Marketing really isnt black & white, the art is not black or white, infact green is my new creative grey as reaffirmed in Green & Black at the Marketing: The Art Of event I recently attended… another really engaging keynote speaker was Mark Palmer, Global Brand Director of Green & Black’s organic chocolate, his talk entitled ‘How to reposition an existing brand’. A really fascinating insight into their ingenious and acutely sharp marketing approach. I learnt Green & Black’s didnt just use the green angle to equal the green greed of green money that so many companies now so blatantly do, however their green approach has grown them a money tree, with sales rising from £4 million to over £40 million.

I actually have a bar, which I purchased from my local (independent) grocery store yesterday, however it was also available in my local supermarket, anyway the bar is sat on my desk with only a few pieces left – part curiosity but largely due to being exposed to some of their great marketing messages resulted in my call to action. Many of their greatly and simply creative marketing messages, which found me in Mark’s talk for the first time, delivered very well by Mark. The Chocolate bar itself, I chose a milk chocolate bar, also has substance as well as style branding wise – I’m sold, I really do like it!

If I’m honest however I feel the Green & Black’s brand can be delivered further by online channels, they have some very creative ideas that could be ingredients for better online marketing recipes, in-keeping with their ethical values, maybe viral isn’t the most tactful word to use in the food context, especially as Mark said he worked at Burger king when mad cow disease hit. However the same offline creativity that saw Green & Blacks put ingenious ads in the financial times telling bankers to “increase her interest rate”, and their newspaper and TV mag ’sponsorship’ of the clocks going back in winter and the dark nights getting in, blend in dark chocolate association, that creativity can melt further online.

Digitial media wise, first and foremost I’ve got to say greenandblacks.com is in need of some seriously applied SEO. Although position 11 (Google) at the time of writing this for the generic search of “chocolate” – they can and should be doing better in the organic search results. I never actually met Mark personally, but should you need some green organic Internet Marketing beans, I hope I’m a natural choice

A search on YouTube shows some sponsored links to GreenAndBlacksDirect.com – green could be the SEO and black could be the PPC, at times online marketing can seem like a black art, but keeping it green and free from artificial preservatives is fitting for online marketing as well. A Green & Black’s chocolate challenge video appears to be the most relevant, and seems a bit artificial and against their marketing grain…

With almost 600 views, the challenge video just scratches the surface of the big WWW chocolate bar in terms of what can be whipped up, Chocolate Mousse Made Easy is a more natural video but leaves an awful taste, its poorly produced User Generated Content (UGC), but contains Green & Blacks as an ingredient, over 2,000 views! So getting the marketing blend is an art in itself.

Talking of Green, as I usually do, I also had the pleasure of meeting and having lunch (green salad with green pesto Chicken) with Ian Green, from Green Communications. Ian had some real interesting points, and was a panellist on the Digital Dialogue session – discussing primarily social networking. His point about search engines being a reputation management tool was a particularly pertinent point, and I agree. Social networking is an intuitive way to establish dialogue with your audience, for example a blog like this. As with many tools that give you an edge, they can either be extremely blunt of sharp, and if used wrong can cause damage, but if used right can effectively chop down weeds (i.e. reputation management), and can be used to harvest a fertile online soil for great marketing seeds to grow into reality. If only I could get a fair trade and soil association thumbs up.

Right now I need to get ready for my virtual spring crop – I’m going to harvest some good greens.
I could just have some fresh spring onions, with duck and pancakes right now!

I’m back, and I hope this message finds you well. I’m burning all cylinders full blast on some very exciting projects at the moment, however my blog is now back on my radar.

This week I attended a Marketing Conference at the Sage in Newcastle, marketingtheartof.com – it was insightful and contained inspirational moments.
PR Guru Max Clifford was the headline keynote speaker, and he was a real down to earth human indeed. In a sense I have perceived Max as a brand himself, and in many respects he is, but it was good to see him in person and learn about his journey. Of course there was the celebrity noisy-notion in most of what he spoke, but it was interesting to hear a simplistic summary of what he actually does, the nuts and bolts of his world wide resonating PR machine. He mentioned 90% of what he does is not necessarily doing, but preventing – protecting his clients from damning and damaging PR.
It was interesting to hear he still does work for the Sinatra family. I know no more and wouldn’t dare say no more with the Clifford-Sinatra unit.

More insight from the event this week…

ARGHH! BEES! Don’t be afraid of bees, this post explains how bees can help your website sow and grow further, by getting the bees to work for you and not sting you, honey sweet SEO…

Firstly some relevant BBC News Buzz…

Before I apply this, I also learnt a new word, a Google define for hitherto returns:

So how does this apply to SEO? Well as I’m a fan of using metaphoric analogies to help explain theory, this is a very appropriate lesson from nature particularly in relation to off-page factors, and here is why:

• Think of the flower as pieces of web content – and the words as pollen, in fields of literally hundreds of thousands (often millions) of other flowers (pages), you have to make compelling, attractive content
• The bees are the users, the searchers, the readers, the linkers… the aim is to:
• attract bees, there called worker bees for a reason (they do some of the work to help give you gold pots of honey)
• lure bees to cross pollinate, i.e. spread your words via links – feed them like you feed searchbots, with good quality content
• overall make the bees buzz about your flower, making other busy bees more likely to notice your patch and land by
• Cross pollinating, i.e. getting your links spread about by users is a highly effective way to help with your off-page SEO strategy, and will yield more results.

