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Digital marketing digital pr online pr SEO

A question for Social Media Experts (and SEO experts). Do Tweets improve SERP rank?

Does Tweeting having an impact on SERP results? Google has certainly indicated that “social signals” have an increasing role to play. However, hats off to Fresh Egg for actually conducting some tests to see whether this really was the case.

You can read a full account of their experiments here.

However, here is a thumbnail sketch.

The term they were looking to rank on was “social media experts”. In their first test, they noted that the SERP position for their target article rose from 395 to number 3 within 24 hours. The key factor appeared to be the number of Tweets containing links to the page (which went from 5 in 5 minutes to 100+ by the end of the first day).

As Fresh Egg pointed out, there were other factors that almost certainly contributed to this such as the good Page Rank of the article itself, the post being fed into Google News, etc.

So the second test was therefore very intriguing. For this one, they put the content in a place that would make it very difficult for Google to index (ie poor Page Rank, no Google News feed, unrelated content context, etc).  The term they were trying to rank on this time would be “SEO vs Social Media”.

Four days after posting this piece, it still hadn’t been indexed by Google. Then they Tweeted a link to the article. It took only 2 hours and 30 mins to get the page indexed. By 12.30pm on the Monday, the page still had no back links. What we can conclude from this, says Fresh Egg, is that “Tweets had played an almost singular role in getting the page indexed. Whilst it is still not entirely clear that tweets alone can get a page indexed or help climb rankings, what is clear is that tweeting out a page on relatively powerful twitter accounts DOES help SEO.”

As Fresh Egg say at the end of their post, “The final test is to rank better for a page which is already indexed and placing well on a competitive term where the content on the page doesn’t or hasn’t changed and this is where you guys come in 🙂 Give it a go and let us know how you get on.”

I’m in. I’ll report back to Fresh Egg and everyone else on what findings I come up with.

In the meantime, I’m going to Tweet about this post and see what impact this has on the ranking for this page around the terms Social Media Experts and SEO experts. How very meta.

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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

MarCom Professional is dead. Long live the CIPR Conversation.

Since July 2009, I’ve been a regular contributor to the popular Marcom Professional site. Indeed, every fortnight, subscribers have been regaled with my peculiar thoughts on all things PR and marcom related via the Friday Round Up e-mail newsletter (every other week, the inimitable Mr Philip Sheldrake has done the honours).

As of next Monday (April 11th), Marcom Professional will be no more. But shed no tears. It is transmogrifying into the CIPR Conversation. This is good news. It brings a hugely expanded potential audience for contributor content. I also hope that it will provide CIPR members and the wider PR community with an excellent platform for learning and debate about the issues that really do matter to our profession.

I ‘d like to  end by saying a big thank you to all of our existing Marcom Pro visitors and Friday Round Up readers. Our e-mail newsletters have a satisfyingly high open and click through rate – I hope you’ll continue to enjoy the content (and the conversation) – as well as benefitting from the expanded community that the new site will deliver.

Enough gushing – see below for the official announcement from the CIPR. Let The Conversation commence.

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The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) is launching ‘The Conversation’ at its social media conference, 11 April. The Conversation is your one-stop shop for great blog posts by practitioners, consultancies, academia and students, from the UK and further afield. Syndicating your personal or company blog couldn’t be easier, allowing the wider PR community to find your content, find your personal, business and consultancy profiles, and respond to your news and points of view. Everyone is welcome to register themselves and their organisation.
In the spirit of The Conversation, the CIPR has invited some of the UK’s keenest PR bloggers to break this news.

There will be no need to ‘make friends’ all over again on The Conversation. Simply give your existing social networks permission to allow us to take a look at your network, your social graph as some call it, and we’ll make sure those relationships are established immediately on The Conversation (ie you won’t need to share your passwords with us). Hey presto, instant social glue.

The Conversation promises to be an exciting addition to the CIPR’s website, at least it will be with your input. It won’t match Facebook for functionality or LinkedIn for seeing who’s connected to whom, but it will be the first such attempt by a professional body to our knowledge. We hope you’ll jump in, and work with us as we iron out the inevitable glitch or two.

Following the successes of the CIPR social media panel – CIPR TV, ‘Social Summer’ events in 2010 and 2011, social media measurement guidance and input to ASA regulation – it’s apt that The Conversation will be launched at the CIPR social media conference. We hope to see you there.