Navigation: This should be removed you don’t want to distract the visitor away from the offer and conversion action.
However you should include a link in your logo so the visitor can visit the main site if they wish to.
Include a footer with links so that the visitor and Google can see you are part of a larger site.

Header: This should be clear & relevant to the visitor so that they are encouraged to scan down, using large clear fonts and if possible dynamic keyword insertion to make the page more relevant to the visitor.

Site Text: This should support any claims you made in your adverts. For example if you offer a free trial in your advert you should make sure the text on your landing page and offer supports your advertising claim.
Don’t make the visitor wonder if they are in the right place tie up you ad copy and keywords with your landing page text and offer.
Text should be in short bullet points and contain your ad keywords, as visitors will scan your landing page rather than reading it.

Graphics: Are eye catching they should be consistent with and support the campaign you do not want them to distract from the offer.

Video: Include a video to highlight the benefits or your offering, you can then always A/B test video or text to see what converts best for you.
A video is a great way of providing the visitor with information without making the page overwhelming.

Form: Make the lead form obvious! It should be at the top of your page don’t make the mistake of having it below the fold.
The form itself should be short and sweet, the goal should be to only capture critical information as the less the visitor has to fill in on the form the higher the conversion rate.
The “Submit” button should be labeled as their action, for example “sign me up to the free trial” or “download my free e-book”
Try to draw the visitors eye to the submit button you can do this by using color and/or arrows to get their attention.

Social Media: Add a forward to a friend button so that your visitor can pass your landing page on to relevant people.

Focus: The goal of the page is to convert the visitor so keep the landing page simple and to the point, resist adding extra information about your company.

Test: Use Google Optimizer to test it is a great tool that allows you to do A/B and multi variant testing of your landing page/s.

This will allow Google users to check out venues visually online before deciding whether they want to visit the physical business location or not. Ultimately this will be integrated into Google Local Business listings and will become a new feature for local search.

This provides local businesses in Sydney opportunities online to showcase their interiors and attract potential customers.

At the moment this project is being run in Sydney and San Francisco and will expand depending on the success it has in these two cities.

What is Video Syndication?

Video syndication is the use of a syndication service to post your video on a number of video hosting sites in one go.

How is it useful?

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.  Approximately 310 million people visit YouTube.com each day (source Wolframalpha Nov 2009).

According to data from Comscore (July 2009), the US site was the 6^th largest internet destination, the top internet entertainment site and has significant reach in most ages groups.

Having a video, series of videos or even a channel (and anyone with an account has a channel) on YouTube is a great way to get exposure, traffic and build links to your site.

Video is a way to deliver information quickly and clearly, and is often better than simply using the written or spoken word alone: Remember when you tried to explain how to programme the video recorder to someone over the phone? Was that fun?

Youtube is only one (albeit the biggest) video hosting site on line, among others are:

• Viddler
• Metacafe
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion
• Google Video
• HowCast
• Blip.Tv
• To name a few video sites, find more sites here

Video syndication offers you a way to get your video on these sites quickly and in only a few steps.

Where do I start?

1             Making the Video

The first step is recording a video.

This video should be about something relevant to your site, it could be a product review, a how to guide, it could even be an introduction by you showing off your site to the online community.  These are just a few ideas.

What do I use?

It depends on what you want to record.

Recording Your Screen

If you are recording content from your computer (“screen capture”) there are a few applications to consider. Here are some we use but do not necessarily recommend you use them:

Macusers can also look at Screenflow ($US 99).

Recording Live

If you are doing live recording you can use a digital camera that takes movies or simply a video camera. You could also consider using a Flip camera – which is specially designed for recording video for uploading to a PC or Mac and then online. (Be warned the Australia site uses flash media and can take a minute to download).

2             Editing

Once you have made your movie you may need to edit it, this may mean adding a soundtrack or a voice over, removing some mistakes or unnecessary content.

As noted earlier with some applications have (such as Camtasia) you can not only record but also edit videos.  Other free applications to consider include:

• iMovie (which normally comes bundled with a new Mac); and
• for Windows users either : Windows Movie Maker (if you use Windows XP) or Windows Live Movie Maker (if you use Vista or Windows 7).

You may already own some video editing software or some other freeware or shareware.

Whatever you have the important thing is you are able to:

1. edit or remove unnecessary content
2. add titles
3. add credits or text to the movies

These last two will allow you to brand your video and also promote your URL.  A few more tips can be found at the end of this paper.

