received planning consent on 21^st July 2011.  Work is expected to start on site in early 2012 with the energy-from-waste facility likely to be up and running by December 2014.

The energy-from-waste facility was designed by architect firm Grimshaw who took inspiration from Suffolk’s open skies to create an eye-catching and unique design. The facility will feature a state-of the-art glazed visitor centre, landscaped wetland area and an on-site ash processing facility.

The £1bn value of the PFI waste deal is comprised of total revenues from the council, third party waste and the sale of electricity. Suffolk County Council estimates the contract will create savings of £350m in additional expenditure over the 25-year period as well as generating sufficient electricity to power 30,000 homes and saving the equivalent of 75,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.

Lagan Construction Managing Director Colin Loughran commented: “We are delighted to have won this prestigious contract and look forward to working with our Joint Venture partner CNIM in delivering this state of the art energy from waste facility for SITA UK and Suffolk County Council”

(Taken from a Press Release which first appeared on the Lagan website on 18^th January 2012).

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

We are delighted to kick-start 2012 with some great news.  We have recently been appointed as the new graphic design partner for Sport Northern Ireland having won a competitive tender at the end of 2011.

As the leading public body for developing sport in Northern Ireland, Sport NI has a vital role to play [in partnership with the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL)] to deliver on Sport Matters: The Northern Ireland Strategy for Sport and Physical Recreation, 2009-2019.

We are really excited to work with the Sport NI team, which will also see us working with other Sport NI groups such as Tollymore National Outdoor Centre and the prestigious Sports Institute for Northern Ireland (SINI), a partnership between Sport NI and the University of Ulster based on the Jordanstown campus of the University of Ulster.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

We have been busy over the last months working closely with our client Solvar (a leader in the design and manufacture of Destination and Heritage jewellery), on a few exciting new projects.  These include the design and development of new packaging for their jewellery ranges and the refresh and re-launch of a number of existing brands.

The hard work will culminate in some of the new and refreshed brands and packaging being launched at this years Showcase event in Dublin. In addition, we also designed the backdrops for the Showcase exhibition stand as well as a series of POS materials to support the brands.

Showcase is Ireland’s largest creative expo, featuring the very best of design-led Irish craft, gifts, fashion and interiors.  The 2012 event is set to be bigger and better than ever. Now in its 36th year, this years show has gone back to its roots – celebrating the essence of Ireland. Inspired by the Irish landscape and heritage, 350 of the country’s leading designers, manufacturers and craftspeople will be exhibiting between 22nd-25th January at the RDS in Dublin.

You can catch Solvar at stands D95 and D98.  We wish them well for a successful show.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

Personally I felt this was much ado about nothing, and that Google penalised itself only so it would be seen to be doing something. In essence Google never paid for any links, but merely paid for video ads to be distributed among bloggers – the link was an editorial decision by one of the bloggers who posted the video.

This sort of thing is not against Google’s own guidelines, but Google still penalised itself under the guise of being “held to a higher standard“. If such a thing were genuinely worthy of a penalty in Google’s search results they might as well shut down the entire internet, as you could probably find a similar link in almost every established website’s backlink profile.

But that was just the start of it, as then another revelation was made by Rishi Lankani about how Google appears to be manipulating +1 upvotes in its Google+ social network, in an effort to make AdWords ads more likely to be clicked on.

This bit of news has not attained the level of media attention of the Chrome link buying saga, but I feel it’s much more newsworthy as in essence Google is distorting +1 upvotes to generate extra revenue, encouraging AdWords clicks that might not otherwise happen.

And today there’s a new revelation made by the BBC about how Google was profiting from illegal AdWords advertising. Apparently Google was showing ads for illegal products including fake Olympics tickets, fake ID cards, and cannabis. Not only that but Google kept showing those ads after they were notified by the police of an investigation in to the matter, and only dropped the ads when the BBC’s investigative reporters followed up with them.

What makes this worse is that Google has been caught doing the exact same thing in 2007 and 2011. You’d have thought they’d have learned their lesson, but I suppose when 99% of your profits come from AdWords advertising you’re keen to maximise that revenue – the law be damned.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

We started the New Year off with the launch of our latest video for Top Fruit on the 1st of January.

The video entitled “New Year New You” is sure to strike a chord with many people. Have you ever started previous New Years with the resolution “must do more exercise” only to fail after the first month, or even week?!  Have you ever forked out on expensive gym equipment that never gets used?

