autogas How To Make Web-Advertising Worth Watching By Jerry Bader (c) 2007 It has become an article of faith that the Web is all about content; content is King on the Web as opposed to television where commercials are king. It seems that television networks just can't wrap their heads around the Internet and fit it into their standard commercial box. The traditional media's tactic of last resort, buying-up the competition and imposing its commercial will, just won't work with the Internet. Businesses that want to succeed on the Web must learn how to turn their commercial message into content as a seamless entertaining presentation. After years of website visitors first ignoring, then getting increasingly irritated with banner ads that blink, burp, and blast across their screens, there finally is a better way; advertising in the form of Web-videos that not only deliver a marketing message but are worth the time invested in watching. There is a lot of hype surrounding so-called viral videos. Many companies have tried to create this kind of marketing vehicle but the sheer lack of commercial purpose fails to attract viable prospects and instead generates a lot of attention from the maturity-challenged segments of society. As a business you want your video to be passed on to as many additional viewers as possible, but if it doesn't attract new leads or at least deliver your message, what good is it? There is an absolute qualitative difference between a video that is engaging, entertaining, humorous and clever that delivers a strong marketing message and a video that is just plain stupid or at best pointless. Bold is Beautiful and Effective We know from experience that clients are attracted when we create entertaining offbeat video campaigns that send a clear message. But as soon as we start to create the equivalent type of campaign for them, they start to get nervous. The Web demands a bold, frontal attack that delivers an uncompromising creative presentation of what you offer; not a defensive, compromised, don't-make-a-mistake approach that tries to cover everything and anything you might do. The average business is incredibly timid when it comes to advertising. Boring, monotonous presentations that drone on are as helpful in attracting new business as viral video food-fights or female mud-wrestling clips. There is as much difference between bizarre and bold, as there is between salacious curiosity and entertainingly effective. The challenge for business is to take this new form of advertising and use it so that it rises above the lowly realm of boring corporate PowerPoint presentations and silly homemade video antics to the lofty, and ultimately profitable dominion of content. Why Web-Videos Aren't Like Television Commercials Web-commercials are not television commercials. I know big advertisers are double-dipping their ad placements by flooding the Web with their TV spots, but who really cares? If you can see it on NBC or CBS twelve times every night why would you go out of your way to watch it on the Web? The most significant difference between television and Web-commercials is cost. According to MediaPost's Gregory Wilson in his VideoInsider newsletter, the average 30-second TV commercial costs $12,000 per second to produce. That's per second, far beyond the budgets of most businesses. You can get an entire Web-video campaign for the cost of one second of TV-level production. Of course, you're not going to have a cast and crew of hundreds working on your spot, but then the quality of scrípt, simplicity of concept, and creativity of presentation count for more than wasted exotic sets and setups. There are lots of things people just hate about television commercials and the best of the Web-commercials avoid these irritants. Television commercials distract viewers from the content. Nobody likes interruptions. There is not much difference on the irritation scale between a telemarketing telephone call selling aluminum siding at dinner time and a commercial that interrupts the latest adventures of 24's Jack Bauer. About the only good thing you can say about these program-interruptions is that they provide you a bathroom and beverage break, which of course doesn't help the advertiser who just spent $12,000 per second to get to you. Web-commercials are different. They are sought-out by people as long as they provide something more than a mundane sales pitch. If you are clever, bold, and interesting, people will not only watch, they'll remember. Think back to when you were in school and the teacher told you to look up the answer yourself and not just rely on her to give it to you? That's because the effort of searching out the answer created a more memorable experience. Commercials are no different. Sure fewer people are going to come in contact with your Web-commercial than they would a television commercial, but then the Web-commercial is more targeted, more memorable, and far more cost effective. Even worse than the continuous interruptions is the repetitiveness of television commercials. Sometimes you have to sit through the same obnoxious commercial multiple times in the same commercial break. Give Apple computer and Geico Insurance credít for their commitment to developing creative, entertaining campaigns that are continually evolving with new segments that build a following for the characters, product and message. These commercials actually do rise above the level of sale's pitch and achieve the status of content. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for ninety-nine percent of all the other television ads. Because people choose to watch a Web-commercial, they don't become upset with the advertiser for inflicting repetitive psychological torture. In fact Web-commercials that are entertaining and informative will be watched over and over, and passed on to friends and colleagues. The Bottom Line 1 Web-users choose to watch Web-videos and therefore are more receptive to the message. 2 Web-videos need to be entertaining so they are more likely to be watched repeatedly and passed on to friends. 