Transcendigital blog

Online video has been explored as marketing tool by large companies, and as a
buzz-builder for content producers of all sizes. But what about small
businesses: can they jump into the fray and get noticed by video audiences?
The short answer is yes. Let’s look at some formats and how they can fit into
your small business marketing plans.

Behind-the-scenes videos

The concept here is that people will be curious about topics that are related
to your business, and that you can leverage their curiosity to inform them
about your business. You’re basically playing the role of a Discovery Channel
producer, looking for interesting tasks, processes, or people that are
involved in your business. If you’re a clothing retailer, you’re shooting the
prep area for a fashion show. If you’re a machinist, you’re showing-off the
laser cutting machine and the stained-glass window you made with it.

From a search standpoint, the goal is to pick an interesting, creative topic
that also happens to be squarely in the path of a search audience. If you’re a
car mechanic, then “hypermiling” could be the hot keyphrase you’d want to
focus on, because many people have become intrigued by the concept of
extending their car’s fuel economy.

How-to videos

A close cousin to the behind-the-scenes approach, the idea behind producing a
how-to video is to catch the attention of people who have some interest in
your field, but have some immediate need that you can address. For example, a
men’s clothing store can produce a video showing all the ways to properly knot
a necktie. The person searching for this information may not be in the market
for a new tie, but if you show them a few sharp designs, then you can count on
some viewers visiting your site to see what you have in stock.

How-to videos are also ideal for contractors and other forms of skilled labor.
Even your best customers will be inclined to try doing simpler tasks
themselves. Producing a video on installing a shower head probably won’t cost
you any business, but it will increase the odds of you becoming the go-to
person for bigger jobs.

Original Article posted here:searchengineland.com/online-video-tactics-for-small-businesses-15858.php

Keyword targeting can sometimes feel like a guessing game. Potential customers
are performing hundreds of millions of searches on Google, most of which you
don’t even know about. With so many searches, you have to guess which ones
might be relevant for each of your landing pages, and hope you find the right
audience for your AdWords campaigns. That’s where the Search-based Keyword
Tool (beta) comes in. With this new tool you can get a better sense of what
your potential customers are searching for and which keywords you should
advertise on.

Here’s the scoop: you know that the Google search engine starts with searches
conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword
targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by
starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are
searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool
does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website’s
content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly
relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns. This helps
you take advantage of missed opportunities.

Original Post Continues here:adwords.blogspot.com/2008/11/announcing-search-based-keyword-tool.html

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a recording of the webinar they hosted, along with the Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer team. The webinar is available in a 60 minute YouTube video.

For more details click here:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-trifecta-recording-now-available.html

Additional Resource:searchengineland.com/080718-084348.php

Adobe announced their final release of the Acrobat Pro 9 software line, touting new video capabilities that are meant to provide a wider range of interactive publishing capabilities, along with improved engagement methods for end users. What’s unmentioned in Adobe’s press releases on the Acrobat 9 series is that there are some special benefits for search engine marketers. Acrobat 9 may be the first all-inclusive software program that can implement, distribute and event optimize video for search results, into a user-friendly and inclusive software platform. That’s a big plus for most search optimizers who are looking to take advantage of the video space, but lack video post-production technical skills.

Here are some of Acrobat 9’s video features and the new advantages for SEOs with the latest software release:

Video SEO benefit - simpler production-What that means for SEOs is they no longer have to understand special video conversion requirements and encoding to multiple file formats. With Acrobat 9, even Microsoft Powerpoint files and Word files with video can be turned into animated, optimizable PDFs.

SEO benefit - social media optimization-Acrobat 9 also allows for embedded video to include comment tags from multiple viewers.

SEO benefit - a strong compliment to your existing video SEO strategy-You can provide a highly complimentary means of having indexable PDF text content around all of your video files, and may even be used as an acceptable duplicate of your existing content without incurring any search engine spam penalties.

Original Article found here:searchengineland.com/080710-163010.php

Search Engine Watch Forums have noted that Google has changed the definition they used for what a doorway page is.

