You can watch Barry’s video above, in which he explains the importance of relevant and keyword-rich header tags for online news. All of Klaus’s slides (in Portuguese) are available on slideshare, including Barry’s video as well as another video contribution from SEO Theory’s Michael Martinez.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

Tomorrow (9th May) is the first annual global accessibility awareness day.

Accessibility with regards to websites is essentially making sure that your content can be consumed by all, this means not making assumptions on what people can use to navigate or consume content.

There are plenty of events going on across the world to help raise awareness amongst developers and designers to the various accessibility issues, a full run down of which can be found on the official Facebook page.

If you can’t get to any events (I don’t think there are any in Northern Ireland unfortunately, this is something I wouldn’t mind trying to change for next year) then everyone is encouraged to see if they can spend an hour either:

• Navigating websites you have built or your favourite websites without a mouse plugged into your computer.
• Navigating websites you have built or your favourite websites with your monitor turned off.
• Navigating websites you have built or your favourite websites on your smart phone with accessibility options turned on.

I have done all these before and I can tell you that every time I do any of the above it is a real eye opener and a real test of your design and content management skills.

There is also a twitter account created for the day which you can follow here.

Let us know how you get on tomorrow!

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

We’re delighted to just have completed the new packaging of a great new range of soup products from The Big Pot Co.

Using a special heat resistant wrap, these new pots are a great lunch-time treat. The three new mini-sized posts are available now in Tesco’s and other good retailers. Check them out.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

Without much ado or fanfare, Rdio was rolled out to UK and France early this morning- almost a year after Spotify rolled onto their turf and launched in the US.

So what’s different? Well not much actually. It seems that Rdio has added a few local touches as regards their catalogue, but they haven’t gone as far as localising the entire service- you will, for example, sign up with the American style mm/dd/yy date format. Their pricing structure is also on a par with Spotify at £4.99 or £9.99 a month.

So where will the rivals go head to head? My guess is that it will be on their catalogues. At the moment, these are quite similar, and it’s notable that neither have access to Adele’s ‘21’…this is despite the fact that American Rdio users have access to it. So is there something going on in that corner with the labels? Remains to be seen.

With very little to tell them apart at the moment, will Rdio manage to make any headway with the Spotify faithful? If they could get quicker access to new releases, would you drop your Spotify account and move to Rdio?

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

So why should companies continue to market themselves and what happens when companies take a break from marketing? Is advertising less effective when times are tough? And are different messages to consumers called for?

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were two major breakfast cereal manufacturers in the United States – Post, the market leaders at the time, and Kellogg’s. During this time, Post behaved as many companies do and took the more frugal approach, seeking to maintain their position. Kellogg’s took the brave step of increasing their marketing budget and launched Tony the Tiger telling the nation “They’re grrrreat!” The American public bought into the brand selling optimism and Kellogg’s achieved substantial growth, overtaking Post to become the leading breakfast cereal manufacturer.

Not all businesses have the luxury of increasing spend when times are tough but a few lessons can be taken from Kellogg’s experience. They saw an opportunity at a time when competitor marketing spend was unlikely to increase and used this as a chance to ensure their voice was heard. Their messaging was upbeat and positive which helped position Kellogg’s as a brand that people would want to be associated with. And the fact that they maintained their position on consumers’ radar helped them appear stable and reliable.

So how do you influence consumers in tough times? Engaging with your customers is more important and easier than ever with the increase of digital channels. Word of mouth advertising can now take place on a larger scale thanks to the advent of social media where referrals and recommendations take place on a daily basis. Which means brands can find out more easily than ever where their customers are and what they’re saying about them.

There will always be a role  for large scale brand advertising to engage with a mass audience but by integrating with digital and direct marketing, an advertiser can more easily gain measurable results, insights and more effectively demonstrate the impact of their Marketing spend on a company’s bottom line.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

From changes in anchor text interpretation to over-optimisation penalties and ‘bad links’ warnings, Google seems to be firing off SERP updates at a machine gun pace. Their latest update is specifically targeted at web spam, and it seems to have wreaked a considerable amount of havoc in many sites’ rankings on Google.

Here at Pierce Communications we haven’t seen anything happen to our client sites aside from the expected ongoing improvements that our SEO campaigns are intended to achieve. And that is, of course, entirely expected, as we do SEO the right way.

With all our SEO projects, our focus is firmly on quality. Quality of the client website’s technical foundation, quality of the content and information architecture, and quality of the links we generate for these sites.

And because quality is the cornerstone of our SEO activities, we’re not particularly worried about Google’s almost daily updates. We know that what we do delivers value and that Google’s penalties are aimed at those who don’t.

Our tactics are not miracle cures that achieve top rankings overnight. It takes time and effort to do SEO properly, and we deliver long term value through improved search engine rankings, increased relevant traffic from all forms of organic search (web search, shopping results, image search, news, videos, etc), and more conversions on the client website.

So while SEOs who prefer risky shortcuts over sustainable best practices are scrambling to try and salvage what they can, it’s pretty much business as usual here in the Pierce Communications offices.

