Luke Moulton

Stuff I like

The Power of Press Releases for SEO

Two weeks ago I launched a used boat classifieds section on BoatsPlus, one of my larger sites. Up until now, Boatsplus has been a marine showcase site; it endeavors to profile most of the popular outboards and power boats in the Australian market.

Getting traction with a classifieds system is tough. I mean look at what you're up against. Apart from eBay, Gumtree and tradingpost, there's two other behemoth boat classifieds sites. Who in their right mind would compete with that right?

I guess if Richard Branson had taken that attitude, we'd still be paying an arm and a leg for domestic flights in Australia.

So how do you even begin to compete with these guys? Fortunately BoatsPlus already receives a healthy amount of traffic, about 45,000 visits per month. However, I setup the classifieds section on a sub domain in the hope that it will co-exist in the search results alongside the primary domain... so it needed a kickstart from an SEO perspective, to get ranking.

Enter the SEO targeted press release.

I'd done some press releases in the past, but I'd usually written them myself and never had much success. This time it's been different, much different.

One week after publishing the release through PRweb.com, with the help of a professional writer, when I do an exact Google search for the release title, I'm getting over 12,000 results. That means the release has been syndicated over 10,000 times. Now, not all of the syndicated content has maintained the backlinks in the article, but even if half have, that's still a pretty powerful link building strategy.

The classifieds home page in now teetering on page 1 for "boat classifieds" and gaining ground for a number of other keywords.

Should Employers Consider Social Network Reach in Candidates

Assisting a client with some recruitment recently got me to thinking; should employers and recruiters consider candidates' social network reach? Perhaps there are some questions around this that need to be asked during the recruitment processes - taken on a case by case basis of course. It's easy enough to find out how many Twitter followers and LinkedIn contacts a candidate has, smart tools such as Klout could be used to asses a candidates online influence. 

Of course, I'm not suggesting that employees should be mrequired to leverage their followers to help market their employers' business. But perhaps, if a company has excellent culture, and their employees are passionate about the product/service being delivered, then their online influence might be a consideration.

What do you think? 

Website Navigation - stick to convention

I've always been a fan of the book "Don't make me think!" by Steve Kruge. As a book on website usability, among other valuable usability insights, it promotes the use of conventions that web users are used to. Conventions like having your logo at the top left, a navigation bar at the top or side of your page. You know, the stuff you're used to seeing and clicking on.

But sometimes people want to be different. I've heard it in many a business board room - "we don't want to look like anyone else, we want to be different". Then when the fancy new website launches and the bounce rate hit's 90% because visitors don't know how to use the site nor care to learn...

If you're running an e-commerce site selling stuff, don't try to be cute, stick with convention.

On the other hand, if you're trying to show off your creativity, go nuts, and take some inspiration from these crazy designers:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmashingMagazine/~3/ZU4Mt7jgisk/

Photosynth 360 panoramic photos on iPhone

Microsoft recently released a panoramic iPhone app called Photosynth which allows you to take 360 degree photos.

Coming across apps like these alway makes me think of the applications for businesses on the web. This one looks like it could be an excellent tool for many small business websites. Real-estate, accommodation, restaurants, tourist destinations, could all integrate panoramic photos into their site and this app could make it that much easier.

More at:

http://lifehacker.com//5793163/photosynth-for-ios-creates-360-degree-panorama...

Blog Curation with Posterous & Wordpress

Recently I've been devouring James Schramko's Fast Web Formula #2 DVD's and after watching a session with the "grandfather" of Australian Internet marketing, Ed Dale, decided it might be time to look into blog curation.

So what is blog curation? Truth be told, you're probably already using social media to curate. If you're using Twitter or Facebook to Retweet or Like information other people are publishing, then you're essentially curating content for your own followers. You're sorting through all the information that you come across on your daily online travels and selecting the best bits to pass on to your Twitter followers or Facebook friends. 

You have a pretty good idea who you audiece is (your followers) and you pass on content accordingly - often with a short comment of some sort.   

What's wrong with this picture? 

You don't own the content.

You're not building content (assets) on a website you own and you have no way of leveraging that content should you choose to in future. By leveraging I mean linking to something else or monetizing the content.

Curation with Reeder + Posterous + Wordpress + WP to Twitter

This process seems to work for me because my morning ritual includes my iPad and a coffee or two. I use the Reeder on the iPad to read the lastest news from RSS feeds I've subscribed to. Reeder lets you email a link, so when I see something I like open up mail on the iPad past in the link and a quote from what I've read, then make a comment on the post. 

This email then gets emailed to my Posterous email address which automatically posts the entry on my Posterous blog. I've setup Posterous to automatically post to my person wordpress blog. The WP to Twitter plugin is then setup to Tweet the subject line and link TO MY BLOG POST. 

Yep, I'm building social media links back to my own blog post which in tern comments on, quotes and links to another page of interest. Building content and links.... noice.

It's still early days, but that's the plan!

Ed talks about authority blogging and curation over at The Challenge if you're interested in learning more.

Designing Attraction with brand relationship engineering

An excellent article in Sashing magazine about how Apple is creating intimate brand relationships with consumers. A good explanation of why we lust after certain brands. 

> There are many types of relationships, but we can put brand-consumer relationships into three categories: acquaintance, friend and lover. When someone purchases a bag of apples at the grocery store, they’re demonstrating an acquaintanceship with apples. They’ve interacted with apples before, but there’s no deep attachment, and there has been very little bonding with the product.