Uploading to YouTube

Loading your video to YouTube is relatively straightforward.

You do need an account but if you have a Gmail account you are pretty much there already as YouTube.

TIP: If you plan to record a series of videos or use videos extensively we strongly recommend you set up a specific YouTube account and hence channel for your business.

There are three preferred formats for uploading to YouTube:

H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4

It may be necessary to convert your video format to MP4. There a few video convertors around, some of them are free but as always there are paid ones. You could also keep an eye on PC magazines (such as PC User, PC Authority) as sometimes they will have convertors as one of the free applications they offer each month.

How do I syndicate?

One free service we recommend is Tubemogul (www.tubemogul.com).

Tubemogul around 25 different video hosting sites including YouTube, Viddler and MetaCafe – a full list is provided at the end of this presentation.

The following assumes you have a Tubemogul account. To get an account, visit the signup page.

Tips for Online Videos

1. SEO Your Video: Optimize your video for keywords and phrases:

• put your keyword in your title
• Start the description with your URL (use the http:// syntax so the link is clickable) then provide a detail description that includes your keywords (if necessary put a transcript of your video in the description). Search engines can then crawl through the text.
• add tags to your YouTube video with up to 20 key phrases (ensure the words are relevant to your video)

1. Catchy Titles: Use a catchy title for your video
2. Short and To the Point: Keep the videos short (no more than 5 min in length) and to the point.

If you need more than 5 minutes to deliver your content, then break it up into 5 minute (or less bites) and create a series.

This will probably  mean you need to edit your video – if so, try to break it up at natural transition points or better still points that appear like cliffhangers (for example, if your video is making a cake you might end on video just at the point you are about to take it out of the oven).

Let people know if video is part of series by including in title hints such as “(part 1 or 5)”.

1. Publicise: Tweet, email, the link to the video, embed it in your blog, syndicate, enable embeddable links (so people can put it into their sites)
2. Start a dialogue: encourage participation and try to get your viewers to engage with you. User generated content (UGC) can be a good source of new material and relevant content. Things you can do include:

• allow user ratings and comments
• ask questions in the video
• actively encourage feedback.

Be clear about where you want the comments to go: “Tell me what you think by putting your thoughts in the comments section.” Include a call to action.

1. Push your site: Put a caption or title at the start, middle and end of your video with your URL link into your video. Make sure  you mention your URL at the end of the video and at the start.
2. Use annotations: If you are using YouTube – use annotations to create clickable points on your video
3. Use an interesting background – people will look behind you and an interesting background may keep their attention.

YouTube URL Tricks

There are a few more things you can do to a YouTube video you have embedded onto your pages:

Original YouTube URL – from Do You Wanna Date My Avatar (3:48, 5.5 million views (Nov 09) since Aug 2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU

Video Host Sites Supporting by Tubemogul

Use the Google Local Business Center (GLBC) to add your business to Google’s local listings.
You can add your address, phone, hours & include images and or videos all for free.
Once you have set up your account you will need to verify your details over the phone or mail.
Once you have been verified you will get a map listing and appear in local search results.

After you have set up a listing in GLBC you have the option to set up coupons.
It’s a free service that allows potential customers to print off coupons and bring them into your business to redeem. It’s a good way of attracting new customers and letting existing customers take advantage of any special offers.

Use Google Merchant Center to upload your product information, this will make it available in Google product search and other Google services.

Add your business to Truelocal.com.au for free; it distributes details of your business over search partners such as Google and Yahoo and satellite navigation such as Nav Man. A free listing allows you to add your business details, listing in 1 category and 1 image upload.

Request a complimentary business listing in yellowpages.com.au. All you need to do is add your business name, address and phone number. You will gain exposure in the yellow directory, yellow online and yellow mobile.

Add your business to free directories such as DMOZ (which acts as a powerful backlink) and BOTW.org which allows you to list your company for free in its search results.

Join Linkedin which is a niche Business networking site, it allows you to make connections with people you know and people you don’t through introductions. It also allows connections to make recommendations about you.

Add your business URL to all your email signatures, msn & social media accounts.

Create a Twitter account specific to your business and use services such as TwitterLocal to find potential connections in your area. Twitter allows you to provide real time information such as news and offers to your customers.

Quality score can range between 1- 10 with 1 being the worst score and 10 being the best.

If you have a low quality score you can end up spending between $5-$10 per click.

Google uses your quality score to determine your ad position and keyword bid price.

If you have a high quality score you will find that your Cost per Click (CPC) will be a lot lower and your ad position will be higher.

