Data Processing: 9 Tested SEO Tips

TV is coming to the Web and there is nothing that can stop it. Just ask Avner Ronen, the CEO of Web TV startup Boxee. Later tonight, he will announce the general availability of his Boxee Box, a small device you hook up to your TV and the Internet so you can watch video from the Web on your TV. The videos come not only from YouTube, but also from ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, Comedy Central, and many other video sites on the Web. I visited Ronen today at his New York City offices where he gave me a demo of the Boxee Box (more on that in a later post), but we also got into a very interesting discussion about how the major TV networks and media companies are reacting to seeing their Web videos increasingly turning up on large-screen TVs.

As he describes in the video below, Ronen argues that the media companies should be more consistent: either charge for videos on the Web or make it free, or go for the freemium model and offer premium video watching experiences on devices like Boxee and the iPad or an additional fee. He reveals that Boxee is working on a payments platform to support such subscription business models on the Boxee service. Furthermore, Hulu Plus will become available on Boxee as a paid option. Yup, the same Hulu that previously blocked Boxee

It is not a foregone conclusion that the media companies who control the most popular TV shows and movies will play along. Just last month, when Google launched its competing Google TV, it was almost immediately blocked by the major TV networks even though it was simply grabbing video freely available on the Web. Hulu also blocked Google TV. Effectively, the media industry is now discriminating based on device and what kind of browser you are using.

Why wouldn’t they do exactly the same thing to the Boxee Box? “I think that is a reasonable assumption to make,” admits Ronen. But he believes that eventually they will come around. “Our view is that ultimately it does not make sense for content owners to discriminate based on browsers and screen size. It is an endless battle. ”

I pointed out that what seems to be happening instead is that the TV networks and movie studios are trying to replicate the business model of cable TV on the Web, by granting access only to services which pay them hefty fees like Netflix does (to the tune of an estimated $2 billion next year).

Ronen is actually fine with making people pay for content, and in fact says that he will make one-click payments part of the Boxee service itself. Next year,” he reveals, “we will launch a payments platform on Boxee. With one click you will be able to subscribe. We think that will be part of the solution.” You can watch videos behind Web paywalls today on Boxee, but you have to enter a different username and password for each site. Boxee’s payment service would be single sign-on and manage all the subscriptions in one place.

What he suggests is a classic freemium model. If you want new shows and videos as soon as they come out in HD, you pay a few bucks a month to NBC or HBO and you can watch those shows on Boxee, your iPad, your computer or anywhere you want. Then a week or so later, it comes out free on the Web in standard definition with ads. The we-support-subscriptions argument is also one the Google TV folks are making.

The media companies are fine with Netflix streaming their movies and shows because Netflix pays them a bunch of money. But where their model breaks down is that often they offer the same TV shows on their own Websites for free. “While they are comfortable with the Netflix model, they are not comfortable with their own services online. I think it is better if they have an online business model that they believe in.”

Watch the shaky-cam video below for more of his thoughts on the matter.

Though social media has proved itself an effective tool in helping journalists gather news and connect with their communities, a pervading question among the skeptics still remains: Where’s the money?

As social sites like Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook build their empires and seek to remedy their own financial instability in the hope of turning profits, news organizations are experimenting with ways to monetize their social media presence and leverage the social web to complete an online revenue puzzle.

The revenue is there, but the social web won’t necessarily solve that puzzle. “There’s no silver bullet,” Jim Brady, the general manager at TBD.com, said at the Online News Association Conference last week. “There’s just shrapnel, pieces of revenue.” Brady, who launched TBD.com this summer, said display ads are certainly not the future in revenue for news and that it will come from multiple revenue streams. class='blippr-nobr'>Newsclass="blippr-nobr">news organizations have certainly been experimenting where they can to get revenue in pieces, from mobile applications to launching group buying sites. Here’s a closer look at some of these efforts.

Self-Serve “Real Time Ads”

Much of online advertising consists of static display ads that are sold based on a CPM ad model, a varying price per 1,000 impressions. An advertiser delivers an ad design that then rotates with others on the site. What if small business advertisers could change the message of that ad in real time?

