SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

An article on The New York Times, ‘Known Faces are Displacing the Amateurs in Online Videos’, talked about it how it is becoming more prevalent for celebrities to participate in various online ‘Web Series’, mostly in the form of small video clips sponsoring various products and services.

Using a famous face who represents the qualities of a company’s promoted products/services has the benefit of keeping advertising fun and interesting for web users. The presence of a celebrity and has been shown to have a positive influence on targeting current and potential consumers.

For example, Kraft Foods brought on a famous American TV cook who embodied the personality traits and qualities of the customers the company was trying to reach. The campaign aimed to encourage housewives to upload video clips of them cooking their favourite recipes. The great responses lead to over 5,000 videos being uploaded and shared.

Ideas for online video promotions for your business:

• Testimonial or case study
• Product demonstrations
• Promotional offers or sales
• Company Profile- who you are, what you do, meet the team

Good online video content should create trust in your brand by putting faces to names in the minds of your website visitors. Dynamic web videos also give others a chance to promote themselves on your website, which will have a positive effect for all involved. They also advance your SEO objectives by creating back links and buzz about your website and company.

The most important things to keep in mind when creating an online video: keep it short, make it fun and interesting, mention who you are and what you do, and describe the benefits of your products/services.

Bayswater Car Rental has been a loyal client of E-Web Marketing and has used several of E-Web Marketing’s services and specialised skills to build their business and expand their client base and recognition in the past two and a half years. E-Web Marketing has a passion for delivering top quality services and this in return has led to a wide client base with loyal clients such as Bayswater Car Rental.

‘When I was looking at investing in SEO, I asked a couple of people if they had any recommendations and somebody suggested E-Web, I went online and punched in ‘Optimisation in Sydney’ and E-Web was one of the first natural search results to be retrieved by Google so I thought, that looks alright! With a solid reputation, and their own ranking providing proof of their capabilities, a decision was almost made to use E-Web Marketing.’

-Arnold Cluck, Business Owner

The E-Web Marketing team recognises the essentiality in increasing qualified traffic to a business’s website and with this recognition and dedication to helping clients achieve business goals such as these, comes loyal and happy customers. With clients recognising that they are adding value to their online investments through using E-Web Marketing, this is what leads to our valued relationships with businesses such as Bayswater Car Rental.

It has been reported that Apple may develop its very own search engine.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years. As the search provider for the iPhone, Google sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones.

Apple understands the data collected daily through the searches conducted on iPhones is extremely valuable and may try to capture this data by forming both map and search products. Google is the default search provider in all iPhones, which has millions of users, and is gaining valuable information from this lucrative deal.

As Google encroaches on Apple’s domain, offering applications, and mobile devices, it may be time for Apple to branch out and capture this information for itself. Although Apple lacks the experience and engineering to build a competitive search engine to rival Google, they may look into alternative options such as buying out smaller entities.

Munster says Apple could buy a search startup with a Web index, such as Cuil or Taptu and use its index as the seed for its own search engine.

Apple may entice local resellers to use the platform to break even. iPhone apps from Google and Bing are still delivering long links, which are undesirable when using mobile screen with little room to view. Which opens the marketing for a touch based mobile search product.

Google Adwords has always provided a wealth of information to advertisers, however until now advertisers have been unable to directly compare their performance against that of their competitors. Now all this is changing with Google introducing the ‘analyse competition‘ feature .

This feature looks at your Adwords account activity over a period of 14 days. By matching keywords, landing page text and ad text against Google search terms, a list of categories is generated which correspond to the products and services you are currently advertising. With each of these categories the user is now able to directly compare their performance with the average performance of all other users within that category.

Performance can be judged in terms of clicks, click through rate, impressions and average position. Comparisons can even be made based on geographical location. The competitive range feature also gives the user additional information, such as the mean and median performance levels, absolute best and worst performers and the exact size of the category.

Using this information it will now be possible for advertisers to make better informed decisions about how to optimise campaigns based on the strategies other advertisers are using to get results. The ‘explore ideas’ button even gives the advertiser suggestions by generating customised bidding, keyword and budget ideas for your campaigns.

