Why use Video for online marketing? The reason is…

“Videos have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text versions in universal search results“

Videos are all the rage over the internet. The stats and survey results published by Nielsen shows that video search and watching is rapidly becoming a popular over the internet. There has been significant rise in online video viewership over the past few years. The recent Nielsen report points the emerging trend of video watching -

“The new trend among our TV and Internet homes shows the lightest traditional television users streaming significantly more Internet video via their computers, and the heaviest streamers under-indexing for traditional TV viewership. This behavior is led by those ages 18-34.”

The number of unique viewers is a whopping 143 Million in the middle of the year 2011. From January to June, 2011 online video watching time has grown to 44.5% which is 4 hours 39 minutes per user with an “increase of 4 percent from May” this year.

YouTube, as expected, holds the top position with 8.5 billion video streams and unique 112,764 viewers in the first quarter of 2011. The statistics nothing but reinforces the fact that videos are becoming more and more important in the sphere of digital marketing. If we dig deeper into the facts the largest audience of internet video is the adult lot (age group 35-49 yrs) while growing interest in mobile videos is evident among today’s youth (age between 24 and 35 yrs). High-end mobile phones with increasing display size further indicate that the trend of online video watching is not to die down soon.

So, this is something small businesses can capitalize on.

When you search with ‘soccer training’ it’s a list of videos that appears in the search result page along with website pages.

The search engine is smart enough to know when to include the video in the result page for a particular search term even if there is no mention of the word ‘video’. Or in other words, it knows when a topical video will be of more interest to the searcher and displays results accordingly.

For example a video on “how to train your dog” is much more effective than its plain text counterpart that may not appeal to the searcher at all with boring textual instructions and paragraphs to read.

Secondly, if we become more specific with video search such as ‘dog training videos’ the result is an assortment of related YouTube videos as well as video content from relevant websites.

So, incorporating video in your online marketing campaign can prove beneficial if it is optimized properly.

Now, the question is how to best optimize your videos for search engines?  

There are two ways you can optimize your videos. One is utilizing the video sharing platforms like YouTube and the other is posting video content in your own website.  You can upload video content exclusively on your website and then share it via social networks.

If you are a ‘dog trainer’ or organizing ‘soccer training camps’ or selling products like vacuum cleaner it’s wise that you create a video content for your website as well as YouTube as it is the most popularly accessed video platform.

Google Plus, the recent craze over the Internet, lets you share your video content within your Circle. Therefore, it is important how you optimize your video content for your website promotion.

Here is what you can do to get the best ROI with your video content:

• Upload your videos to prominent sharing platforms.
• Use popular keywords in the video title and add keywords rich description to it with your website address embedded in it.
• Don’t forget to tag your videos using some targeted keywords.
• Post video content regularly in social media and other networking sites if you want consistent viewership.
• For on-site videos create and use a video sitemap if you have a considerable number of videos on the site.
• Use informational keywords that focus solely on the topic, service or the products. Long tail keywords including phrases like “how to”, “why”, “what is” have better prospect when it comes to video optimization.
• Avoid transactional keywords that is, phrase including words like “buy”, “sale”, “free”, “cheap” etc. Studies found that use of transactional keywords in video optimization causes adverse effect.
• It is often noticed that videos ranking well on the universal SERPs also ranks high on its own platform. Conclusion is, if your video tops the ranking on YouTube chances are high that it will perform well on universal SERPs as well.
• Do make your videos easily sharable.

And last but not the least is to make real good videos that are relevant to your service/product and at the same time useful for the viewers. Good videos often shared over the social media by common users. And that’s the most rewarding part of video optimization.

If you compare Bing and Google search results with the key phrase “indian seo company’ the result varies largely (except from the first site that ranks 1):

SEO Factors: Google Vs Bing

Here is a quick comparison about how and where Bing differs from Google when it comes to SEO.

Page Rank: Since it is a method patented by Google it is obvious that it will matter for Google searches and not much for Bing.

Backlink: Backlinks matter less for Bing as researches show that top ten sites in Bing search have less number of back links than their counterparts in Google search. But anchor texts pointing to relevant and quality site matter a lot for both the search engine behemoths.