So of course design comes into play, anybody can publish words on the Internet, but the words need to be part of an attractive design just like the pollen is encased in beautiful flowers. And maybe with Web 3.0 we could have nice smelling websites (just imagine ajax induced smell sprays to users), of course I’m day dreaming – plus as a hay fever allergist myself I’d be sneezing all over my keyboard and monitor it would be a fire risk, eugh! Imagine what certain websites would smell like;

I think Google would have a freshly washed linen smell – or maybe that other green smell… of fresh crisp money!

Sorry, I’m digressing, cutting to more relevant scientific blurb…

Of course the inherent underlying aim of SEO is to have your pages position higher within the results with greater search engine visibility, think of page 3 onwards as the dark depths of a rainforest that does not get much light or life. Look at the dandelion image in the design of this blog, it represents the seeds being blown and spread to aid your growth, of course this can be done by yourself however make sticky pollen and get other busy bees to help spread the seed too!

As always with nature and evolution, there is a trade off:

So there is no way to shortcut nature, in a sense evolution is a form of optimisation. So finally the word wobble, I must admit I never thought I’d derive a “wobbly” SEO theory, but in this instance it clearly represents the balance – putting in the effort (wobbling) to ensure seeds are spread directly and indirectly, attracting buzz (links), however don’t be desperate or you’ll snap your stem and in doing so break your morale.

Worker bees are good as they’re essentially your audience, and if they smell or see any bad over the top techniques, you will get stung!

Closing words: flower up your content, attract some buzz and your search visibility will grow, but as always… keep a natural balance! What a breeze ey?

As a relevant treat here is some YouTube buzz, check out this incredible speed painting of Bumblebee, unbelievable photoshop skills!

BUMBLEBEE – Speed Painting by Nico Di Mattia

Top of the SEO world to you all.

I apologise it’s been a while since the last post, searching took a while to return results and has largely been due to algorithmic updates within my whole life, however I’m now back on the radar, and results have been found!

Results 1 – 3 of about 128 for sean seo life. (6ish months)

• I’ve now made the leap and planted my own ethical SEO consultancy business, trading solely for now as a sole trader! RESULT!
• Got some ace feedback, leads and clients already, and working with some really talented people! RESULT!
• Replanting, nurturing and growing this blog is now on the plan of action! RESULT!

So overall I’ve been and am optimising my own personal and business life, all is well.
My aim is to grow some good leaves (posts) of insight, humour, research and other SEO related matters for you all to come pick and consume as you like.

Stay tuned. More to follow very shortly and frequently…

Just a quick update post – I’ve been busy moving house and gallivanting around my usual days antics – however I am still very much active! As always I’m searching for new opportunities, both personally and professionally. I’m truly putting together a Life Plan of Action (LPOA) to roll out which includes optimising many things such as my fitness, career and rest assured this blog is on the list.

Anyway yada yada yada, I won’t yak on too much and get lost in my self-search results, in true SEO style I will summarise the current state of play via the art of keywords:

direction, searching, improving, finding, evolving, optimising, researching, clarifying, devising, startegising

Time for my applicable philosophical reflection point:

Searching brings results, researching often brings better results!

Bottom line is….
I’m working on devising a continually improved SEO service – I’m still searching (and researching) my strategy thoroughly, I don’t want to rush things and cut corners. Loading, please wait…

A great new addition comes to the SEO field, brought to you by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land.

Essentially its based on Social Networking sites like Digg but specifically related to Search and Internet Marketing.

The site is still in BETA, however based on my play about and the fact it has many news stories and members interacting already, I believe it will do extremely well!

I’ve added it to the spread the seeds social bookmarking facility for each post.

Theres a lot of debate online about the optimal keyword density, proximity, frequency, plurality, objectivity etc. One principle worth keeping in your conscious is the following:

Keeping it simple: Content should flow naturally with descriptive keyphrases/words prominent.

I’ll look as specific ways to draw emphasis on keywords/phrases in later posts.

Wowza! Imagine having over 10,000 staff, global world …. wide web domination, and only coming out with $925 MILLION in 3 months, the pain of gain!

Still, I think its good in a sense, makes Google more on the ball and innovative to succeed. Eric Schmidt has stated Google is exploiting global opportunities, Google Earth is a fitting example (albeit blatant) but wow, goes to show what collating talent can do. Obviously money is a glue for the whole world sticking together, hopefully they wont become obsessed with the money, and remain true to their philanthropic values.

Regarding user experience, Google doesn’t overly complicate things by default, simplistic user experience is a key factor to their success.

Lets hope their quest for global domination doesn’t unneccessarily complicate what we actually see in our browsers and cause a distraction.

Bottom line! Google are still sailing along nicely and theres no fear of them sinking, which reminds me why I called this post “Google – Drunken Sailors?!?”, this quote surmises:

Interesting Webmaster World debate discussing whether link exchanges still work.

Google’s Matt Cutts is referenced as saying:

Cutts to the point (I couldn’t resist)! So as with a lot of things in life, lets not be excessive, balanced and selective moderation is the answer. Genuine and relevant link exchanges are a good viable way to trade traffic and ranking value.

I’m planning a more detailed investigation on link exchanges, lets not write them off just yet.

Apologies it’s been a while, just recently got back holiday/vacation (this should give a clue to where I went from and to) heres another clue: optimisation and optimization.

Okay its a tentative link, went from the UK to the USA for a while (see, keyword regionalism – I’ll touch on this more in future posts) – had a lovely time in Los Angeles – first time to the west coast, I hope to return v.soon!

I’m working on some more informative posts, and also a useful SEO aggregation tool, essentially a page you can bookmark and get access to a wealth of SEO resources from around the net – a map so to speak.

Stay connected!