3 Web-videos are less costly to produce so advertisers can create campaigns consisting of multiple videos on the same theme so that viewers don't get bored or irritated. How To Turn A Pitch Into Content If you are going to bore people to death, then Web-advertising is not for you. If all you have to say is buy my stuff, nobody is going to listen. If you are afraid to be different, you are just going to blend into the woodwork. If you think search engine optimization is going to solve all your marketing problems, well think again. If you want to turn your advertising into content then create your next campaign on the following principles: Be Clear. Be Bold. Be Uncompromising. Be Entertaining. Be Engaging. Be Clever. Be Humorous. Create Character(s). And Tell a Story. Krakow accommodation Backlinks - How To Get High Quality One Way Links To Your Websites By Matt Garrett (c) 2007 There are basically two aspects to SEO, "on page" & "off page" optimization. "On Page" SEO is easy because it's totally under your control. It's simply a case of making sure you have optimized your web pages correctly. OK, so there is a bit more to it than that, like keyword research, keyword density & frequency, which html tags to use, making sure your site/pages are W3 Compliant, using relative/absolute internal linking structures to feed the pagerank where it's most effective, using titles and descriptions that encourage people to clíck through from the SERP's etc. But essentially, once you know how to do all that, it's not difficult to get it right for all your pages/sites. It's also less important in the long run than getting sufficient links to your site/pages from other sites. Getting links to your site is fundamental to getting visitors, and without visitors all the time, effort and money invested in getting your site up and running, and looking "nice", is irrelevant. No Visitors = No Point! So links are essential to the health of your site, and indeed your business, but all links are not equal in value to your site. Reciprocal links will help, but they are far less effective than one way backlinks, i.e. links from another site where you don't have to link back to them. These "One Way" backlinks will give your site a far greater boost in the search engine results and bring you more traffíc, providing of course that you have chosen good (relevant) keywords for your links. There are many ways of getting these powerful one way backlinks, but most you will have no control over the anchor text used (i.e. keywords) in the link, which means their "power" is unfocused and therefore of less use to you in achieving the targeted keyword results you are looking for. For example, submitting your site to website directories can be a very effective way of picking up some high quality one way links from high PR sites, but you will seldom be able to choose the keywords/anchor text used for the link, often ending up with the site name as the link. This is not a waste of time, as the Pagerank passed to your site will, with the correct internal linking structure, be passed on to your sites internal pages, helping them to rank better for their targeted keywords. So how can you get highly targeted one way links? It's fairly common for webmasters to now buy or "rent" links to their sites through services like Text-Link-Ads.com, and these services will allow you to choose the anchor text, but they are far from cheap. A link from a PR 8 site can easily cost $150+ per month. In fact there is now a business model emerging based on building sites simply to sell these kind of links (see LazyGitMarketing.com). Google has also publicly stated that they disapprove of this practice and are actively seeking to downgrade the value of such "paid links", although personally it seems like a valid form of advertising to me, but maybe I just don't have Google's wisdom in these matters. ;) As always in business, there are entrepreneurs who have identified this need in the market and a whole new branch of linking services are popping up offering new solutions for one way backlinks. I've been testing some of them out over the last few months and have found a couple that have had a significant positive effect on the sites I used them for. The Backlink Solution This first solution is a monthly subscription that provides a network of high quality blog sites for you to post comments on, including a link to your site(s) using your chosen anchor text. Note: As you make the link yourself, you can also link to internal pages on your site to improve their rankings as well, which you can't do with directory submissions. It is a manual process, but is easy enough that it can be outsourced fairly cheaply. The Pagerank of these blogs varies, but the links provided are very "natural" in appearance to the search engines, and as you can post unique relevant content on market related blogs, the links are highly relevant. You are also limited as to how many blogs you can post to each month, to ensure that the links grow naturally over time, rather than all in one go. Three Way Links The internet marketing market is highly competitive, so it's hardly surprising that another service with a different twist has popped up from this market. This is an automated "three way links" system, where you link to site A, which then links to site B, which then links back to you. Whilst this is arguably not as powerful as true "one way backlinks", it's still a significant step above one way "reciprocal" linking that is the more traditional method used by the majority of webmasters. The process is also automated for you, making it very hands off. You can submit up to 20 sites with just one account and you can specify three different anchor texts to be used as the links for each site's, making sure you don't incur any penalties for over use of just one text link keyword or phrase. It is also set up to gradually build up the links over time to make it all appear very natural to the search engines. Your Own Authority Blog There is one final service that I've found to be very useful, although it is more ideal for people with multiple sites to promote. The service gives you your own blog on an existing high PR authority site. The site has 833,039 backlinks listed in Yahoo and gets spidered several times a day by all of the major search engines. For example in June 2007 Googlebot visited it 14,470 times and Yahoo Slurp 52,436 times, so you can see why it's regarded as an "authority" site. I have used this to link to brand new sites and had them indexed by Google within 24 hours, so it's a great way of getting a new site in to the SE's quickly, and the link weíght will obviously also help any site linked to. As a side note, I've also found that my blog on this site can get fairly significant traffíc itself when I take the time to keyword optimize the posts, which is always a nice added benefit. I haven't traded reciprocal links for any of my sites in almost two years, and you can probably see why I don't need to. Using powerful new linking tools and services like these means I am able to take total control over the "off page" SEO linking strategies for my sites in the same way as I do for the "on page" SEO factors. Wouldn't you like to do have the same level of control over your sites search engine rankings? L i n k i    
