Sensible Marketing for Small Business

If you are considering building a mobile application or mobile website over the next year, there are a few best practices which you can work into your website re-design process which will make moving to mobile much easier. Below, I’ve put together four key elements which will prepare you for the mobile transition.

Be prepared for RSS Feeds
When you are creating a mobile website or app, we always suggest setting it up in such a way that once you post a new article to your website, it automatically appears on the mobile side as well. Such a setup ensures that adding a mobile presence won’t double the amount of work for your marketing team. The main method for creating these type of automatic updates is by using RSS feeds.

When re-designing your site, map out any section which has frequently changing content (i.e. publications, recent news, press releases, ect.) and make sure you have an easy method for creating RSS feeds for each of these sections. You could even take this a step further and create RSS feeds for this content right from the outset.

RSS feeds are quite common for major media websites and there will be visitors to your website who will appreciate receiving your latest updates in the RSS format. The only point to remember here is make sure your feeds contain the full article and not just a summary of the content with a link to the article. Summary RSS feeds will not work for mobile as they do not give the mobile app enough information to re-create the full article in the app.

Limit PDF Based Content
Many professional service firms are stuck with using PDFs as there is a certain segment of their audience who like having print formatted content. However, the demands of readers are quickly changing and the challenge with having too much PDF content on your website is that it does not translate well to the mobile web. On most older Blackberry devices, the phone of choice for many professionals, PDFs simply will not open. For newer Blackberries, iPhone and Android users PDFs will open but it will be difficult to read the information. Reading PDFs on these small screens require a lot of zooming and scrolling left to right which will frustrate users.

The best solution is to accommodate both sets of users. When you’re planning how to display PDF content, make sure to include a brief extract of the document in HTML format and then link to the PDF. Following this hybrid approach will satisfy both groups of users.

Put Video Content on Youtube
The benefit of putting all of your video content on Youtube is that it is the most common online video platform on the planet and is thus supported by almost every modern mobile device. Distributing video to mobile devices can be quite difficult but Youtube has done the hard work to make video work on most devices.

I’ve found that Youtube is most helpful when it comes to distributing content to Blackberry devices. These devices require a specific technology called an RTSP stream to playback video. These streams are normally quite costly and difficult to maintain, so taking advantage of Youtube saves time and expense.

Start Tracking Mobile Usage…TODAY!
Even if you are not going to be launching your mobile initiative until later this year, you should still be measuring how many people are visiting your site from mobile devices. Measuring mobile visits can be done using free tools like Google Analytics. If your current analytics program does not measure mobile visits, you may want to have your IT staff also add Google Analytics tracking to your site. It’s free and is widely regarded as one of the best Analytics programs in the industry. Finding mobile information is different for every analytics program but you should be able to find a mobile tab which will help you identify which mobile devices your visitors are using. In Google Analytics, this information can be found by going to Mobile and Mobile Devices under the Visitors section. Having this information will help you to determine which platforms you should target with mobile apps and websites once you start into your mobile initiative.

Note:  INC Magazine interviewed me for this article on the emergence of video in search marketing and lead gen programs

Video can raise your search engine optimization prominence and bring in new customers — if you do it right.

How can a small company build visibility for a product or service in a big marketplace?  Uploading video to websites such as YouTube can be a surprisingly powerful tool for gaining visibility in search engines. Businesses who’ve tried it report this strategy offers huge advantages over simply the hosting video within their own website.

“In our small software company, we use video to generate leads that will bring us new business,” reports Michael E. Williams, director of marketing at BillQuick Software.

BillQuick Software. It wasn’t always that way. Before Williams joined the company about a year and a half ago, instructional videos were hosted on BillQuick’s site, as part of its support content. “A lot of time and effort goes into creating those videos,” Williams says. “Keeping them behind a firewall on a support site is ridiculous.” The problem is that search engine “spider” software can’t look behind the firewall to see how many times a video’s been viewed. Since viewings lead to search engine a prominence, without this information, the spider won’t give the video a high search ranking.