On the Google Page, it now reads:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.

The cached version still has the previous version:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Key sentences, words and adjectives have been removed and replaced by more generic terms. Google seems to have re-written it to discuss less of the technical nature of the page and more of the desired outcome of such a page.

In any event, all SEOs should know about the change.

Article Resource:www.seroundtable.com/archives/017282.html

Additional Resource:www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

Google’s News Blog announced the addition of “related searches” at the bottom of Google News search results. Related searches are “automatically generated based on an algorithm to determine terms related to your search,” said Google.

It might be a good way to learn what is related in the news for a specific topic by just looking at the related searches in Google News. For SEOs and SEMs, related searches in Google News is a great way to expand your keyword research techniques to find more recent topics you might want to write about and target.

Article Link:http://searchengineland.com/080506-090053.php

Additional Resource:googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/related-searches-in-google-news.html

Many of us in the online video advertising space have been encouraging small businesses to deploy video to stand out in search results and level the playing field with larger competitors. Some colleagues and I have been working with select clients to test, learn, test again, and learn again from placing video in search and other distribution points. The early learnings have been interesting and reinforced some tips outlined further below.

Some video-related tips to keep in mind in 2008

Relevance is key. We’ve said it before—it’s all about relevance. The higher the relevance of the video to the information that surrounds it, the better the results.

Use focused keywords. The tighter, the better. For the condominium marketing agency, we can track what keywords people type to locate video ads. We’ve seen “long tail” terms like “old historic Seattle buildings with condos for sale” return property video ad landing pages toward the top of universal search results pages.

Create useful content. We are often asked, “How long should a video be?” We have deployed video ads for a number of clients and are finding that viewers watch an average of 70% of an ad, regardless of video length. If content is useful, people will watch it.

Optimize for performance. Unlike single .flv files that you upload to YouTube and leave alone, we change and optimize VideoAds for our clients wherever they are distributed. With some clients we’ve made tweaks to their VideoAds and seen views-to-impressions ratios increase by over 35% and true conversions (clicks-to-views ratios) increase by over 50%.

Article Continues Here:searchengineland.com/080501-123746.php

Major search engines have announced an update to the sitemaps.org protocol which will enables site owners to store their XML Sitemap files in any location — even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. This will be a welcome departure for those who manage multiple domains and would like to keep all Sitemap files in one place, as well as for those who would like to store their Sitemap in a location other than the root.

Are there any cautions? Yes! You have to be able to edit the robots.txt file of the domain the Sitemap file references.

The search engines made the announcement today on the Search Engineers Q&A panel at SMX West.

Here is how this works and how to implement it on your site.

On Google’s Checkout blog it was announced that they have launched Google Checkout Trends. Google Checkout Trends is a version of Google Trends, but limits the data to that collected from Google Checkout merchants.

It basically shows you what people are buying and selling online via Google Checkout. You can plug in one keyword or several keywords separated by comma, and it will show you a chart plotting revenue over time.
Google has trends for several of their applications, such as Google Trends for the main search index. They also came out with Google Hot Trends in May and Google Reader Personalized Trends about a year ago. Google Finance charts are basically a form of Google Trends, but with stock data. Google News has a form of trends for archive news, as well.

Link:googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-on-hot-list-google-checkout-trends.html

For some time Yahoo has been considered by some an innovator in local search, and on Nov, 29, 2007 the company rolled out (only in two California markets) a new feature that allows community members to identify, discuss, and potentially organize around local issues of concern. Called “Neighbors,” Neighbors combines functionality found on Yahoo’s suggestion boards and in Yahoo Answers. This tool was a result of Yahoo Hack Day, and the company has decided to introduce it on a limited basis to test community reaction.

As of now it is a completely non-commercial offering and is intended to allow people to make suggestions for how to improve local communities, vote on those suggestions, and potentially organize volunteers to address local issues.

Article Link:local.yahoo.com/neighbors

Additional Resource:searchengineland.com/071129-120903.php