Incorporating video into your marketing efforts can prove to be an effective to way supplement search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives.

The popularity of online video has experienced tremendous growth over the last few years and with the help of video sharing sites, online video has made its way to the local advertising level.  According to The Kelsey Group’s US Local Video Forecast, local online video ad revenue will increase from approximately $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion by the end of 2012. Local video advertising is an emerging way to deliver a company’s message, showcase products, services and build credibility.

Many Internet Yellow Pages such as Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, and Yellowbook.com offer video advertising as part of their advertising bundles and are continuing to expand upon their offerings. For example, Yellowbook.com recently entered into an agreement with YouTube, which will enable Yellowbook.com’s video advertisements to be displayed across YouTube, the world’s most popular online video community. This is a great opportunity for an advertiser’s message to be exposed to an audience separate from Yellowbook.com.

Videos can also be leveraged for SEO. It is common to see video results occupying the top spots on the search engine results pages as part of Universal or “blended” search. These videos can be a powerful differentiator from the common text listings. Tagging video files with relevant terms, adding videos to unique pages on the site with supporting content, and uploading them to sharing sites or social networks can all boost SEO.

Lastly, humorous, informative or interesting videos can increase interaction on a website and can become viral. An engaging site may lead to repeat visits, inbound links from other sites, and an increase in conversions.  With the considerable amount of growth potential, now is the time to take advantage of video because online video marketing will only become more competitive in the years to come.

The best part about internet marketing is that anyone can participate.  There is a low cost of entry, regardless of whether you are a large corporation or a small business owner.  However, there are some advantages and disadvantages to both the small business and the large corporation when it comes to having a presence online.

To begin with, those who manage the website for a small business are often stretched thin.  They are likely wearing many hats throughout the company and the website does not always fall at the top of the priority list. At large corporations, there are often entire teams that manage the website.  One person may be responsible for the website’s content, another individual may handle the programming, and another may be solely dedicated to writing on the company’s blog. Small businesses don’t usually have the luxury of having an entire website team.

On the flip side, an advantage of being a small business is that change comes a bit easier. If you want to try something new such as participating in an emerging social media channel or building a new pay per click campaign, the decision can be made quickly. You can also be more creative at times and be an early adopter of new ideas. Larger companies can have internal procedures that can make even small content changes to the website a time consuming process.

Even though small businesses typically have a smaller budget to spend toward their marketing efforts, ensuring that the company has a presence online is essential. Below are a few inexpensive tips to help boost the visibility of your small business.

1. Add a blog to your site.  Blogs are great for many reasons.  They allow you to connect with your customers through posting new content and they provide you with the perfect opportunity to establish yourself as an authoritative source of information.  Another great thing about blogs is that you can add an RSS feed, which will give visitors the ability to subscribe to any new information and will encourage them to come back to the site.

2. Participate in local search and other local directories.  (Additional information on local search tips can be found in one of our SEO team member’s previous blog entries.)

3. Leverage sites where customers post reviews such as the sites listed below. Encourage customers to rate your company after they do business with you. Reviews by customers add creditability.  Don’t be afraid of the possibility of negative reviews. Instead, use them as an opportunity to listen to your customers and fix any issues that need fixing.

Yelp.com
Insiderpages.com
Citysearch.com
Local.Yahoo.com
Local.com

4. Communicate with your potential customers.  If your product or service is targeted towards a defined audience, find groups or networks where those people are and participate in their discussions. Add value to the conversation and remember to include a link back to your site where appropriate, even a link in your signature will do. 

5. Track results using an analytics program.  If you are putting time, effort, and money into your internet marketing, then you will want to have a way of tracking the results. Fortunately, internet marketing is highly measurable, unlike many other forms of marketing. How else will you know if your efforts are actually working? For additional information about analytics, visit our Analytics Blog.

Whether the reasoning behind a redesign of your website is to increase the overall usability and functionality or just to update the look and feel of the site, this is an important time to bring search engine optimization (SEO) into the mix. Ensuring that your site is SEO friendly is critical in achieving high positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Below are just a few things to address during the redesign process that can impact the SEO friendliness of your newly designed website.

One of the first questions to ask yourself; will your new site be on the same domain? If possible, keep the same domain from the original site to the newly designed site.  This is because the search engines place a lot of weight on the age of a domain.  The older the domain, the more trust the search engines have with the particular website.  Also, by keeping the same domain you will retain the inbound links to the site and these inbound links are an important component of good positions in the SEPRs.  However, if it’s necessary to start with a brand new domain, note that there will likely be a drop in traffic until the new domain is established.

Take the time to do keyword research. This process can help with the architecture and navigation of the site as it can provide insight into the different ways people are searching for the information, products, or services that you offer. Keyword research will also help you to identify the best phrases to focus your optimization efforts.  The key phrases that you thought were ideal to optimize pages of the site around may not be what people are actually using to search.

Make sure that the design allows for enough content on the pages and that you are writing the content for your visitor and not the search engines. Even though you should work the targeted keyword phrase throughout the content to help the search engines determine what the website or page is about, you do not want it to sound unnatural or as though you have written only for the search engines. Additionally, creating great content from the start will make your site more link-worthy, encouraging others to link to your site.

The crawl-ability of the site is very important for SEO.  JavaScript links and menus as well as graphics and Flash can be difficult for the search engines to crawl.  This isn’t to say that these elements cannot be used, but it is something to take into consideration. Make sure that there is a balance and that the pages of your site contain ample room for index-able content. 

The anchor text of the links to internal pages on your site should be crawl-able by the search engines. Use descriptive anchor text to tell the visitors and search engines what the topic of that page they are about to visit is about. Quite often, the keyword for the destination page can be used in the anchor text.

Another (and maybe the most important) thing to take into consideration is how the old site will transition to the new site.  If the URLs are changing, how will this be approached? As mentioned above, the best case scenario is for the URLs to remain the same, however, if they change due to a reorganization of sub-folders, moving to a different platform (such as from .php to .asp), a new naming convention is adopted, or for business reasons, you will need to develop an SEO friendly transition strategy. This strategy will vary site by site, but make sure that you have a strategy in place.