Posts Tagged ‘Search engine marketing’

Search Engine Optimization Tools

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

There are some handy tools out there to help you out with your SEO efforts.  Here are a few of the tools that I find useful for search engine optimization:

  1. Download and use the SEO for Firefox plugin.  Every SEO I know uses this tool.
  2. GSiteCrawler - easy to generate Google & Yahoo friendly sitemaps.
  3. Google Webmaster Tools, there are still a lot of people who don’t know about this handy Google tool.
  4. Yahoo’s version of webmaster tools - Site Explorer.

There are also a bunch of great forums all about optimization so if you have any questions they’re likely to be answered for you here: SeoMoz, V7N Forums, Digital Point Forums.

Help Your Video go Viral

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

Following on from my last post on using video for SEO, here are some tips to help your video go viral.

If you’ve created a simple instructional video for your site then you’re probably not hoping that it will go viral.  If on the other hand you’ve created something spectacular and want to share it with the world then you may need to give it a bit of a helping hand.

Over 80 million videos are watched on YouTube & millions more are posted online every day.  The chances of your video going viral can be pretty low.  Most don’t go viral by accident - it takes a lot of effort, time and perserverance BUT it is possible.

If you have a video that is worthy of going viral here are some tips:

  • Once you’ve uploaded your video - share it.
  • Reach out to blogs that will find the content interesting.  Some blogs allow you to post video within the comments section.
  • Be cheeky, label your title ‘unauthorised’, ‘leaked’, ‘behind the scenes footage’ or ‘exclusive’. Once it gets going and has more views you can update the title to something more relevant and findable.
  • Use Twitter to share the video with your network.
  • Forums - create a new posts on forums and discuss the video content.  You may want to create several accounts to start up a conversation. This is time consuming but can have huge benefits.
  • Post your video on social networks, as many as you can. Think MySpace, Bebo & Facebook.
  • Encourage people you know to watch the video and share it.
  • If your content is good (which it should be!) email the video to your friends and encourage your coworkers to do the same.
  • If you’re a power user on YouTube you probably have several accounts - so use them. Comment away, have a conversation with yourself and get the discussion started.
  • A great tip I read about recently is to use tags strategically.  Create a set of unique tags that aren’t used by anyone else on YouTube and put these tags on all of your video content.  Once people have seen one of your videos you’d really like them to move on to another of yours rather than random ‘related’ content.   Done well, this allows you to have control over the videos that show up as ‘related’ on your video page.

Search Marketing Spends Increasing Worldwide

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

It’s not surprising that a recent E-Marketer study shows search marketing spend is increasing around the globe.

eMarketer search spend by tactic

People realise that in the current economic climate they really need to justify their marketing spend.  I think all marketers are increasing their focus on results, measurement &  budget accountability.

The graph above shows that 45% of respondents intend on increasing their PPC spend.  Pay per click advertising is cheap and effective.  You don’t need a designer to create the ads and you can set your own daily budget to keep costs under control.

Online banner advertising, email marketing & paid search or pay per click advertising can all show a clear ROI for every dollar spent.  If you are using the correct tracking tools you can see exactly how many people have converted on your site and from where for every dollar of advertising spent.   If only we could see those results for all forms of advertising.

The key to getting the best results online are measurement & optimisation.   Are you using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Omniture to track online conversions?  Are you keeping an eye on what people are saying about you using online reputation management ?  If not, you should be.

Track, test, optimise and make sure that you’re getting the best ROI for your ad spend.