Following our Silver win at the 2011 Midlands' CIPR PRide Awards in December, as one of the region's most 'Outstanding Small' consultancies, we are delighted to have been recognised again for our exceptional work and dedicated focus on cost-effective PR activity for a number of clients.

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Watch out, watch out, there's a link spammer about!

When researching possible future clients for our PR agency, one of the things we always check out their site in terms of how well it is optimised for SEO and this can sometimes lead to interesting surprises. One such was a UK trade association, where upon digging into the site we unearthed a nasty bit of 'black hat' SEO link hacking-spam, related (it appears) to that found by Rishil on his post about a link hacker.

Upon digging further, we found that when we searched for a phrase the spammers were targeting we found that 30% of the top 100 search results returned by Google were sites that had in some way been compromised without the (apparent) knowledge of the site owners. (If you're interested, the search was for a pharmaceutical product - think little blue pills for men online.)

It seems there are many, many sites still out there suffering from this hack and sadly, the spammers are using these techniques to score high results in serches for competitive pharmaceutical-related phrases.

While protecting against these attacks can be difficult (some sites were hit multiple times after being 'cleaned up') - you can at least protect yourself to some extent by ensuring that you are alerted should your site be compromised. 

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We like tools and apps that help us scale up our SEO and PR work. In many situations we build our own tools because we can't find the right product elsewhere (e.g. for #managing twitter lists and finding co-citation sources for local search optimisation). We've also found a few off the shelf products to be invaluable, SEOMoz tools and MajesticSEO are two of them, and we're always on the look out for others. Here we look at two products from Caphyon, Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) and Advanced Link Manager (ALM). 

Both products are offered with a range of pricing options (from $99 - $599) and are robust SEO tools, but they can seem complex when starting out with them because there are so many features (this is particularly true of ALM).

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We’ve been looking back over our year and couldn’t help but conclude that for a small, four-person team we have achieved some truly amazing coverage for our clients over the past twelve months. This conclusion has of course been cemented by our recent Silver Outstanding Small Consultancy award win at 2011’s Midlands’ CIPR PRide Awards but don’t just take our word for it…have a look and see for yourself:

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Profit drives most of the business world and that's the same for PR consultancies.

As PR agencies are people businesses, typically the model for most account teams is using the cheapest people to do the majority of the work...the 80/20 principle.

We had a conversation with a marketing manager this week and he had worked with a large (and in my opinion) very good technology PR agency. However, while the team, which consisted of two young ladies, was very nice, he complained that they just 'didn't get it'. Another anecdote is a marketing manager who was 'too embarrassed' to introduce the PR team to his technical division as they again didn't understand the company or its technology.

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Ever wondered about free press release services? Is it worth posting your news to a free press release site to get your message out to influencers, or perhaps you're hoping to use the service to build links as part of your SEO efforts? In this, the first of our regular reviews of free press release services, we looked at 60 different sites to find out which are the best and worst. We issued a series of press releases using the sites and evaluated the results in terms of both PR and SEO benefit. Read on to find out which sites deserve your attention.

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A range of auto and low carbon events ran recently, and we wanted to share our event’s success for one of our clients Evida. We arranged speaking opportunities at the Low Carbon Vehicles (LCV2011) event in Corby, Northamptonshire and the Low Carbon Expo in Cardiff, Wales. 

Evida’s Jonathan Shine presented  at LCV2011 on how commercial fleets can adopt low carbon vehicle solutions without adversely affecting their business performance and talked about electric vehicles and whether they are a commercially viable option for fleets at Wales’ Low Carbon Expo.

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