Page Content: Google’s indexing process is much faster than that of Bing. Hence, site’s that regularly uploads fresh content get rewarded by Google with higher ranking. But Bing’s indexing is not that fast hence freshness of content loses importance.

Flash: It’s a known fact that Google doesn’t like Flash based sites. On the contrary, Bing is quite friendly with Flash.

Google Maps and Local SEO

Why Small Businesses Need Google Maps

It can be well explained with an example. Today, law firms comprise a large portion of small businesses that also have online presence. One specific characteristic of law business is that it has regional boundary. Even though there are international laws, lawyers mostly practice in compliance with the law of a specific country, state or territory. A lawyer just can not get away by providing online support only. It requires offline meeting and discussions in person to turn a visitor to a client.

So, it’s important that your prospective clients find your location with ease. SEO for lawyers makes sure that the law firm’s site ranks well while optimizing for Google Maps can help you rank in local search (with place name in the key phrase) and pull in visitors who are looking particularly for the service you offer. In a way Google Maps relates online negotiation to offline business activity. This is applicable for other businesses as well.

Advantages of using Google Maps…

It’s free: Some major advantages of Google Maps are that it is free and easy to use. Website owners don’t have to be expert in search engine optimization to ensure optimal use of Google Maps.

Multiple map views: Google Maps gives users three options of viewing maps – normal view, satellite image and terrain view which they can utilize according to their needs.

Protected data: My Location feature can be utilized to determine your geographic location with advanced privacy settings to keep your data secured.

Geo-tagging: With geo-tagging application you can provide accurate information about your geographic position in the photos and images you upload on Google Maps.

Provision of Meta data: Meta data including appropriate title and keywords can also be fed with the uploaded images/photos on Google Maps to improve ranking.

Online reviews: With ‘Review Businesses’ option in Google Maps you have a chance of receiving customer reviews online. Positive reviews with your business related keywords can boost your ranking on Google local search as well as help in your brand marketing.

Dedicated mini-site for integration: Now with dedicated mini site ‘maps.google.com/getmaps’ integrating Google Maps to a website gets faster and easier.

Updating your Geographic Data on Google Maps…

You can update your geographic data on Google Maps to display the correct and updated information about your business location from time to time. However, it is advisable that when you are targeting a particular region or city as your market on Google Maps search, you should have your office/showroom/outlet physically located their.

Adding Google Maps to your website’s contact page is easy even if you are not an SEO professional. Common users can select the Quick option and then follow the step-by-step instructions to fill up the necessary information fields.

Bing-Yahoo Merger: More Time for SEO Strategic Thinking?

Search engine optimizers and marketers have long started speculating on the outcome of the merger. Let’s take a look how SEO and SEM will be affected with this merger.

More time for strategic planning…

Well, you don’t have to spend time for the big three – Google, Yahoo and Bing. Rather you’ll have only two major search engines to focus from now on. The time saved can be utilized for studying the Microsoft-Bing platform and interface, installing Bing Webmaster Tool, which was so far a bit neglected, and developing effective strategy for adCenter.

A little bit of adjustment…

Those who are currently running their advertising campaigns on Yahoo Search Marketing platform will have their accounts automatically transferred to adCenter with slight adjustments in functionalities.

Lot of expectations…

As the experts say, SEO professionals have a lot of expectations from Bing. If Microsoft can improve the user interface and adCenter Desktop Tool for Bing the alliance might prove to be a profitable one, both for the companies and for the webmasters.

Location Sharing and Social Media Marketing

Recently Twitter has launched location sharing feature, Twitter Places , which enables users share their physical location in their tweets as soon as they activate this feature. As you turn on this feature your geographic coordinates are shown via Google Map.  While Twitter is all set with this new attribute Facebook has kept location sharing (Facebook Places) limited for iPhone users as of now.  As you check-in to different places on Facebook it gets listed on the News Feed and on your friends’ home pages.

But are users ready to accept this exposure? It is learnt that many Twitter users are against going overtly public with personal informaton sharing. Well, it is still an optional feature. Even though people are apprehensive regarding misuse of location information many are glad to share their whareabouts with frinds and acquintances.

