Video SEO Benefits your Overall SEO Strategy

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Optimizing video has always posed great opportunities in the SEO world, and all companies should find ways to leverage this medium. The internet has become more diverse and more visual over time, and that’s not going to slow down. It’s easy to start with the basics of where you host the video, what titles, descriptions, and content you load into the video. The harder step most of the time is distributing the video and getting press and rankings from it. Often time this means instead of saying where are we hosting, or publishing the video it means saying, how many places are we going to post the video to. YouTube, Hulu, MySpace are just a couple of examples. How are you leveraging your social media channels to get visitors to see your video, and hopefully make it go viral? Do you even have social media channels? You should and this is content that those channels will find enegaing if you do it right.

One thing to be aware of with Google’s most recent change to their results page (if you haven’t seen it, it’s on the left sidebar) is where you can refine searches based on a variety of factors. For example, you can scope your search for just news, shopping, images, videos, books, blogs, updates, and discussions just to name a few. The thing I want to point out here is the more people are going to scope by video. Then when you get into those results you can further refine the videos by duration, posted date, relevance, quality, and even source. This expands on the options that we have to optimize video. Now businesses can take into account when they are making videos are they going to be short, medium, or long, and at what quality are we publishing. This also plays into the question of where are we posting our videos? All of these factors are going to continue to play a role in the evolution of video SEO and interactive media.

A short video or “webmerical” can go a long way with helping your web strategy and online exposure. If you are looking for a company to assist with a video or your online marketing or web strategy, contact us @ Bevelwise.

5 New Features Google Analytics Offers In The New Beta AdWords Stat Tool

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A couple of us Internet Marketers here at Bevelwise were just talking about this a few weeks ago. I had even provided this as feedback to a Google survey a few months ago that I would like to see, specifically goal tracking day parting on campaigns. I feel like those Windows 7 ads – “I’m an Adwords Certified Professional and day parting of conversions was my idea”. Google has beta released the new stat tool for AdWords data in their Analytics package. This adds a ton of features and ways that we can look at Pay-Per-Click traffic and how it is interacting with websites. If you’ve never checked this section of Google Analytics out before then go under “Traffic Sources -> Adwords” you will see a wide range of new options under that.

I thought I would give a little more insight about about some of the new features I’ve enjoyed checking out this morning and point out my top 5

  • The new Adwords Overview looks at your CTR and Bounce Rate metric side by side and line graphs it for you very nicely by default.
  • You can now see your goals/conversions broken down by day-parting. This is something we’ve not been able to see until now, and lets you see exactly what time of the day is bringing you the best conversion rates.
  • The layout of your Destination URL’s are easier to get to now, and you can see the statistics breakdown for how each destination url on your website is performing. This helps even further when we are looking at conversion rate optimization
  • You can see your “Keyword Positions” performance, which lets you pick a keyword anywhere in your account and see how many times it is clicked when it is served in the first position, second, third, etc.
  • You can see statistics breakdown for each match type you use. This means that you can see the bounce rate if you want for all your broad match types, and compare that to your phrase and exact types to see what is bringing in the most qualified traffic.
As you can see this a big addition to their already great Analytics package. There are so many ways to apply this to further improve Google Adwords advertising, and websites in general when we are looking at conversion rate optimization.

If you don’t already have a company that helps you manage your search engine marketing or website analytics Bevelwise is a SEM firm that is utilizing these strategies and all of the most current techniques to drive our client’s business and have successful web strategy. Staying up to date with these great additions and changes is more than a full time job for us, it’s our passion – which makes us good and what we do.

Is it Social Media or should it really be Public Media

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The term Social Media is not really accurate any more. Why? Because we have moved well beyond “social” into doing business. You want information to get into the marketplace, just turn to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc – and you can get it out to the masses more quickly than ever. Another reason, all of the a four mentioned have more value that being social if you use them right.

Also, one does not really have any control over what can be said/posted about them or your company or organization. It is really “public” media. Word can spread at warp speed to the public, especially if people deem it to be interesting. Several companies, public figures, and celebrities have “social media” site about them that they don’t have anything to do with – but all go into controlling public opinion of them. Some have to spend significant time to control their brand out there. The bigger your “Brand”, the more time you have to spend in this space to control your Brand.

