BritMums Live! Reporters: SEO Tips & Legal Essentials

Beginning Blogging: SEO Tips and Legal Essentials

Presenters: Simon Halberstam and Andrew Solomon, Kingsley Napley; James Ray, Forward 3D.

Reporter: Gillian Nove

This session was well attended and the bloggers were clearly looking forward to learning more about both of these areas. It started off with the legal essentials and Simon was the first speaker. He identified at the start the areas that he was going to cover:

• Basics of libel law
• Reviewing products
• Copyright theft
• Online competitions

Libel law is covered by the Defamation Act of 1996. For a case to be successful, the claimant must prove that the blog has been defamatory – has it lowered the claimant’s “esteem” in others’ eyes? They must also prove identity – that it actually refers to the claimant. It must have been published to a third party and damage the claimant’s reputation here in the UK.

Simon then moved on to product reviews in blogs and whether it is acceptable to entirely honest i.e. give a bad review if it is felt that the product has not performed up to scratch.  Again bloggers must consider defamation and malicious falsehoods when writing product reviews. They should think about whether their views could be presented as a false statement or whether the review was published with malice. The view in the room was that bloggers were more able to be honest when conducting product reviews than many journalists, who were restricted in their feedback. However, given Simon’s advice, this is not always the case and bloggers should proceed with care when giving less than favourable reviews.

Copyright theft is an interesting area and it is not always sufficient to credit the source at the bottom of the blog. Sometimes it is necessary to get permission to use assets such as trademarks or logos, sometimes you should provide a link through to the source’s website.

Andy advised on competitions and identified 3 main types:

• Free prize draw – the most common type of competition used in blogs.
• Equally accessible free entry route (not premium numbers).
• Lottery. This is covered by gambling laws.

Think carefully about what type of competition you are planning on running and how readers should enter. In the majority of cases, competitions should be easy and free to enter.

There was a lot of information in this half of the session and consequently it overran slightly. A number of people were keen to get copies of the presentation after it had finished. However, it was well pitched at a beginner’s level and gave some good advice on using common sense when considering legal issues. If the blogger suspects they’re doing something a bit naughty, then they’re probably right. If in doubt, don’t post it!

The second half of the session was focused on SEO and there was great interest in this area, with lots of bloggers keen to find out some top tips on how to boost their blogs up the Google rankings. I had no knowledge of SEO prior to this event, so I was really looking forward to learning some new tricks! James was full of knowledge and clearly understood his subject area. He started off by explaining what SEO is and that Google accounts for 90% of search traffic in the UK. So it’s very important to point your blog and keywords at the Google search engine.

He showed how a search page was laid out and explained what it all meant, which was very helpful. There are 3 key areas:

• Paid search (in the middle at the top)
• Organic search (underneath the paid search. This is the SEO bit and is free)
• Google+ (appears top right, beside the paid search)

The search results are determined by algorithms which are a carefully guarded secret at Google.

James explained that search engines send out search spiders which crawl each website reading all of the text and content to determine what the website is about. This is why one of the most important things to do when planning SEO is to choose the keywords carefully and do lots of research! To help with this, Google has a really helpful keyword tool

The title tag (post title on WordPress) is the most important element on the page, so it’s vital to always place the target keyword at the beginning of the title. Add a secondary keyword if needed, then add an associated brand. Each page’s tag should be unique. The meta description tag (under the title tag) doesn’t help you rank, but provides a call to action via a click through. It contains 147 characters and the keyword should certainly be the first word, with two more mentions if possible.

James then went on to recommend a plugin to use with WordPress – WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is a free plugin and is very straightforward to use to help beginners get started. I’ll certainly be checking this one out myself!

Unfortunately, the session overran slightly so the last few minutes were a bit of a gallop. But it was a very positive and worthwhile session, with lots of bloggers keen to learn and find out more. Consequently, James had a small group of bloggers clustered round him afterwards as people wanted to ask him more specific questions. There were a few questions throughout and again, there were lots of requests for presentation copies. I’d suggest that this should be run as a separate workshop in future, because it was so popular and could have benefitted from more time for questions too.

All About Gillian:

I originally come from Edinburgh, but these days live in lovely North Wales, not far from Chester. I am married to Chris, with a son of 4 and 2 step-children of 14 and 18. I spent 12 years working in retail marketing, but left at the start of this year to set up my own marketing consultancy to try and achieve more balance in my life between work and family – the Holy Grail for working mums! Things have started well and the business is growing slowly, which is really encouraging. I’m a social media addict and can lose hours weaving my way between Facebook, Twitter and my new favourite Pinterest. It was my love of social media that led me to blogging. I’m still very much a novice, but it’s something that I enjoy and am looking forward to doing much more of!

Links:
http://www.facebook.com/serenmarketing
http://twitter.com/geenove
http://twitter.com/SerenMarketing
http://pinterest.com/geenove/
https://plus.google.com/106892416753422218887/
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/gilliannove