Shifting focus from personal view point if we concentrate on the commercial aspect we’ll see that location sharing can add new dimension to social media marketing. Just as search engine marketiners are turning to geo-targeted or Local SEO with the help of Google Places, social media marketers can make use of this new features on Twitter and Facebook  for their campaigns. It can be a great tool to catch up with the potential local customers in their network. The target customers can easily find them out as they search for tweets from their locality. It will be easier for companies to advertise about their local offices, events and meetings and create their brand awareness locally through social media. Thus location sharing online may drive off-line sale as well.

May be Facebook and Twitter’s location sharing feature is primarily designed for personal user accounts but with these two social networking behemoths competing each other we wouldn’t have to wait too long to see what’s more in store for business entreprenuers.

Article Marketing or Video Marketing?

Article marketing and video marketing are two aspects of online business promotion which are very common and very popular as well. The reason is that both are free and both are capable of pulling in visitors if properly targeted with related keywords. However, video marketing is relatively newer to article marketing, which is there from the very beginning of online business and web promotion.

Article marketing – an overused strategy?

Initially article marketing was doing well. Many search engine marketers have made money by creating one article, stuffed with keywords and links back to main site’s landing pages and submitting it to several article directories. But increasing competition, innovation of automated article writing software and spreading of viral articles degraded the quality of content inevitably. Moreover, Google got busy in improving its search algorithms almost everyday. So, the things got tougher and an alternative was required to stay ahead in the competition.

Video Marketing as an effective alternative

With the growing popularity of social media as internet marketing platform video marketing came as an alternative. Multimedia attracts people more than a plain article. A video with sound and moving images can instantly impact viewers mind. There is no denying that video has a larger target market. So, interesting videos were created and distributed across various social networking sites and video sharing platforms for branding and marketing. With time creating, viewing and downloading high resolution videos have become a lot easier. And it has been proved that like human users search engines also love videos provided you upload them with relevant keyword or key phrases.

Which one to choose?

And there arises the question, which one to focus – video marketing or article marketing? Well, from experts’ point of view, both are important. Both are capable of boosting your website’s rank on SERPs if targeted properly. Video may have a wider spectrum but articles are still valued as good resource. Google values contextual links as more authentic and natural way to earn backlinks these days. And in addition to article directories, blogging and guest posting on related blogs have opened up a new horizon for article marketing. However, good quality of the text content is a high priority. So, the best possible way is to combine these two strategies – article marketing and video marketing in your web marketing campaign to get the best result.

If you have not yet switched to social media for marketing your brand here are the reasons why you should opt for it immediately.

Cost-effective

Social media marketing is highly cost-saving compared to traditional marketing strategies. And to be more precise it is much more effective than other online marketing methods such as email marketing which is more of a one-way communication to clients and customers.

Direct and Interactive

Social media lets you interact with your clients and customers in more humanly way. Online conversation and quick exchange of messages work more effectively with users.

Impact of Recommendations

If they like your messages they can instantly spread them in their networks and most of us often rely on the recommendations by our friends. Thus you can get a large number of followers shortly by letting your social media contacts advertising for you.

Quick Turnaround

It may take a long time to build a niche with your website. Making way into the first pages of popular social media, bookmark sites and online video platforms can notably increase organic traffic to your way and in turn move up the sales conversion rate to a great extent.

Improved Ranking

Social media marketing has the potential to boost the search engine ranking of your website. You get more natural back-links to your site and it becomes easier to improve rank on SERPs.

More over, Google have already started indexing real time tweets and posts from some of the prominent social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook. And this real time search result works similar to Google PageRank – that’s what the SEO experts say.

Reduced Risk

You may argue that you can buy links from other website owners in little time instead of ‘wasting’ so much time behind social media marketing. Buying links might be an easier option but it in turn increases the risk of getting your site booked in Google’s black-list and banned forever. But with social media you get natural inbound links which is much more valuable in terms of search engine.

