Advantages of internet Marketing

Internet marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to the ratio of cost against the reach of the target audience. Companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets. The nature of the medium allows consumers to research and purchase products and services at their own convenience. Therefore, businesses have the advantage of appealing to consumers in a medium that can bring results quickly. The strategy and overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns depend on business goals and cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis.

Internet marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively. Nearly all aspects of an Internet marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested. The advertisers can use a variety of methods: pay per impression, pay per click, pay per play, or pay per action. Therefore, marketers can determine which messages or offerings are more appealing to the audience. The results of campaigns can be measured and tracked immediately because online marketing initiatives usually require users to click on an advertisement, visit a website, and perform a targeted action. Such measurement cannot be achieved through billboard advertising, where an individual will at best be interested, then decide to obtain more information at a later time..

Because exposure, response, and overall efficiency of Internet media are easier to track than traditional off-line media—through the use of web analytics for instance—Internet marketing can offer a greater sense of accountability for advertisers. Marketers and their clients are becoming aware of the need to measure the collaborative effects of marketing (i.e., how the Internet affects in-store sales) rather than siloing each advertising medium. The effects of multichannel marketing can be difficult to determine, but are an important part of ascertaining the value of media campaigns.

Google algorithm update Vince favors Big Brands !!

Recently there was a rumor on the Internet that there has been a change in Google algorithm which seems to be helping big brands for ranking on major keywords. Matt Cutts, the Head of Search Quality group in Google, confirmed in the following video that the rumor was indeed true, and Google ranking algorithm update named ‘Vince‘ is responsible for the sudden boost in rankings for big companies for major keywords.


Recently there was a rumor on the Internet that there has been a change in Google algorithm which seems to be helping big brands for ranking on major keywords. Matt Cutts, the Head of Search Quality group in Google, confirmed in the following video that the rumor was indeed true, and Google ranking algorithm update named ‘Vince‘ is responsible for the sudden boost in rankings for big companies for major keywords.

As we know, this is not a major Google update, but just one of the over 300 changes which Google carries out a year to enhance the quality of their search results. He further explains that this change does not favor any specific brands, but rather gives a boost in rankings based on relevant criteria such as trust, authority, PageRank or reputation.

Some Interesting Thoughts on Google Instant

The blogosphere is absorbing today’s announcement of Google Instant. I wanted to give some context and some thoughts.

Google’s web search (and web search infrastructure) team tries to do several things well:
- We want the most comprehensive index of the web. We explore ways to crawl the web deeper, faster, and better, from increasing our index size or indexing speed to crawling web forms to discovering links in JavaScript.
- We try to return relevant, useful results. Hundreds of people work on lots of improvements to our ranking algorithms.
- We try to return your search results really fast.
- We try to improve our search user interface (UI).

The first three things aren’t highly visible. Average users might not notice changes like Caffeine (improved indexing) or a better algorithm to detect hacked sites–although we have seen effects like users searching more when we deploy a fresher index. A bunch of people at Google have come up with amazing ways to make your search results faster. We’ve shared many of those insights to help make the web faster as a whole.

A key insight behind Google Instant is that if we want to get people answers and solve their problems faster, we can help with that by improving our UI to help you formulate queries more quickly (and then doing a bunch of hard work under the hood to answer that query too). Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. :) With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Sources: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

International SEO Market

Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.

In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany As of June 2008, the marketshare of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise. That market share is achieved in a number of countries.

As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable markets where this is the case are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the Czech Republic where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.

SEO New Trends !!

The past year has been one of major transition in the search engine industry. Changes to the landscape have been enormous with mergers, acquisitions, and the easing of several formerly big-players out of the sector or, in the case of AltaVista, Lycos and LookSmart, into the minor leagues. We’ve seen new technologies and revenue models being tested by search firms, along with fresh promises of personalized ad-delivery through contextual placement. While there is no end in sight for changes in this evolving medium, this is a good time to examine the impact of such upheaval on the state of website marketing and search engine placement.

The biggest recent shift in the industry is the steady erosion of Google’s dominance over the past eight months. In mid-July, the SEO community started to notice subtle changes in Google’s ranking algorithm. At that time, Google had an absolute lock on the search engine world with some form of involvement in over 76% of all searches conducted globally. By the time Google released its infamous "Florida Update" in mid-November, Google’s lock-hold was slipping. At that time, Google was the main listings provider for a host of Internet properties including the gigantic search-portal Yahoo!.

That changed recently when Yahoo discontinued their relationship with Google in place of their in-house database, Inktomi. With the loss of distribution through Yahoo!, Google now fuels approximately 48% of all search traffic, with the bulk of the remainder split between Yahoo and MSN, both of which are currently fed by Inktomi. (Please note: Yahoo will be moving away from Inktomi in mid-April in favour of their own paid-inclusion database.) While Google continues to enjoy a higher viewership than any other search tool, it has lost a great deal of distribution power since being dumped by Yahoo!. The bottom line here is that there are now three major search engines as opposed to just one and SEO strategies need to change to meet the new environment. Last year, clients were strictly concerned with Google rankings, knowing full well that good Google rankings were a sure-fire ticket into Yahoo. SEO-Reaction: This year, SEOs will need to concentrate on a mixture of strong-keyword enriched copy in order to please Inktomi, along with a well thought-out link-building campaign to please Google. The re-emergence of Yahoo and MSN as serious players in the search industry is beneficial to advertisers and webmasters as competition and the corresponding increase in consumer choices tend to produce better products and services in the long run.

