Total Content Optimization

We all know by now that SEO is a vital part of a company’s web marketing campaign. Having a website, blog, or published articles on the web is great—but if no one can find your content in the search engines, then the material is useless. For years, optimizing a page was as easy as including your targeted keywords many times throughout the content and including them in your meta keywords tag. But now all those tactics are for the birds.

We thought it would helpful to compile a quick content optimization checklist of the fundamental methods of optimizing page content for a website. There are numerous on-page ranking factors that the major search engines take into consideration when determining how relevant a given page is for a specific search query.

While some of these factors may be more significant than others, it is important to utilize as many as possible to gain a competitive advantage in the search engines. Enjoy!

• The page content needs to be unique and present quality information that is useful for the VISITOR. Google has made it very clear that a web page should be build for visitors/actual users as opposed to search engine spiders.
• Each unique page should only target one or two primary keywords. If you are targeting more and the information you are presenting is worthy of its own page then do it! This allows you to hyper focus each page toward ranking well for specific searches.
• The page title must include the targeted keyword. Also, the closer the keyword appears towards the front of the title, the better.
• Your targeted keywords should be scattered naturally throughout the article. Do not force the keyword into your content as your ranking can actually be penalized for attempting to keyword stuff your content.
• Include variations of the targeted keyword (here at ideaLaunch we refer to them as secondary keywords) throughout the content.
• Include the targeted keywords in the url
• Use the targeted keyword in your header tags—most notably H1.
• For any image on the page, be sure to include keyword-rich alt tags
• Name your files with keywords in mind
• Use the <bold> or <strong> tag for your keywords

For more on total content optimization. 

Web Video Production Services Tied in with Sales 2.0 Marketing

Online PR News – 24-April-2011 –Barnegat, NJ - April 24, 2011 -- Companies with web video production services take a company director's idea and turn it into a high quality professional video which may be shown on the business web site. The movies are not only able to be used on company web sites, however. The web video production services may also be used to create videos for company job instruction, trade shows, webmercials, promotional DVDs, demonstration videos, or any video you can imagine. The goal for all of these video formats is one easy thing: to improve revenue. Having an experienced organization that offers web video production services produce a customized video advertising plan for your organization can make a spectacular increase in your revenue. Once you discover and hire a web video production services firm to create a video marketing campaign for you, you'll find that clients are most likely to be impressed by your website featuring the video, or even the video being played at a trade show or meeting.

Working on the video production with your chosen production firm will lead to discussions about your goal audience and their expectations of your company, products, and public image. Getting the right information to the right people is what web video production services are recognized for. Communicating your company's crucial ideas to prospects can be a bit intimidating for some people. Even for individuals who find making sales very simple will recognize that having a video perform most of the groundwork for you works. Seeing income flow in after showing clients a professionally designed, produced, and edited video is one thing which cannot be ignored, even for the most skilled sales people.

Using a company that offers web video production services(http://www.salesengineintl.com/) is one of the simplest methods to communicating why your product or services are revolutionary as well as why they'll be a good investment for potential buyers. The majority of people shopping for something only spend a few seconds deciding whether or not to purchase a product or service. This means that those first few seconds tend to be absolutely essential, and you can hook potential clients immediately with a well-crafted video. Having a professionally produced video to describe and display what it is that your small business is so good at is tempting to customers because it implies that your company is established enough to have a video campaign created. It implies that you believe in your company enough to invest the time, money, and energy into having a video campaign created. What these potential clients do not always need to know is the fact that the videos designed for your company tend to be relatively inexpensive compared to other promotional methods.
If your industry is highly competitive and your company needs a hand becoming established among the competition, hiring a company that offers professional web video production services
(http://www.salesengineintl.com/blog/) can set your company apart from the rest. It is a really sound business investment due to the rising interest in multimedia marketing and internet broadband connections. The majority of your target market most likely has access to a high speed internet connection, and having access to your website with information being conveyed through a video 24 hours a day is one of the easiest ways to take advantage of this fact.

Contact:
Purpose Advertising
79 S Main St Suite 4
Barnegat, NJ 08005
888-698-6609
support@kjprnews.com
http://www.purposeadvertising.com

8 Takeaways from ad:tech San Francisco

TopGetting social in real time
The recent ad:tech San Francisco conference had a good mix of topics (social and mobile everywhere), interesting presenters (although Guy Kawasaki and Arianna Huffington are hard acts to follow), and a great sense of energy. I walked away feeling that if you glanced away from this industry, you’ll be left in the dust as a marketer.

Here were my top eight takeaways from the conference:

1) “This is a more transformational time in marketing than ever before,” said 25-year industry veteran Antonio Lucio, the CMO of Visa. So true! Why? Mobile is anything, and anything is mobile. Power has shifted to the consumer. Everyone is multi-tasking, with one-third of people using three screens. The marketing funnel is now dynamic loops where consumers seek information from many sources and then become a source.