As per “2010 Social Media Marketing Survey Industry Report” about 91 percent of today’s marketers use social media to promote their business online. The number increased from that of last year’s 88 percent. It is also noticed that young marketers of age group 30-39 are more enthusiastic in using social media for branding and marketing purposes. Therefore, it is obvious that social media marketing is going to be one of the most powerful tools for online business promotion in the near future. The sooner the small business owners recognize it the better it is for them.

Addition of some new tags for in HTML 5 promises improved page segmentation that was not possible with this presentation language so far. Let’s take a look as how HTML 5 is going to benefit SEO page segmentation. As page segmentation leads to more accurate understanding of a particular page’s relevancy the new tag elements in HTML 5 are expected to prove beneficial for optimized web design.

Let’s take a look what’s HTML 5 has to offer.

• <Article> tag: The new <article> tag can be used to mark any sort of online entries including forum post, blogs and articles. In a way it will help the search engine to concentrate on the main content of the page. It gives a relief from using several <div> tags for better display and management of on-page content.
• <Section> tag: The new <section> tag for marking different sections of a page can have its own HTML heading. The tag can be used to exploit the relevancy factor. The search engine will treat the section containing the keyword in greater number as more relevant than any other sections and focus on it.
• <Header> tag: The <header> tag similar to existing <h1> tag in terms of functionality ensures greater flexibility by allowing marking long texts, even an entire paragraph as well as hard-coded links in addition to common header elements such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
• <Footer> tag: Similarly the <footer> tag can contain all the important information at the bottom of a page as well as a section.
• <Nav> tag: Navigational elements are important factors from SEO perspective. The new <nav> tag can be used to point out the set of links to other pages to the search engine.

With these tags it will now be easier for the webmasters to direct the search engine about how to segment the page. The coding will be much cleaner resulting in faster crawl of a page by the search engine robots. It not only adds to flexibility of the presentation language but also makes it easier for the search engine to decide importance and assign relevancy of a particular section with respect to a particular search term.

When you do SEO, you have to understand your client’s website. Few basic things you have to do before starting SEO for a client:

• Understand their target audience and country
• Understand their objectives – traffic, conversion or clicks on ads
• Understand the business – special features, how are they different
• Study the market; watch the competitors and their online behavior
• Start keyword research – consider client’s input and use your own knowledge to decide on the keywords
• Think of article topics that can create a buzz for the client
• Think of niche-specific online platforms where you can promote your client
• Find out web spaces where you can place banner ads to have a strong online presence
• Decide which social media channels can be good for the client
• Find target audience on Social Media and reach to them

With no understanding on how your client does business, you can do a lot of article submission and directory submissions, but you cannot think out of the box. To stand above the average you have to go that extra mile, do your own homework and prepare yourself to take up the project. And while preparing the marketing plan, apply your understanding in it. Unless you know the terminologies and industry-specific terms, you cannot write an acceptable Meta tag even!

And when it comes to Social Media Marketing or community building, this domain knowledge becomes more important. Without a fair understanding about the market, the product and the service, you cannot engage the customers in a conversation.

Stand out of the crowd, study your client’s business properly, know about the product, do some basic research and then start working on it.

SEO 2.0 covers them all. Businesses that are looking for web presence should not miss the other verticals of web search. Image optimization, video optimization, blog post optimization and organic search engine optimization – the combined effect of all can only help to achieve a strong online presence.

There are many plug-ins available for WordPress that allow bloggers to optimize the blog posts – such as adding Meta tags, introducing search engine friendly URL etc. Image optimization and video optimization cover a lot of things also. These topics require dedicated blog posts.

Even a lot of individuals and corporate houses go for optimization for name search – professionally called online reputation management. If someone searches for the name of an individual or a brand name, they should see the official pages related to the individuals and brands only.

Finally, with the increasing popularity of mobile web, companies are going for optimization for mobile search as well. Competition is tougher when it comes to mobile search as on web people may visit the pages appearing in the second page of the SERP. But on mobile, people hardly browse beyond top 5 results.

However, if more people start accessing web from mobile – then companies cannot go without having mobile website and without doing optimization for mobile web search. Get ready for the new verticals; otherwise it might be too late.