So when the company launched BillQuick 2008, Williams used TubeMogul to upload video to a variety of video-sharing sites, including YouTube, Brightcove, and Metacafe. “We started seeing a tremendous amount of viewings,” he reports, more than 2,500 viewings in one day. The reason is that the video drew search engine prominence. “If you typed in ‘BillQuick 2008,’ the video would come up higher than our own site,” he notes.

Getting video SEO right

Uploading content to sites like YouTube is a start, but there are many additional methods for leveraging video’s to lift search engine rankings. Here are some of the most effective:

1 Take advantage of text. Most search engines can’t tell what content is actually contained in the video, so they use the accompanying text to determine its relevance. Most people don’t put much thought into the text that accompanies videos, so this step alone can provide competitive advantage. Carefully craft the text that accompanies the video, the title of the video (which should be relevant but short), and the video’s keyword tags.

Don’t neglect the actual video filename. “A lot of files are called things like ‘video1.wmv,’” notes Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of the video search engine Blinkx. That’s a wasted opportunity, he says, because many search engines also consider the actual name of the file when determining a video’s relevance.

To truly take advantage of the power of text to boost video’s search engine optimization (SEO), consider providing a transcript of what’s said in the video. In fact, that’s the only way to gain search engine ranking for a privately hosted video, says Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook.com, an online SEO resource. “That way, the search engines have the text to rank against,” he says.

2. Build traffic to the video. That is, to the video hosted on a service, so the search engine will be able to track those viewings. “If you have a popular blog or newsletter for customers and you can use those things to link to the video, that helps a lot,” Wall says.

One effective way to build traffic to a video hosted on YouTube or another service is to embed a link to the video on your site, rather than hosting it at all. This has the added advantage of saving you bandwidth and giving viewers a better experience at the same time. “The video sharing sites have better load balancing than you do, so the video loads really quickly,” Williams says.

Some businesses, he adds, might hesitate to embed a video with the YouTube logo on it. But Brightcove and some other services offer the option to embed a video link with no logo, and will even allow you to customize the video player appearance to match your site, he says.

3. Provide quality content. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending a ton on production. For instance Printable Promotions, which provides promotional giveaways such as reusable grocery bags, achieved significant search engine prominence with videos shot using the video feature of an inexpensive digital camera.

“I make sure to add value,” explains Stacie Long, operations manager. “I’m not talking about price, or saying ‘Buy, buy, buy!’ I’m giving you information about the product.” For instance, one popular Printable Promotions video shows how to fold the reusable bag into its own inner pouch, making it easy to carry in a pocket. “A still picture wouldn’t really explain it,” she says.

Needless to say, you should avoid the depressingly common practice of putting tags on videos that may boost SEO prominence, but have little or no relationship to the video’s actual content. “Some people use tags of popular search terms such as ‘Britney Spears’ to bring viewers to a video about their product or service,” Chandratillake says. Blinkx is fighting back, he notes, with voice-recognition software that can actually tell what’s being said in the video. “If we find a video where the tags talk about one thing, and the video is actually about something else, it will be penalized in relevance,” he says.

4. Track your results. TubeMogul provides details analysis of how many times a video is watched, and YouTube has a similar feature. Williams also recommends adding a query string the URL link from the video to your site, so that you can tell when traffic arrives from a particular video site. By using this system, Williams learned that the video hosted on  Sclipo, a video sharing site devoted to instructional videos, had a higher clickthrough rate than the other sites, though a lower number of viewings overall.

And Long found a useful new search term. “We sell reusable grocery bags that people can put their logos on,” she says. That’s how she’d always thought of them, but by reviewing YouTube data she discovered many viewers had searched “supermarket bag” instead. “I had not thought of using the word ‘supermarket,’” she says. “I now know to update our product pages so they have the keyword ‘supermarket’ in them.”

For the full article, follow this link:  http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200806/videoSEO.html

Copyright © 2008 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved. IncTechnology.com, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195