It is important to ensure that your quality score is high, otherwise you could end up bidding allot more than the advertiser in position one only to find your ad is appearing at the bottom of page. By improving your quality score you can in turn reduce your CPC which will result in an improved ROI (if the keyword in question previously converted for you)

4 Components of Quality Score

Google quality score has 4 components: Ad relevancy, history, Click-thru-rate (CTR) and landing page quality.

1. Ad Relevancy – Google judges your quality on how relevant your ads are to your keywords. Small ad groups with tightly related keywords are the way forward, if possible just use one keyword per ad group and then include the keyword in the headline. This will automatically make your keyword highly relevant to the ad copy.
2. CTR –If your ad copy has a high CTR you will be rewarded with lower CPC, justification being if your ad has a high CTR it must be relevant to the users search term and thus improving the user experience. I would recommend continually split testing your ads to improve your CTR.
3. History – Google rewards customers who have been with them the longest. By looking at account history Google can identify who the long term, high quality advertisers are.
4. Landing Page Quality – It is important that your landing page is relevant and optimized for the keyword you are targeting. Google wants to provide its users with a fantastic experience; poorly optimized landing pages don’t provide this experience and thus you will be penalized with higher CPC’s.

So how can I improve my Quality Score?

a)      Good account management – ensure keywords are in small tightly related ad groups & keep an eye on keyword impressions; you don’t want keywords generating high impressions and no clicks.

b)      Split test Ads

c)       Build quality landing pages with relevant copy.

2) You will only pay 1c a click if there are no other bidders – Search Engines set there own minimum bids for keywords & this is partly determined by the quality and relevancy of your landing pages.

3) Broad match is ineffective- If used properly broad match can be effective you just need to ensure you use negative match types properly. Run the keyword through the Google keyword tool to get an idea of the keywords you will need to negative match.

4) Bidding high increases your quality score – This does not improve your quality score or lower your average cpc, as quality score is strongly linked to the relevancy of your landing page. However by bidding high you will generate allot of traffic and thus clicks which will give your account more history.

5) Google is the only search engine you should bother with -You should test other search engine, Google may have the highest volume but that doesn’t mean it will always deliver the best ROI for your campaign. For example people who search on MSN are much more likely to purchase a product than those on Yahoo. I recommend you to test Yahoo, Ask and Msn.

6) PPC has a effect on organic rankings – Not True

7) Advertising spend has an impact on quality score and therefore ad rank – Not True, even small advertisers can have low CPC it all depends upon their quality score.

PPC is to be only used short-term until you get natural rankings. – If your PPC campaign is getting you results and a good ROI there is no need to stop. You may start to get traffic from organic rankings but this doesn’t mean it will convert as well as traffic from your ppc campaign.

9) You only need to optimize your PPC account once – You cannot just set up your ppc campaign and forget about it. It will need continual tweaking, optimization and ads will need split testing.

10) You don’t need to optimize your site – You will need to optimize your site in order to increase landing page quality score and conversion. You will also want to carry out split testing and try slightly different page layouts.

Having a social media plan is an essential part of any online marketing strategy, by using social media you’re giving your online business the opportunity to push and publish information through a variety of online platforms. Social media applications such as twitter are changing how communication flows real time between consumers and business, online communities such as Linked in act as niche social networking sites and allow information to be shared between those with common interests. Online publishing platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger allow individuals to publish there thoughts and opinions and then interact with visitors through user generated content or forums.

Here is a list of a variety of tools you can use to produce and distribute your content.

1. 1. Blog Platforms

Blogger http://www.blogger.com

Wordpress http://wordpress.org

Typepad http://www.typepad.com

Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com

Gawker http://www.gawker.com

Squarespace http://www.squarespace.com

Movable Type http://www.movabletype.org

2. Micro Blogging

Plurk http://plurk.com
Twitter http://www.twitter.com
Friendfeed http://friendfeed.com

3. Social Networks

On social network sites you can create profiles that contain personal information, photos, causes, hobbies etc. Social Networks such as Bebo and Facebook allow you to stay in contact with friends you have met in the real word and those who you have met online. You have the option of making your profile as open or as closed as you like.
You will find that companies, organizations and celebrities use social networks to build friends or/or fans. They use the social networks to provide information about new products, changes, events etc
You will find that some social networks will be much more niche for example Linkedin is a business oriented social network.