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Back to the Future SEO By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007 Recently I took on a new SEO client who had a major problem. They had a very popular portal site in a competitive industry but for 3 months running, their Top 10 search engine rankings for major keywords had taken a consistent dive. The position drops ranged from 1 or 2 places up to 20 places. They hired me to try and address the issue quickly because their advertising revenue relied on the top 10 visibility of their brand in the SERPs. I looked for the usual suspects, a Google penalty, dodgy code, hidden text, new competitors, 404 errors, keyword stuffing, fast acquisition of links, domain issues, major hostíng outages, over-optimization and code bloat. Nothing - the site checked out clean. There had been a major Google algorithm update in the past 6 months, but that had occurred weeks earlier to the downward trend. So then I asked about the design history and if any major changes had been made a week or so prior to the sudden ranking drop. The client couldn't recall any major changes so I went about the business of improving the site as best I could and integrating a link building campaign to obtain links from high quality sites in the same industry. But I couldn't shake the idea that there must have been some major change to the site that impacted its previously ideal search engine compatibility. So I asked for the site's log files for the past 6 months and imported them into ClickTracks for a closer look. I discovered that the site showed a solid growth in traffíc starting in February and continuing until April. It was attracting the most traffíc on April 5 and then it suddenly plummeted. The logs didn't reveal much else, except record keyword referrals for the period, followed by record lows. It was then that the little light bulb above my head switched on. I could use the Internet Archive to see what the site looked like on those dates! If you aren't already familiar with the Internet Archive (affectionately known as the Wayback Machine), it's an online repository of web sites in historical timeline format so you can see what web sites looked like on different dates in their history. Take a look at Wikipedia's front page design from 2001. It's fun, and a little embarrassing, to see what certain web sites looked like many years ago. So I pulled copies of the client's home page from the archive for the date range that coincided with the major spike and fall and studied the HTML code of each carefully. When I compared them, I saw one glaring difference. The older version contained keyword-rich link titles for the main navigation area while the later version didn't. The links were still there, but the link title attributes were not and a quick check of the client's current home page HTML showed they were still missing. It turns out that the web designer had inadvertently removed them during an update without realizing and failed to replace them. Because the navigation area consisted of a large number of untitled links, the result was a drop in the home page keyword density for the client's major target keywords, allowing their competitors with higher density to push them down the SERPs. I presented my discovery to the client and they were somewhat relieved to have an explanation at last. The link titles were reinstated and the client's rankings have been climbing back ever since. The whole experience got me thinking: the Wayback Machine is really the SEOs secrët weapon. It's Back to the Future SEO! Here are just some ways SEOs could use it: 1) To spot major HTML coding changes on your own sites or client sites that may have impacted rankings (as per my case study). 2) To study the design and HTML history of your client's sites and their competitors. 3) To spot if a web site has been optimized in the past. 4) To study the design and HTML history of the web sites belonging to your major SEO competitors. 5) To spot if a web site has used dodgy optimization tactics in the past. 6) To see what keywords your competitors targeted in the past versus the ones they now target. 7) To compare design and usability changes made over the years by big brand sites (and imitate them). 8) To rescue HTML code and images for sites that have been hacked or wiped without back-ups in place. 9) To track content duplication or copyright violations where the site owner has already removed the offending material. 10) To check the true age of a web site and see if it has been used for a different purpose or company in the past. These are just uses I came up with from the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty more. Some of these uses are not SEO specific, but useful to webmasters in general and particularly to persons looking to buy an existing domain. Then there are the fun uses – embarrassing your mates by emailing them a copy of their old site complete with frames and blinking graphics. Having a laugh at the first designs rolled out by some of the major search engines. This is what Yahoo looked like in 1996. Here's Google in 1998. The possibilities are endless. So what are you waitíng for? Use the Wayback Machine and Get Back to the Future! About The Author Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.