If you want to have a chat with our seasoned SEO pros about what we can do for you, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

On Friday night, some of the members of the Pierce Communications team headed off to the 12^th Annual PANI Awards in the beautiful Titanic building in Belfast.

All trussed up in our finery (including Toby in his stunning 8bit tie!), we mingled with some of the best advertising talent in Northern Ireland. We ourselves were nominated in two categories, “Best Outdoor Innovation” for our work with Fleet Financial and “Best use of digital advertising and social media” for our work with Top Fruit.

The awards themselves made great use of social media both on the run up to the event and on the night with the implementation of a Twitter hashtag #PANIawards. There was a lot of activity on this with all the attendees interacting and tweeting their experiences of the night. It’s also the first time that I’ve attended an event where I was asked to take my phone out and switch it ON!

We were delighted to have scooped silver for the “Best use of digital advertising and social media” category. We’ve been working with Top Fruit on their Facebook page for 6 months now and in that time have grown the page by over 300% and increased the engagement by 390%. We’ve aimed to make the page fun and quirky and use videos to help this- 2 of these were  picked up by moneysavingexpert.com, which helped drive traffic to the page. You can view the videos here and here.

Unfortunately we didn’t win in our other category but we went home thrilled with our win. Congratulations to all the winners and nominees on the night, we had a great time and hope to see you all again next year!

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This morning I attended a breakfast seminar at Google’s European headquarters in Dublin, where several speakers informed us about some of the latest news and products coming out of Google.

It was organised by the Digital Marketing Institute and free to attend for DMI members. I’ve been a lecturer for the DMI for quite some time, providing lectures on Search Engine Optimisation and Google AdWords for their Belfast-based courses.

The event was well-attended, with not a single seat left empty. The first speaker was Gavin who detailed some of the handy reports that now exist in Google Adwords that allow you to get extra mileage out of your PPC campaigns. An interesting report he mentioned were the Time of Day and Day of the Week reports under the Dimensions tab, where you can see exactly when your campaign’s ads are showing to potential customers.

The second speaker was Sarah and she had some interesting tidbits to share with regards to mobile marketing. She showed how easy it was to advertise when people do a search using Google on their smartphone, and how you don’t even need a mobile-ready website.

Sarah also showed us the howtogomo.com website, which is a very handy site that tests your website’s mobile-readiness and contains all kinds of handy tips and tools for mobile search marketing.

Sarah also shared the most interesting factoid of the day with us, which was that in the last month Google had, for the first time ever, seen a day where more searches were performed on mobile devices than on desktop computers. That more than anything shows how relevant mobile marketing currently is, and Sarah emphatically stated that if you don’t have a mobile marketing strategy, you don’t have a marketing strategy at all.

It was a very successful event, and the DMI’s Ian Dodson announced there will be a series of upcoming events for DMI members, featuring some of the digital industry’s biggest companies. I’m looking forward to those!

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

We recently had to pull together some quick stats to help guide our mobile browser testing policy, whilst this isn’t the only thing that is going to shape what we test on it will be one factor and I thought it would make sense to share the results.

We have listed out the top devices, browser agents and operating systems used by a selection of our clients.

The data was gathered from Google Analytics for some of our biggest websites. One was a commodity ecommerce site, one a luxury ecommerce site and one used car sales site.

It is fair to say that most of the traffic will be Northern Irish based, if not then mainly Irish or mainland UK based.

Mobile Devices

• iPad
• iPhone
• iPod Touch
• Samsung Galaxy S2
• SonyEricsson Xperia Arc
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
• HTC Desire
• Samsung Galaxy S
• HTC Wildfire S

Mobile Browsers

• Safari 7534.48.3
• Safari 6533.18.5
• Safari 6531.22.7
• Safari 531.21.10
• Android Browser 533.1
• Android Browser 534.12
• Android Browser 530.17
• Mozilla Compatible Agent 5.0
• Mozilla Compatible Agent 4.0

Mobile Operating Systems

• iPad
• iPhone
• Android
• Blackberry
• iPod

As I say this isn’t the only data we will be using but there are some interesting talking points that come out of this.

The biggest surprise to me was that many people use their iPod touch to browse the web. Given that the iPod touch requires WiFi in order to work these people are presumably either in their homes or offices (perhaps somewhere with open WiFi, but I can’t see the numbers being high enough). I personally never enjoyed the experience of browsing on the iPod touch, especially when I had another device near by.

The next surprise for me was that Opera didn’t show up in the results, from what I have read Opera has gained massive traction in the mobile market and I would have thought it was more than Firefox, but our figures would suggest otherwise.

I would love to hear from other people in Northern Ireland who have looked at similar stats to see if their top list is the same as ours.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.

Offers is basically a coupon deal and will act as a way for brands to finally be able to monetise the following that they have. At the moment, it is only available to advertising clients who will naturally have a larger following, but if it is rolled out beyond this, to smaller brands, it will be an opportunity for them to increase their following using social commerce.

What is also interesting is that, at the moment, offers are free to run. However, Facebook does recommend that in order to increase the number of people who see your offer to consider running an ad or a sponsored story, so it is highly likely that they will still profit from this in long run as brands spend more to make their offers more visible.

This is a post from the Pierce Communications blog.