One of our great pleasures as a business which grew up in Edinburgh is to be part of this dynamic community full of amazing businesses, organisations and people. While our heart is now split between Edinburgh, Manchester and London, we still take pride in our Scottish roots.

That is one of the reasons we are very happy to be supporting L’Arche in Edinburgh – a fantastic charity which helps people with learning disabilities reach their full potential. Right now L’Arche is fundraising to build a fourth house in the Edinburgh area, to allow more adults to become members and take the strain off their ageing parents.

This is an incredibly important project, and we are very excited to rise to the challenge and raise a boatload of money for L’Arche Edinburgh!

Here are a few ways the Edinburgh team is going to be fundraising:

Rat Race Adventure – Four of our most intrepid staff members are really up for a challenge!  This 10k fun race takes place in Edinburgh and has a number of ‘obstacles’ to overcome.

Five-a-Side Football Tournament – We’ll be organising a five-a-side football tournament at the Bonds in Edinburgh. Come on down if you think you can take on Caliber’s range of continental imports.

Sponsored Car Wash – The whole team will be out with the suds, turning old rides into shiny new ones ready for the summer season.

Sponsored Waxing – We are desperately looking for a volunteer…. Know anyone? Anyone…?

Sound fun? Be sure to follow our Twitter feed where we’ll provide details of all these events, and how you can participate. Or better yet, get your own organisation involved in this truly worthwhile campaign.

To get in touch with L’Arche directly, email edinburgh@larche.org.uk.

Ellie

Ellie Quinn is the office manager of Caliber’s Edinburgh office. She ensures the smooth and efficient running of the Edinburgh office and takes the lead on a variety of project spanning IT, charity initiatives and team events. Ellie has travelled the world and then some living for spells in France and South America, and is a big supporter of local Edinburgh charity, especially the Rock Trust of Edinburgh.

With Pinterest dominating the Social and public limelight for months, it was only a matter of time before the business world came knocking on its door. Eager to tap into the fastest website to reach 10 million unique visitors, companies flocked to sign up to the hottest site and develop attractive Pinterest campaigns. And there’s good reason too; studies have shown that in some cases Pinterest generates more traffic than Google+ and LinkedIn put together! (See graph below)

Source: http://www.statista.com

However, before you start setting up your boards and dash off on a pinning spree, it’s important to first set out a clear strategy to define how Pinterest can help you and your business. Here are three effective tips to help you on your way

The best way to get your images liked and repinned is to upload original high quality pictures that will catch people’s attention. For instance, if you own a bakery, why not upload the pictures from your website that have received the most comments – delicious cupcakes, tempting desserts and so on? To generate traffic, upload your images by clicking ‘add’ then ‘add a pin’ and enter your URL to select the picture (you can only upload one image at a time, so repeat this process for each picture you’d like to add to your board). Consequently, if someone clicks on your image, they will land straight on your web page.

If you want to display your wonderful products, a great way is to create individual boards for specific items or topics. Leading retailers like Ikea have created boards to show off their collections, so that consumers can click on particular boards of interest and see a range of products they’re interested in seeing and/or buying. Moreover, you can also add prices to your product pictures, thus effectively turning your board into a shop window. This method will work to only attract people who are interested in buying your products, so that when they click and land on your website, you can convert their visit into a sale.

Aim to be the thought leader in your field – the Pinterest account where others get their images from. It’s simple to pin a few images then forget about your account for a few days or weeks. However, for your Pinterest strategy to be successful, as well as, your traffic and influence to remain high, you have to continuously keep pinning to keep your boards up-to-date with the latest website content, industry infographics and relevant images. Also, don’t forget to like and repin other people’s content to build a wider audience and following. After all, Pinterest is a Social website.

So there you have it; three simple tips to get your Pinterest strategy on the right track. You can also grow and engage with your Pinterest community by adding Pinterest buttons on your website and blog, including your Pinterest domain name on all marketing strategies, and including a ‘Pin It’ button on all of your images.

Let us know what you think about Pinterest and feel free to add your own essential tips?

Anthony Ngaithe

Anthony Ngaithe is a Social Community Executive at Caliber Interactive overseeing client’s social media accounts and providing reputation management. Prior to joining Caliber, he was the assistant head of Marketing at a fashion event company responsible for promoting fashion campaigns and acquiring sponsorship for company events. Aside from work, Anthony loves to write and read poetry, socialise with friends, play video games whenever he can and immerse himself in all things digital media and technology.

There’s no denying Bill Slawski is a bit difficult to understand. It doesn’t mean he’s not interesting and well worth the read if you can wade through it. So, to save you some time, I’ve summarised a few of his comments about web blocks and linguistic features.

Slawski writes about how a page can be broken down into segments such as the main content, header, footer, advertising, navigation, etc. Each of these blocks can be considered as “separate semantic units” that can be connected or standalone in relation to the page topic (they can also be physically connected or broken up into smaller segments).

In a patent filed on behalf of Microsoft in 2003, this analysis is described as an “…independent approach to detect content structure. It simulates how a user understands web layout structure based on his visual perception (emphasis mine).” If you think about how you read web pages (in a kind of zig-zag pattern, amiright?), the segmentation approach is not far off.

As a writer, I’m interested in the way content is structured and that includes the selection and placement of words and links. We already know that links in the middle of the page have more weight than those in footers, but what I didn’t know was that a search engine might actually assign PageRank for individual segments.

For example (according to the patent), a section of page with hyperlinked, capitalised words in short phrases, which appear in the sidebar or at the top of the page, indicates the main navigation. It sounds like common sense, but understanding how a search engine sees a page is really essential to SEO. These basic linguistic features – i.e. syntax and punctuation – are the means by which search engines are classifying and indexing pages.

*Puctuation Owl is impressed with your new-found wisdom:

So, if you write content for the web, it’s important to keep in mind how a search engine might segment it, but also remember that this patent was filed in 2003. A similar patent from Google followed in 2004. In other words, search engines have been thinking about segmentation for nearly a decade, and they’re continuing to improve their understanding of page semantics all the time. Watch this space!

Caitlin Smythe

Caitlin is a Digital Copywriter responsible for producing content for a range of clients. Based in the Edinburgh office, Caitlin eschews all the “girly” projects in favour of cars, insurance, banking, property and travel, and writes at a speed of knots. Originally from South Africa, she began working in SEO in 2007. In her spare time she likes karate, parrots, red wine, combat films and poetry. Sometimes all at once.