I could also see the term “community media” being a potential moniker as well. All of these tools we mentioned above really go into creating a “community” of people who are interested in similar topics, products, information – and they feed off each other. That is an effective strategy to utilize all of these mediums. Add value to your clients and prospects, filter information for them, be a resource and partner to them as much as a supplier or vendor.

Creating an effective social media strategy is all about the execution of it and understanding how each piece plugs into the overall picture. You should hire someone to guide your strategy, but the information and content really has to come from someone internal while the expert will tweak that content for maximum effectiveness through “public” media channels. That guide for most companies that would mean outsourcing as would not be near a full time position – the right partner should have some understanding of your business and industry in order to be most helpful.

Local Search and the Multi-Platform Approach

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I was just reading this article from Search Engine Land about the topic above. While their “case study” method left a bit to be desired (why would you ever go from your own Facebook page to the yellow pages and put them in front of ALL of the competition make absolutely NO SENSE!), you do need to have multi-platform strategy to effectively keep your presense in a local marketplace.

You do need the local search methods, the directories, and your web content all to help you maintain your presence and potentially “own” the local listing, I just don’t see yellow pages being the answer. Social media would be more effective than that. I cannot tell you the last time I personally looked in a phone book. I also don’t go to online yellow pages unless there is something specific that I am not finding through Google/Bing/Yahoo. You can tell the writer definitely came from the Yellow Pages world.

As these mediums, try to revamp to become more relevant in an Internet driven world, there could be some value here, as web strategy is the “sum of all parts”. Local Search is something that needs a trained professional to help you with in order to maximize effectiveness and ensure you are getting your ROI. If you are interested, find someone (like Bevelwise) who understands it, can explain it, and has no reason to be bias to any one media – only to produce the results you desire.

Google Apps is ceasing support for Internet Explorer 6 as of March 1st

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Google sent us the email below stating that they will no longer support IE 6. So contact your IT staff and tell them you need to make sure you are upgraded. We suggest you get IE 8, Firefox 3.5, or Google Chrome 5 (the fastest browser) and for Mac users get Safari 4.0. You might a well upgrade to the latest version if you need to upgrade.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Anyone can be a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professional right?

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I was just going through a Search Engine Land discussion thread that was posted through their Linked In profile and it was all about “What passes for an SEO professional”. Needless to say it has 94 posts over a 4 month period – mostly about how people have paid for SEO and never realized results and trying to establish some sort of benchmark or certification to protect people from have a bad experience with Search Engine Optimization because anyone can call themselves an “expert”.

Really, almost anyone who builds websites would be an expert compared to the average business person. Part of finding a good source for your SEO partner is knowing what to ask for. Lots of web people can say a lot that sounds good to the average business person, and they probably do know what they are talking about. BUT…execution of strategy makes all the difference in the results you achieve.

I have had to explain to customers that they didn’t necessarily get “screwed” with their web site or SEO, but it is just because they didn’t know the questions to ask and the person they worked with just didn’t know how to follow best practices or execute to maximize results. There are over 200 factors that go into determining how a site will rank, and unless you have pretty deep pockets, you will have to rely on execution to get results with a focus on 10% of these factors.

It is about properly setting expectations and working to achieve those. You cannot guarantee someone everything they want unless you are using what is known as “black hat” techniques – but you measure you results and guarantee your work based on those properly set expectations. And black hat catches up with a site eventually.

Tips for successful SEO:
1. Be very specific with the keywords or phrase you want to get ranked
2. Understand that this is an ongoing process and you could check every hour of the day and see your own results vary probably up to 10 positions for the same keyword or phrase.
3. Ask for references and examples of work.
4. This is more of an ongoing relationship to be successful – doing it once and expecting it to last is going to be VERY temporary for results.
5. Don’t spend all your budget “up front” or for one time optimization. It should be a 6 month budget because then you have the money to adjust once you start to see results.
6. There are basics to effective SEO, but every client engagement should be based on what that client wants to accomplish so your “plan” should be based on your desired goals.
7. Algorithms change regularly – usually 1-2 major changes a year, so there is no long term solution other than to tweak your optimization and it takes some work in order to keep SEO “expertise” by your resource. If you are reading it in a book, it is already TOO OLD to really help.
8. If you are starting from ZERO and don’t rank for much of anything but your name, anyone should be able to move the bar for your results. Understanding if you are getting maximum value for your money is much harder for you to quantify unless they help you quantify it. Ask them. Ask for today, and ask for 6 months from today.
9. Be prepared to have more content and pages than you EVER had and have your site grow in pages in order to have enough content to create the quality scores and keyword density you need.