2) Given this, digital engagement and outreach must be integrated throughout organizations. For companies to succeed, digital must be an integral part of marketing, customer service and product development. Lucio also advises setting a directional goal for digital spend (Visa’s was 30%) and then tracking the impact on transactions, revenue and brand equity to find your right media mix. Hint: It’s higher than the 10% allocated on average today.

3) Define your media plan first: Given the power of the consumer, it’s even more crucial to “Think Audience First.” Lucio recommends starting by defining your media plan, essentially an engagement plan, based on consumer behavior with your products and their media consumption. Next, you should develop creative. Feels like opposite-land now, but it won’t soon.

4) The five (instead of four) “Ps” of Marketing: Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter Group, believes we all need to add people to product, place, price and promotion in our marketing plans. Marketing is now about shaping and steering experiences. It’s about talking to the mind and heart of your customers via trans-media storytelling, not with marketing-speak.

5) KISS now means “Keep it Simple and Sharable,” ideally in 120 characters or less so that it can be easily retweeted, according to Solis.

6) Resist the desire to “market to” your fans. Per Solis, your fans are looking for value. If there isn’t value, then they will leave—it’s assimple as that. From the customer perspective that means regular engagement with special offers, interesting content, fun ways to participate and give back, not marketing messages.

7) My favorite quote came from Lucio’s keynote as he talked about the social web approach: “Marketing will become like sex. Only the losers will pay for it.” OK, that’s a stretch, but you get the point. Yes, companies will still pay to develop high-quality products that consumers buy and recommend, to support their customers, and to raise awareness. The key is to seed, nurture and support it properly (marketing 1:1:many) to get more reach and frequency from your marketing spend.

Some predictions from Dr. Jeffrey Cole, Founder of The World Internet Project: 1. Screen time explodes, 2. Privacy concerns will reach a peak, but because digital content needs digital advertising they will get addressed, and 3. Social networks will fragment over time. Facebook will reach 1B UVs and then decline. We’ll see!

One more thing… Try a Yahootini, which was featured at the Yahoo! “Powering Performance” party. Here’s the recipe:

1 shot of Ketel One Orange Vodka
Splash of Blue Curacao
Splash of Raspberry Liqueur
Splash of Lychee Puree (or more to your liking)
Lemon Wedge
And then while you are being oh-so social, multi-screening and enjoying your Yahootini, share your thoughts about Lucio’s principles of the social web:

Sharing is the new Giving.
Participation is the new Engagement.
Recommendation is the new Advertising.
By Christine Beury

SEO, Paid Search or Social Media?

There are so many different opinions on the best way for a business to market online. Whether it is paid search, SEO or social media, there isn’t one consensus best option. As a business owner, you probably hear the following:

“Search engine optimization is long term strategy.”
“Social media is a long term strategy.”
“SEO is dead.”
“Content is king.”
“Paid Search is the safest way to achieve ROI.”
“Social drives brand awareness not conversions.”

Truth is, some platforms work better alone, while other businesses are able to leverage a combination of all three. For instance, paid search may not work well for a T-shirt brand but may work wonders for a lead generation company. Added to the fact that online marketing success is all relative to how you measure success (or conversions), it can get confusing really fast.

Many small business owners have changed the way they view a success. Social media marketing has came on strong in the past couple of years and marketers are beginning to measure successful conversions in terms of engagement rather than purchase decisions.

With this approach, they are able shape their strategy to create long term relationships with customers rather than viewing them as one-and-done. According to eMarketer, “as of March 2011, 44% of respondents to the survey used social media for marketing, vs. 28% who used SEO and 21% who used paid search.” This statistic can be taken with a grain of salt because it is likely attributed to the fact that social media is a friendly, low barrier to entry marketing solution for small businesses.

Many businesses try social media and realize that it is easy to do and hard to do well; they are taking an advertising approach rather than engagement strategy. This is why many small businesses plan to invest in social media for the future. According to the same eMarketer study, 44% of small businesses currently use social media and 29% plan to add to their social media marketing tactics in the future. The growth in social media as an ad platform has made it an attractive solution for fostering engagement, where a smaller amount of SMB’s are investing in SEO and paid search, 22% and 16% respectively.

While we know where the majority of businesses are putting their advertising dollars in 2011, each industry differs in effectiveness. 57.2% of small business respondents told Ad-ology that social media was at least somewhat useful at generating leads. The MerchantCircle survey found local small businesses were more likely to say search engine marketing was an effective channel than social networks, at 40.2% vs. 36.7%.

Social media may be easier to adopt initially for most businesses, but alone it will likely not be as effective as when it is incorporated equally in the online marketing mix. To ramp up your media marketing efforts make sure your business is equally investing strategies in paid search, SEO and social media in conjunction with your website.