Some important things to note about this new feature:

• The competitor analysis is based on anonymous data so it is not possible to make comparisons between specific advertisers.
• Only data from the Google Search and the Search Network is currently available for competitor analysis.
• The data is refreshed once a week and the time range being used is stated above the table.

For more information on this new feature I recommend having a look at this short video.

Buzz at the moment is on how Amazon has thrown its hat into the social networking arena with the online shopping giant’s recent acquisition of patent for a ‘social networking system’. 

How Amazon plans to use the patent is The Question. Its social network patent was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last Tuesday, meaning that Amazon may be planning to offer similar services to social media users as those provided by Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz and Friendster.

The patent “provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users” and “automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.” Ring any bells?

Back to The Question: what Amazon will do with this patent? The history is that Amazon planned to develop a network service (PlanetAll) which it acquired in 1998. However this was shut down after two years in 2000.

What Amazon may plan to do now is a little mistimed considering the level of competition in the current market. Pre-MySpace and Facebook, Amazon had the technology and the concepts but it culled PlanetAll and absorbed its features into Amazon’s Friends and Favorites technology.

Does Amazon hope to compete on a large scale with the likes of Facebook and Friendster? Would it seek legal avenues to enforce its rights to the patent, trying to make other networks change their current models?

This is unlikely in my opinion. It’s more likely that Amazon would use it to build its own social network based around its products and services, in order to benefit the sharing of information and increase sales.

With so many different types of social networks around at the moment and the many more we will surely see in the future, each changing how web users interact and find information, I am keen to see what eventuates and to find out what Amazon can bring to the social networking table.

A new social media company Syncapse has released a report on their research on the true value of a Facebook fan, by asking 4,000 social media fans of top brands such as Coca Cola, Red Bull, McDonald’s and PlayStation.

The objective of the report was to try and put a monetary figure on the value of a Facebook Fan. In summary, the main points found:

• An average fan is worth about $136.38
• On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
• Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
• Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

With social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the number of fans and followers have become a big numbers game, and almost a competition between businesses. However with almost anything, quality over quantity will trump.

How can you measure the quality of fans or followers?

• Updating and evaluating fans on Facebook by looking into their user information such as demographics and like can help you determine if they are in the same industry as you, or would be interested in your products or service.
• Ask questions and feedback from fans and followers. You not only are actively engaging with your current/potential clients, this will help  you determine how active and eager they are.
• Google Analytics is also a great way to track the number of users coming through the referring sites of Facebook/Twitter. If you are an e-commere store, specific tracking on your shopping cart system can be set up so you can specifically track sales from social media sites.

When it comes to Android smartphones, it’s generally agreed upon by most online forum-goers, editorial reviews and office geeks that Taiwan-based manufacturer HTC is the brand to beat. HTC has set the standard for mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system, consistently rolling out high-quality and innovative cell phones.

Awareness of the HTC brand is continuing to rise, challenging the likes of the iPhone and BlackBerry for the loyalty of a new generation of mobile consumers.

We are going to compare two of the most popular HTC Androids to determine which gives the best bang for your buck: both have a recommended retail price of AU$779.

HTC Hero
•    Sharp bright screen with 320×480 resolution.
•    Powered by a 528 Mhz internal processor and 288 MB of RAM.
•    Not a lot of internal memory space though.
•    For a touchscreen phone, it’s amazingly hassle-free to use. Intuitive scrolling, tracking, scanning and re-sizing capabilities make the Hero a simple and fun device to operate.
•    Easy Internet connectivity including USB, 3G and Wi-Fi, and web browsing capabilities are great for both business and social networking.
•    Impressive array of apps and widgets, both pre-installed and available for download. While nothing can beat the iPhone’s bottomless App Store, but 10,000 aps is nothing to sneeze at.
•    Battery life is not fantastic, but better than HTC’s predecessors. At least you’ll get through a whole day without needing to recharge.
•    The 5 megapixel camera comes with auto-focus but there’s no flash, so indoor photos won’t turn out well.
•    Built-in Microsoft Exchange makes it handy for business.

Verdict: As a typical “jack of all trades, master of none” touchscreen smartphone goes, this one does pretty well in checking more “master” boxes than “jacks”.

