Getting Your Money's Worth: SEO and Your Digital Assets

Reference: http://searchenginewatch.com/

Whether you're dealing with double-digit gains or losses, getting efficiency and maximum value from every part of your site and your brand's assets only makes good sense.

Frequent readers might remember my article last year about my adoration of Billy Mays, the TV gadget pitchman extraordinaire with the blue shirt, thick beard, and booming voice who met an untimely end.


Behind this guilty pleasure lies a begrudging admiration for not just what he accomplished, but for the $19.99 gadgets that he peddled. They do everything! They serve 50 different functions (none of which you'll need more than once). At an extremely cheap price, remember: buying an elephant on a one-dollar sale only makes sense if you need an elephant. With a money-back guarantee (which, for under $20, you'll never bother with)!
Yes, the products are laughable, but they sell because you feel you're getting your money's worth. And, of course, because Billy was awesome.

So ask yourself: Are you getting your money's worth from your site? 

For much of the answer, you'll immediately think of the big, common pieces of the site, like your page templates and checkout procedures. You forked out good money for these features and want to see them earn it back in spades.

The same mindset also applies to pieces of your site that are much easier to forget, and those that you might not realize could be optimized for more search value. These are elements that make up your Web site that took just as much time and money to develop: your digital assets.

Google Buzz introduced to Gmail

We've blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we've taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you're up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today's world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it's increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve. We've recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we're taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting

20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing

reference: http://www.addme.com/

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for people to come together and share opinions,experiences and thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this and are using the power of social media to connect and inform their customers, and potential customers. Referred to as "Social Media Marketing", it's a smart way to open the lines of communication between you and your prospects.

Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn't take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a campaign, you shouldhave a firm grasp on what it is you're trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company's brand image.

Neglected Stepchild of Social Media Marketing by Larry Brauner

Reference: http://online-social-networking.com/

You want to market on the web and take advantage of the vast potential of social media. You start your blog, create your Twitter account, launch your Facebook fan page, and you’re ready to go.

Or are you? Have you missed any crucial first steps?
Sandy Abrams, begins her new book, Your Idea, Inc., with words that have been attributed to Mark Twain:
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking down your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
This quotation presents three problems, which I believe ought to have troubled Samuel Clemens:

1. Isn’t “breaking down your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks” itself a step in the process?
2. Aren’t understanding your needs and clearly defining your objectives vital preparatory steps as well?
3. How do we determine the optimal sequence in which to execute all the small manageable tasks?

These are three aspects of planning.
Planning is not popular, which explains the all too common lack of direction and focus in social media work.
Lack of direction and focus impedes progress and can cause frustration.

Your Social Media Plan

Before you jump into social media, devise your social media marketing and PR plan. Here are 16 key areas that might factor into your social media plan:

Getting Video SEO Right By Benjamin Wayne

Refeerence: http://searchenginewatch.com/

Videos, properly submitted, are 53 times more likely to generate a first page Google ranking than traditional SEO techniques, according to a recent study by Forrester Research. However, many companies are ignoring video SEO altogether, only submitting the pages on which videos reside and not the videos themselves, or worst of all, submitting their video assets to YouTube under the misunderstanding that this will generate SEO benefits.

Video SEO Advantages

• Video SEO is 53 times more likely to produce a first-page search result than traditional techniques.
• Google is pushing video to the top of search results, creating a goldmine for marketers.
• Results begin to appear in days, and some publishers succeed in getting 25 percent or more of their videos to produce first page results.
• Search engines can't find video content on their own, so getting submission right is critical -- a knowledgeable partner can make this much easier.

The Unfair Advantages of Video SEO
Although video SEO isn't dissimilar to traditional SEO, it has two distinct advantages.
First, Google and other search engines work to have a mix of content types displayed in search results (a.k.a., blended search results). For this reason, they give a higher ranking to video content than other forms of Web content in order to make sure that searches consistently display mixed search results.
Second, there's a relative dearth of video content available today, and only a small fraction of the content available is properly submitted to search engines for inclusion in the search indexes. This combination of disproportionate bias towards video content and the small pool of indexed video content available is a gold mine for publishers.

Getting Video Content into the Search Engines and Getting it Right