Facebook http://www.facebook.com
Myspace http://www.myspace.com
Bebo http://www.bebo.com
Hi5 http://hi5.com
Orkut http://www.orkut.com
Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com

4. Video Sites

Many sites allow you to upload videos these sites essentially host your video and so that other users can view and access them. Video Marketing is increasingly been used as way to spread information, increase search engine rankings and generate traffic to website.

Video Hosting Sites

YouTube http://www.youtube.com
Revver http://revver.com
Metacafe http://www.metacafe.com
Vimeo http://www.vimeo.com
Viddler http://www.viddler.com
Blip.tv http://blip.tv

5. Podcasting

A podcast is a video or audio file that is recorded and then distributed online, either by direct download from a web site or through distribution services.  You can convert any written documents you have into podcasts in order to reach a wider audience.
Podcasting Sites

iTunes Podcast Store http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts
Audible.com http://www.audible.com

6. Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a way to organize your favorites or bookmarks by setting up a profile on a web site that displays all the sites you bookmark. Users can share their bookmarked sites with other users.
Social bookmarking sites can give your websites a much needed boost in traffic and in the case of site that “follow” much needed backlinks.
Social Bookmarking Sites

Delicious http://delicious.com
Stumbleupon http://www.stumbleupon.com
Magnolia http://ma.gnolia.com
Diigo http://www.diigo.com

7. Photo Sharing

Photo Sharing web sites let users upload and share photographs with one another.

Photo Sharing Sites

Flickr http://www.flickr.com
Zooomr http://www.zooomr.com
Smugmug http://www.smugmug.com
Picasa http://picasa.google.com
Photobucket http://photobucket.com

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase search engine rankings and traffic.

In this Post I have listed 12 tips in order to improve your on page SEO.

1.       Internal Link Architecture

Make your site easy for the user; a good linking structure should only be 2-3 clicks away from the homepage. If your site is easy to navigate and has a flat hierarchy it will make the search engines job of crawling ad indexing your site relatively simple.

2.       Bot Accessibility

Add a robots txt file this allows search engine robots and spiders to crawl your site so that your pages can get indexed by the search engines. There may be pages on you site that you don’t want the search engines to index or to follow. You can limit the bot accessibility by adding parameters such as “no index” and “no follow”

3.       Sitemaps

You should have two site maps one for the user and one for the search engines. A site map for a search engine is an XML file that contains a list of site URLs. By adding a site map you are helping the search engines to index your site.

4.       URL Structure

When creating URLS ensure it contains the target keyword for that specific page. Your URLS should be short and static, dynamic URLS have too many parameters and do not get indexed as quickly.

5.       Server Response Codes

Check your server responses codes to ensure that you server and web browser are talking to each other.  Click here for list of codes

Tags

6.       Title Tag

The Title tag is visible in the browser and should reflect the content of specific page. It is important you include the core keyword in the title tag and do not stuff it with a list of keywords.  It should not be less than 6 words and not greater than than twelve, with a range of fifty to eighty characters, this includes spaces, hyphens, commas

7.       Meta Description Tag

Meta description tag is what appears in the search engines. If you don’t write a Meta description the search engine will take a snippet of text from your site instead. If you write your own meta description make it compelling to the reader so you can increase your click thru rates. Ensure that it contains the most important keyword found within your content. The description should be between 12 to 24 words.

8.         Meta Keywords Tag

The Meta keywords tag can only be viewed by the search engine or by the user if they view the sites source code. The Meta keyword tag should include the most important keywords for that webpage. Historically the Meta keywords tag has been over used and stuffed with keyword which has resulted in spammy sites. Thus over time this tag has become less important in influencing search engine rankings.

9.         H1 Tag

The H1 tag should include your core keyword, the purpose of the H1 tag is to reinforce the importance of a keyword to the search engine.

10.       Internal Anchor Text

You should include your target keyword in your internal anchor text.

<a href=”http://www.dietscentral.org”>DietsCentral</a>

In this example, the code simply indicates that the text “DietsCentral” (called the “anchor text” of the link) should be hyperlinked to the page http://www.Dietscentral.org.

11.       Alt Tags

As search engines cannot view images by using an Alt tag you can attach a keyword to an image.

Alt Tags help reinforce the importance of a keyword and can help improve rankings.

<img src=”internetmarketing.gif” alt=”internetmarketing” />

12.       Unique Text Content

Although you can optimize your webpage to target specific keywords, you will only achieve decent search engine rankings and traffic if you have unique content. Unique content can be articles, blogs, videos, UGC, podcasts etc