Bigger, Better, Undercut&ldots;

The validity of the truism about competition driving innovation and producing better products and innovations is demonstrated by the number of new services and innovations introduced over the past twelve months. Search is becoming far more technical and, in many ways, far more specific. Localization and personalization are two of the new common buzzwords in Internet marketing. Localized search results promise increased relevance to the searcher by delivering search results from sources within a reasonable traveling distance such as a postal/zip-code or telephone area-code. Personalized search results promise listings based on specific interests or behaviours of the individual searcher, or the computer used to conduct the search.

An early example of a search tool designed to deliver personalized Eurekstersearch results is Eurekster. Eurekster bases it’s results on two major factors. The first is the user’s personal behaviour. The second is the behaviour of friends and others belonging to a social or work grouping. The basic idea is that groups share common interests. Weighing a search-query by those interests may produce better, more personalized search results. SEO-Reaction: In order to adapt to these two innovations, website marketers and SEOs will need to add highly specific elements to a client’s website such as geo-specific metatags and text, and corporate identifying information such as full street addresses and telephone numbers. Website marketers will also need to add features to websites making them more useful to individual searchers such as newsletters, local-promotions and blogs to make their site relevant to specific users in order to present a level of personalized attention that will keep viewers coming back, or at least keep the client’s website in the minds of search engine users.

The big three are using these and other features to try to undercut each other’s level of service offerings, including blogging, news aggregators, email and instant-messaging, and a whole host of tool-bars. It is only a matter of time until someone introduces a new technology or search tool that "re-invents" the way we relate to information retrieval. Both IBM and MSN are developing deep-crawling spiders that will certainly expand the scope of search. IBM is developing the Webfountain tool and MSN is slated to release its new search tool based on the coming Longhorn operating system. These tools will include Excel sheets, Word docs, emails, and other documents found on a hard drive that a user has viewed, in search results for that specific user.

Evolution or Bust
Over the past three years, search engine marketing has become the fastest growing advertising medium in the world. New SEO firms are emerging and established SEO firms, like StepForth are growing rapidly. Website owners and webmasters are advised to shop around before choosing an Internet marketing provider. Check out several SEO websites and compare service offerings. Ask serious questions and don’t be afraid to challenge an SEO’s knowledge of the environment. With change comes confusion and we are noting a number of new firms playing on that confusion in order to see short-term gains. A new company in our area will take $200 from clients in order to add their URL to an automated submitter.

As difficult as it may be to believe, there are still millions who fall for that old, "better living through automation" argument. Another pitfall to watch out for is hiring a company that is not prepared to evolve their services to meet new technical innovations. As the search world changes, good, honest SEOs are prepared to adapt and tell their clients exactly how that evolution will take place and why.

Source: http://www.zeromillion.com/webmarketing/search-engines-and-seo.html

How to do videos promotion online ?

These are some methods of online videos promotion:-

1. Submit to social video bookmarking sites. Digg.com, Video Bomb, Flurl, StumbleVideo – all these sites have the potential to send a lot of viewers if enough people vote for your video.

2. Email video blogs and websites to tell them about your video. Email blogs which post interesting online videos. Use Google and Delicious to find such blogs.

3. Email blogs that talk about your videos topic. If your video is about an Apple Mac then email Apple Mac blogs, if your video is about making pizza then email recipe blogs.

4. Submit to regular social bookmarking sites Don’t forget the regular social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, BlinkList etc. These sites will link to videos and if enough people vote for it you can get a lot of visitors.

5. Submit your video (or a teaser video) to the busiest video sharing sites YouTube is busier, but so is Daily Motion, MetaCafe, and many others. Check out a huge list of video sharing sites here. If it’s a teaser video or you want people to visit your website write your website in the description and also show it within the video.

6. Post your video in relevant discussion boards and forums. Read their rules first and don’t spam. Make sure what you post is relevant to the forum and choose the busiest forums to post in.

7. Tag and describe your videos It is important to put the keywords that describe your video in the associated tags and description so search engines know what your video is about.

8. Read the SEO guide for video The video search engine Blinkx published a guide on optimizing your video for search engine traffic.

9. Send out a press release If your video is especially news worthy you may want to send out an online Press Release.

10. Make videos regularly and create your own website and MySpace A one-off video may get popular but if you make videos regularly and place them on your own website AND MySpace you can build up a large following.

11. Enter competitions There are plenty of video competitions out there so look around and enter any you can for more exposure. For example the Network2 contest, BrioBox contest, Acceptable.tv etc.

12. Get help from your friends Get your friends to help by adding you to their MySpace, bookmarking your video on social bookmarking sites, adding your video as a favorite on YouTube, posting about your video on their site etc.

13. Choose the right thumbnail When ever you decide to watch a video it is heavily influenced by the thumbnail (the little picture of the video clip) that you see first. If you can choose the thumbnail do so and make it sharp, clear, eye catching and relevant to your video.

14. A catchy title A catchy title is just as important as a catchy thumbnail to encourage people to click that link to watch your video.

15. File Sharing This is often forgotten but if you are giving away your video for free why not distribute a copy for free over file sharing networks. Depending on the niche of your video this can work well. Don’t forget to include the name of your website in your video.

Social Media Optimization

SMO-Social Media Optimization is the method of social media activity with the interest of attracting unique visitors to website content. SMO is one of two online methods of website optimization; the other method is search engine optimization or SEO.

There are two main categories of SMO methods:-

(a) Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos

(b) Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles.

Ideally, Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

Social Media optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO), is not limited to marketing and brand building. These days smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (ie. product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more). Additionally, Social Media Optimization is oftentimes implemented to foster a community of the associated site, allowing for a healthy business to consumer relationship.