If so, go to Top Fruit’s Facebook page and tell everyone what you REALLY use your old gym equipment for.  You could be in with a chance of winning 1000 euro. Good Luck!

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

This is entirely unwarranted, as SEO is a very powerful instrument in a website’s online marketing arsenal – if done properly. However, some of the negative connotations of SEO are due to inexperienced practicioners working off of incomplete or outdated knowledge, and thus not managing to gather any resulst for their clients.

Because search engines continually improve and update their algorithms, SEO is never static and always evolves towards new ranking signals. Thus SEOs need to change their tactics continuously.

However, not all SEOs do. Some still continue to work on old principles that no longer apply. Below are a few of such outdated practices that, if a ‘SEO expert’ recommends them to you, you should turn around and run:

1. Meta Keywords tag
Not to be confused with the meta description tag (which does have some use) the meta keywords tag is pretty much useless nowadays. In the early days of SEO, putting relevant keywords in a web page’s meta keywords tag had value and could help improve that web page’s rankings. However due to abundant abuse, search engines now ignore the tag entirely – and have for many years.

If a SEO recommends you use the meta keywords tag, is it a strong indication they’re not up to date on the latest SEO practices. In fact, their SEO advise is probably dangerously out of date.

2. Keyword Density
This is one of those recurring myths of SEO that seems to pop up with some regularity, probably because it sounds scientific and can wow clients. Keyword density refers to how often a specific keyword is used in the text of a webpage, with the myth stating there is an optimal percentage of usage for the targeted keyword.

The fact is that keyword density might have been a factor at some point in the past, but has been an utterly ineffective metric for years. Search engines have evolved and their understanding of the topic of a body of text depends on much more than how often a keyword is used. In fact, chasing after keyword density might be actively harmful, as it can sometimes be seen as a spam signal by search engines instead of a relevance signal.

3. LDA / LSI
Related to the keyword density myth, scientific sounding terms like LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) are sometimes bandied by inexperienced SEOs as proof of their detailed understanding of key Information Retrieval concepts.

While these terms do have some relevance to how search engines index content, the truth is that Google and its rivals use vastly more intricate models that are not only highly guarded secrets, but also far beyond the limited models of LDA and LSI. When a SEO uses those terms in an attempt to sound intelligent and scientific, chances are they’re just covering up for their lack of actual worthwhile SEO knowledge.

4. PageRank
Probably the most persistant of all SEO myths, PageRank (often mistyped as Page Rank) is used by inexperienced SEOs as a metric of a site’s value and authority.

The first sign of danger is when a SEO fails to make the distinction between PageRank – an actual part of Google’s search algorithm – and Toolbar PageRank – a numerical value between 0 and 10 that can be publicly seen with the right tools.

This is a very important distinction, because while Google allows people to see the Toolbar PageRank (thusly named because it used to be part of Google’s browser toolbar plugin), this number is a wildly inaccurate representation of the actual value of a website as it exists in Google’s search algorithms.

Toolbar PageRank is often quoted as evidence that a site ranks well in search engines. Unfortunately this is patently false. There is only the tiniest of correlations between a webpage’s Toolbar PageRank and its performance in search engine results, so any SEO that quotes this number as a valid metric is most assuredly working off of outdated knowledge.

There is No Excuse
Unfortunately this type of dated and inaccurate knowledge continues to be propagated every day by novice SEOs trying to build a reputation for themselves. Because there isn’t a proper accreditation for the SEO industry – and due to the speed with which the industry moves it would be hard to implement one – it can be exceedingly difficult for companies who wish to avail themselves of SEO services to weed out the amateurs from the professionals.

The fact is that there are so many good SEO blogs out there, run by very knowledgeable veterans of the industry, that there is really no excuse to not be up to date with current SEO trends and tactics. Staying on top of the latest developments in SEO is part & parcel of the job. If a digital marketer is incapable of doing this they’re not only lazy, but potentially dangerous to employ.

Below is a short list of some of the best SEO blogs that will keep you up to date on the latest developments in the world of search:

• Search Engine Land
• State of Search*
• Search Engine Journal
• Search News Central*
• Search Engine Watch

*Disclaimer: I am a contributing blogger to State of Search and Search News Central.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

We’ve all been there…either as attendees or organisers. So in the run up to Christmas, at a time when food will undoubtedly play a big role in most homes, we’ve prepared our “recipe” for creating the perfect workshop – a hopefully useful resource for anyone planning to run one in the New Year.