There are many more things to effective SEO, but I don’t want to go on forever. If you want to have a discussion, just contact us at www.bevelwise.com and we will be glad to answer your questions and help further.

Twitter to be Indexed on Google and Bing

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Both Google and Bing (with Yahoo SERP going to be powered by Bing they will really be one in the same) plan to begin indexing Twitter tweets in 2010. That will allow them to show the the tweets within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). This will more than likely be the first test for real time, non-paid, content to be indexed and shown on SERPs. That means you should position your Brand for more in depth, relevant, and timely tweeting because you will be able to move the bar on the search engines more quickly.

This will also help move Twitter from the social space into the main stream for business purposes because this will make it relevant on so many levels. Effecting real time search results? That is power. I would see Blogs getting the real time priority next(especially those using Blogger if you are Google) as they already help immensely with index-able content on a site. One would have to think that Facebook posts would be on the short list as well to go real-time

Emotional Marketing Messaging vs. Facts Based Rational Messaging

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I was just re-reading an Article from earlier this year in Advertising Age that talked about why emotional marketing messages beat the rational ones. They looked at 880 case studies, covering two recessions to see if there was any difference between the “good and bad times”. What was determined was emotional advertising was twice as likely to generate profit gains than the rational ones, with the campaigns that use both, splitting the difference right in between.

The biggest difference was the emotional marketing reduced price sensitivity, which helped companies to be able to hold more firm on their pricing (with a better economy, it would allow you to probably charge a premium). Emotional advertising allows one to create a sense of differentiation for your brand and helps it appear to be worth “more” to the customer. However, a person that would respond to more data driven advertising or rational messaging, is typically more analytical so it is expected that they are more price sensitive because they would be one that “does their homework” first.

Balancing this in the Internet age takes some effort because of how Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, and everything can spread more quickly – especially through industry trade channels. If you combine that with the fact that 80%+ people research what they want to buy online (especially if it is not a standard consumable good) then you have to make sure your message reaches across all mediums.

If you ask most business owners, “Would you like to be able to keep 1% more through your price or increase your volume 1%?”, holding that price would be more to the bottom line that the equivalent increase in sales volume. Your marketing needs to help you achieve that.

Success in Local Business SEO

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1.Non-Business Name Searches: It’s great if people searching the internet are discovering your website without typing in the name of your business. Probably most of these visitors were previously unaware of your business. This signifies that your website is ranking well for phrase that describe its location and the type of products or services.

2. Specific Service or Product Searches: If your company offers a exclusive product or service you will definitely want to be found for it. These keywords will point to your website because you have a search engine friendly website well optimized even for its more unique services.

3. Searches by Zip, Street, & City: An important component of Local Business SEO if having your address in the footer or on every page of your website. Your company can even gather online traffic for searches by multiple zip codes across your region. This is also a result of having a well optimized map listing. For example, in your Google Local Business Listing, make use of targeted keyword phrases in your list of services or products.

4. Synonyms for Products or Services: If your website is well optimized, it will be able to draw traffic from multiple keywords describing its services. Optimize for multiple phrases to describe your business’s services and products on pages within your website.

Have you locked up your Brand Identity for Social Media?

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There are several sites out there that people use for sharing information and more social media aspects that you should consider registering your name. Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook or Twitter, we would advise you at least lock up your name so someone else cannot steal it – which is known as “squatting”. Besides, just because you don’t plan to use either of them does not mean there isn’t the next hottest one around the corner that you should lock up.

This happened with domain names in the mid 90′s as websites were coming into popularity. Several Fortune 500 companies ended up in court trying to get their trademarked names back. There has not been any precedence set for Social Media and if and how companies can get control of their Brand once it has been registered by someone else who is not them. As reference, here is an article from Adage that shows you some of the big Brands that don’t own their Twitter identity.

You can see if anyone has squatted you out and potentially avoid that by visiting UserNameCheck.com. There are 68 different sites that someone could “squat” you on. Some of them you have never heard of, several are familiar and you can find all the different sites people could squat your identity on. You never know what might be the next big fad or emerge so it is best to lock them up and as new “fads” come out, register those as well, even if you don’t ever use them – you can at least know you are protecting your Brand when it comes to Internet & Web Marketing and Social Media.