Dear Clients, don’t listen to anyone for advice, ever.

That seems to be the advice we (in the internet/creative/web/marketing industry) are  giving out at the moment.

To help with this, I’ve compiled a list of the most common experts and good reasons you could give to a client to avoid them*:

There’s a growing problem for campaigns across mixed forms of media, how do you link back to your internet page/site from a TV, radio or print advert?  Friendly, memorable URL’s are becoming scarcer as the internet gold rush means that most are already taken (even if not in use).

Some campaigns get it very right, using memorable URL’s for a campaign: how could you forget “Compare the meerkats”?

Others go for a subdirectory like “example.com/offer09” – not bad, but harder to remember and more likely people type it incorrectly, although they’d still end up on your site, its harder to track which visitors were arriving as a result of which elements of the campaign.

Recently there’s been a trend towards “search for:” for example the new “Search for: Change 4 Life“.

Are these a good idea? Well there are a few points to consider:

It allows your competitors to sponsor the exact phrase you are paying to advertise – see the PPC ads now listed against the pharse above.

Other entries could overtake your own as the number 1 ranked spot, a blog entry discussing the campaign is already in 4th place.

It IS more memorable, the campaign can be built around a pharse, which you’ve heavily SEO to appear.

Radio ads don’t need to clarify spelling “Connections, with an x” – great for remembering it, but uses up valuable Ad time.

For some campaings, a variation on this kind of advertising is “Search Facebook for:” and then using the group/fan page name as the phrase – that will avoid PPC targetting and it would be easier to complain to Facebook about rivals targetting a specific phrase, but parody groups/pages could easily rank next to your result.

Certain products are experimenting with 2D barcodes, too techy for most, although good if you’re targetting the geek niche I guess.

What are your preffered ways to spread the URL love? Did I miss any?

I’m a geek, I think we established that… as a geek, I like to try new sites and applications when they come out, often discarding them if they don’t offer any real business benefit.

Twitter was one of those. I set up a personal account… I could see how it was useful for certain types of internet users, to share ideas… I got that sometimes it was the best way of rapidly publishing information when you need to share updates with friends/colleagues or customers – like live blogging from a conference to say “this is on at stand so n so in 20mins” – in the US the SMS updates are free – but I didn’t really get how it was useful to most businesses.

I realised something yesterday, and I hold my hand up, I should of pieced it all together sooner..

EVERY status update on twitter (some people call it a “tweet”) gets its own URL – take a recent update from us about GimPhoto for example.

Yes, the link has a “Nofollow” tag… but… there is plenty of discussion about how the different engines actually use nofollow.

I’m also pretty sure that my rapidly rising traffic isn’t just because of my amazing writing style (ahem), I’ll be having a dig in Analytics, but I’m sure Twitter has driven traffic to this site.

Add to this the following post about Twitter and SEO (You should all subscribe to Blogstorm btw)

It makes me think that Twitter is not only a great way to communicate to a wider group of people (it is searchable) but it must help with SEO.

I’m NOT an SEO guru, but I’d love to hear from some of you that are!