Recipe: The Perfect Workshop

Serves: 25-30

Ingredients

• Expert Presenter
• Keen Attendees
• Preparation
• Beautiful Setting
• Little Touches

Step 1: Take one expert presenter: The most important ingredient is of course the presenter. You need a presenter who knows their stuff, has the experience and credentials to back it up, can speak well and can get their point across clearly and intelligibly.

Step 2: Add a handful of keen attendees: The next thing you need for a successful workshop is keen attendees. With the right mix of topics and content, this should be relatively easy, as for most, getting a chance to chat to peers in your respective field is sometimes just as energising as the knowledge you acquire at these events.

Step 3: Mix in a generous helping of prep work: Even if you have the right speaker and the right audience, without preparation events like these can fall apart very quickly. A useful tip is to have the following sitting on desks as delegates enter;

• Glasses
• Water
• A nice pen
• Some paper
• A USB stick with the entire presentation material

Obviously some of these things are small niceties, but having the USB with everything prepared is a real crowd pleaser because it feels more like a gift than anything else. Also, knowing the content is to hand means delegates only have to take a handful of notes allowing more time to spend properly listening.

Also, a well prepared speaker, who has taken the time to pre-empt questions is reassuring for attendees and reinforces the calibre of the presenter.

If you have these things your attendees should be in for an excellent day, but the gravy of this recipe has to be the next two steps.

Step 4: Carefully select a memorable venue: A beautiful setting can make a workshop all the more memorable. Coupled with hotel staff who are professional to a fault allows delegates to really learn in comfort knowing that all demands can be catered for.

Step 5: Add some extra finishing touches: Finally, the little touches, probably the least important things in terms of getting something out of the day for a delegate are potentially the most important in terms of remembering the event long after the day is over. Here are some of the little things that can make a good workshop, great.

1. Beautiful food
2. An internet connection that actually works
3. A gift bag was every delegate

The food being beautiful may sound like an odd thing to point out, but there is a massive difference between dry sandwiches and bottled generic water and a variety of carefully planned menus. Think  a  selection of croissants, pan au chocolat and bacon rolls for breakfast; freshly battered fish and chips for lunch and burgers, tartlets and nibbles throughout the day washed down with plenty of tea, coffee and soft drinks. (Such was the menu at a recent workshop held in The Merchant Hotel!).

Booking a venue that has an internet connection able to cope with an increased number of users is key. There is nothing more frustrating for attendees who need to check emails during breaks than having a slow or non-existent internet connection.

Finally –a personalised gift bag for all delegates with various brand reminders linked in some way to your event is a nice finishing touch. Everyone loves getting something for nothing (like a USB stick) and a little bag of goodies can escalate the organiser from being good to being outstanding.

There you have it - a recipe for The Perfect Workshop. We would love to know your thoughts on what makes a good workshop so please share them in the comments.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

[This is an article originally published online in the Women In Business NI November Ezine on Monday 28th November 2011]

With over 100 years combined knowledge the print management team in Pierce Communications is one of the most experienced around.

Print & Procurement Director, and recent WIBNI Member, Angie Brown, leads a team of 6 who specialise in providing cost-effective and hassle-free print management solutions for a diverse range of public, private and not-for-profit clients across Northern Ireland. Customers include Coca-Cola, The Fire Service of Northern Ireland, Action Cancer and the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL).

Angie commented “We pride ourselves in offering some of the best print management services available, including web-to-print and online ordering facilities. We are part of The Pierce Group which was the first company in Ireland to offer web-to-print services.

This is a useful tool for companies whose print requirements are large but who also need to tailor outputs, sometimes to “individual” content. The online ordering system links clients to a secure website where they can receive a quotation and place, proof, approve and track orders, all online for items such as business cards, compliment slips and letterheads.  This is not only a cost-effective approach but improves turnaround time for the client as well”.

As an independent print broker, Pierce Communications operates a best practice policy of obtaining multiple quotations for every job ensuring clients receive the most competitive price without compromising overall quality.

Offering flexibility, quick response times and ability to meet deadlines Pierce Communications has a solution for all print requirements such as:
• Brochures and catalogues
• Folders and newsletters
• Posters and outdoor advertising
• Business stationery
• Tickets and invitations
• Penquin/Pullup stands
• Web to Print
• Pressure Seal

Pierce Communications can trace its history back to 1929, and Print Management has come a long way since then. The company has moved with the times too, and is now a fully-integrated communications agency offering a range of services from print management and branding, to web design and digital marketing.

For more information on how Print Management Services at Pierce Communications can benefit your business contact Angie Brown at angie@piercecommunications.co.uk today.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.