By Matt Krautstrunk

Hulu Continues Losing YOY Viewers

Online video site Hulu had about 27.5 million unique US viewers in March 2011, according to new comScore Video Metrix data. While this was on par with 27.26 million unique viewers in February 2010, it represented a steep 31% drop from about 40 million unique viewers in March 2010.
Hulu also lost about 30% of its unique viewer total in February 2011 compared to February 2010.

Google Strengthens Lead

In contrast Google sites, which includes the undisputed leading online video platform YouTube, increased its dominance of the US online video space in March 2011. Google recorded about 143.2 million unique viewers, 1.97 billion viewing sessions and 275.6 average minutes per viewer. These totals were all significantly ahead of any competitor, with the closest competition coming from Hulu in average monthly minutes (215).
Compared to February 2011, Google increased unique visitors by about 1% from roughly 141 million, increased viewing sessions by almost 9% from roughly 1.83 billion, and increased average minutes per viewer by 5% from 261.6.
The only one of those metrics comScore tracked in March 2010 was unique visitors. Google grew its unique visitor total by about 5% year-over-year from 136 million.

Fewer Monthly Unique Viewers Watch More Videos

Video Metrix data shows that 174 million US internet users watched online video content in March 2011 for an average of 14.8 hours (888 minutes) per viewer. The total US internet audience engaged in more than 5.7 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.
Unique viewers were up 2.5% from 169.65 million in February 2011 and down about 3% from 180.2 million in March 2010. Viewing sessions were up 15% from about 5 billion the prior month, and average time per user was up about 9% from 816.4 minutes.

Tremor Media Reaches More than Half of Audience

In March 2011, Tremor Media ranked as the top video ad network with a potential reach of 96.5 million viewers, or 53.5% of the total video viewing audience. Adconion Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 81.6 million viewers (45.2% penetration), followed by Advertising.com Video Network with 80.8 million viewers (44.8%).

Other Findings

• 84.8% of the total US internet audience viewed online video.
• 135.3 million viewers watched 12.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (95.6 videos per viewer).
• The average Hulu viewer watched 26.7 videos, totaling 2.6 hours of video per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.

What Has Video Done For Us Lately?

by Adam Singolda , Monday, April 11, 2011

Andy Plesser was kind enough to invite me to speak last week at Beet.TV conference on a panel with Kevin Krim, Global Head at Bloomberg (disclosure: one of our customers) and Bismarck Lepe, Ooyala founder and president of products. We were fortunate to open the event on a day when the panels following discussed topics such as video strategies, things publishers do, what works, what's not and -- is Hulu a mega-web failure or not? (A question more or less answered below.)  

I thought I'd share some of the notes that were discussed by some key media leaders:

1.     "Content is king."Dermot McCormack from MTV was great, passionately articulating the importance of good content: "We keep reminding ourselves at MTV that, yes, we can try to deal with technologies, and discuss various solutions as much as we want to -- but at the end of the day, it's all about whether you produced a 'Jersey Shore' with Snooki or not. MTV did. Period, the end  -- and content is indeed the king.

2.     Personalized videos can triple your video views and revenue. Kevin Krim and I were discussing the impact of replacing contextual related videos that reside on story pages, topic pages, video pages and the homepage -- with personalized related videos. The uplift it can create in viewership and revenue is ~3x.

3.    We need  single advertisers to invest $100M in online video. Bill Lederer, CEO at Kantar of WPP, said the industry needs serious advertisers. In a later conversation with me,  Bill  said that the need is not for a "package" where it's a TV + online deal, but rather a direct deal to the Web. Bill also estimated that the largest video advertiser spends $30 million annually.

4.     Don't ignore your mobile viewers. Bismarck Lepe  said that as publishers launch Ooyala they see new audiences coming from mobile/portable devices -- from 5% of the total to start, growing to 20%.

5.     Blend expensive production with cheap ones -- otherwise you will not cover the cost. Ran Harnevo from 5min was provoking the panel, asking if Hulu is really a good business or not. He compared the amount of money poured into producing the content Hulu offers versus their revenue. This equation is obviously skewed towards the cost.

6.     Monetizing distributed traffic is not an easy task, but we're getting there. Andy Plesser was discussing with Ed Halsam, head of marketing at YuMe, the challenges advertisers face when buying video traffic that is not on the "MSNBC of the worlds" but rather on blogs, etc. Ed made a comment that if the distributed traffic is unsafe it's hard to monetize it, but there are some good technologies that are advancing a "brand safety" environment so advertisers can capitalize on that traffic.

7.     Good content sells. Mark Marvel from MSNBC.com mentioned that his company is seeing 200 million monthly video views and they are fully sold - because the content and the environment is something advertisers seek. Mark then asked the audience who would pay to read NYTimes online, and most of us raised our hands. The point was clear: good content sells.
Video is gaining increasing momentum in the industry. I see more people coming to conferences and panels than I used to see, and it's the topic of discussion for media leaders.

Those who have videos are seeking ways to get more viewership, and those who don't have videos are trying to get them through syndication and distribution.