HTC Desire

•    The next generation on from the Hero, this smartphone contains all the features of the Hero with a few minor variations.
•    Lightening quick 1Ghz internal processor and 576MB of RAM.
•    The touchscreen is even crisper with 480×800 resolution, however users have reported it as being a little too sensitive.
•    To support a range of extra apps and inbuilt software programs, the battery life actually runs for about an hour less on average than the Hero.
•    As well as Exchange for emails, Quickoffice also comes ready for editing MS documents.
•    The camera has a flash, though this tends to result in a weird blue-ish overtone in most photos.
•    For those who still listen to the radio, the Desire comes with one built-in.

Verdict: Another powerful all-rounder, with a design focused neither completely on business nor completely on fun.

There is no clear winner here – with the prices equal on both smartphones, it really depends on what you value more. Battery life and easy usability for the Hero, and extra power and prettiness for the Desire.

As more businesses become aware of the potential of advertising online, the more mainstream it could potentially become. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014, Internet as an advertising medium is set to become the second largest in the U.S. behind television.

As a result of the global recession:

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report, which PwC plans to release Tuesday.
Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.

Based on the PwC report, it predicts that advertising across video, email and interactive media will reach $6.6 billion in 2014 from $4.7 billion in 2009. And with the launch of new mediums such as Google TV, this could grow the segment further because of the low costs of producing ads.

In addition, advertising on mobile phones are set to grow as wireless networks are upgraded and more phones are becoming internet enabled.  According to the Pwc report, Mobile advertising in North America is predicted to quadruple from $414 million in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2014.

Adobe Flash looks great on websites and provides hours of entertainment in the form of online games.

It is also is unsearchable on Google and unusable on your iPhone.

This can be frustrating when you don’t want to download apps, but want to play “free” games online. It can also be annoying when you are building a website that would best display in Flash. But as all web developers and SEOs know, Google doesn’t read Flash, and Apple has shown how cool HTML5 is.

So does this mean they Google and Apple are intent on shunning Flash developers?

This may have been considered unlikely in the past, as Google and Adobe have been recorded as saying that they would try to work together to accommodate Flash in Google’s search engine results. The first such announcement of intended collaboration was made two years ago, and only seven months ago there were rumours of Google providing new SEO-friendly resources for Flash developers.

So should we be expecting another announcement in the near future? Perhaps not, if the demo on Apple’s website showcasing HTML5 is anything to go by.

Whether this is Steve Job’s attempt to make up from the iPad’s failure to load the Wall Street Journal is unknown.  But if you spend some time on Apple’s site, it becomes clear that HTML5 is actually really cool. It delivers Flash-style effects without the SEO restrictions, can embed massive amounts of text using CSS3, and the “typography demo” is truly revolutionary.

So whether Google and Apple both had HTML5 in mind when refining their algorithm or their mobile devices is yet to be known, but it does seem likely. Once again however, only time will tell.

Google has just released news that Google Caffeine will be rolling out to their worldwide data centres tonight. Unlike the hundreds of other updates that Google makes every year, this single change has been described as “huge”. Early reports indicate that this new addition to the world’s most famous search algorithm will provide search results that are 70% fresher than what is currently in place.

Google claims that this new change will deliver much more relevant and user-friendly results. Searches will run much faster, and it is rumoured that Caffeine takes up close to 100 million gigabytes, or 100,000 terabytes, of storage in a single database. Another way of measuring it is 100 petabytes – to put that in perspective, “petabyte” isn’t even recognized by Microsoft Word’s dictionary.

Google veteran Amit Singhal said that the primary focus of Caffeine is to improve the user’s experience.  After all, Google’s objective has always been to provide its users with the most current and informative pages. 

Normally pages are indexed by Google after one of its “spiders” has crawled the pages for various information and updated the search engine’s index.  After the release of Caffeine, it is said that sites won’t take weeks or months to appear in the results pages, but minutes. 

Google does not anticipate too much public backlash, but has warned that search results may fluctuate with Caffeine. The updated algorithm is said to favour the new over the old to a higher degree, so pages which are new or frequently updated may gain even more rankings at the expense of those which have remained stagnant.

This means that after Caffeine goes live, when you search through Google the most current and up-to-date sites and information should be available first. Invaluable knowledge for both users and webmasters.