That’s the idea of Minnpost.com’s Real Time Ads, which essentially use customized widgets that pull in messages from an advertiser’s Twitter, Facebook or YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube accounts. Local businesses can buy the widget space for a specified amount of time, instead of a CPM model, and are able to update the content whenever they’d like, making each message timely and perfect for a daily deal or promotion.

It is especially useful for local business. Even if they don’t have a social profile or an RSS feed to attach to the ad, they can update their ad by e-mailing a new message to their account, said Karl Pearson-Cater, director of operations at Minnpost.com — a non-profit news organization that relies largely on donations.

“Advertisers love real-time ads. The biggest benefit is how easy it is to get set up and how easy it is to maintain,” Pearson-Cater said.

If real-time ads work for Minnpost.com, Pearson-Cater said they can help adapt the platform for other publishers as well. In the past few months, he said they’ve begun to see a significant revenue stream. They now have approximately $15,000 in annual contracts using real-time ads.

At Yahoo! News, Anna Robertson, director of social media and original video, said they’re considering sponsorships around social widgets on pages as well, or another form of sponsored modules. It’s likely that this form of advertising will become more prevalent across news sites.

Revenue Share

At TBD.com, Brady and his team are leveraging a network of blogs to sell distributed ads. When they come to advertisers, they’re able to sell ads across a network of 196 blogs, which they share 35% of the revenue with. It’s a win-win for TBD and its partners that get revenue they may not have gotten otherwise.

Another approach, of course, is being on the receiving end of social partnerships or revenue sharing. YouTube, for example, shares revenue made through AdSense and publishers can have Promoted Videos run on their page. And as of late, YouTube has become even more sophisticated in making money off of copyright infringers, sharing revenue with the original publishers.

In-stream Advertising

On websites, display ads coexist beside content on a page. But more and more content is becoming part of the social news stream. Users are becoming more accustomed to receiving and digesting information in a stream format on Facebook, Twitter and other sites that display updates in real time. Because people often engage the content in the social space and may not even come directly to the site, monetizing social media off-site is just as important, said Mike Orren, president and founder of Pegasus News in Texas.

“The thing that hasn’t been figured out is how to do so without alienating the social media audience that seems generally trained to disdain ’sponsored’ postings,” Orren said. But of course, that could change.

It’s also important to set clear user expectations of what’s what. Robertson from Yahoo! News said if done effectively, while protecting “church and state,” it can be a good option. She said it’s up to the news organizations to be transparent about what is an ad and what’s content in order to protect journalistic integrity.

Twitter has begun releasing several products to monetize its service, including Promoted Tweets, which are sponsored messages that are featured within a user’s stream. However, news companies have experimented with selling in-stream messages to advertisers and sponsors. The Austin-American Statesman experimented with selling sponsored tweets for $300 per day for two tweets. And according to the paper’s social media editor Robert Quigley, who had to approve the tweets before they went out, followers found them non-intrusive.

In fact, sites like Ad.ly work with advertisers who buy sponsored messages that appear on their participating partners’ Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and mobile and site widgets. Its partners include a slew of celebrities like Kim Kardashian and publications like TIME.com.

Laura Heck, director of business development at TIME.com, said more publishers are starting to experiment with this format. At TIME.com, Heck said they’ve recently begun to offer advertisers access to its 2.2 million Twitter followers and 165,000+ Facebook fans for sponsored messages. Heck said they’ve put strict rules in place for the type of messages they will feature, frequency, etc., to make sure it doesn’t hinder the user experience.

Selling Traffic and Amplification

The ROI for news companies putting resources to build their social presence has often been a more “engaged” community of readers, a notion that is too often measured by a sheer increase in traffic referrals from social sites or more time spent on site. Many defend social investment by showcasing an increase in traffic, traffic that can then, hypothetically, sell more ads.

Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and news industry analyst at Outsell, said social networks have become the fastest growing source of traffic referrals for many news sites. For many, social sites like Facebook and Twitter account for 10% to 15% of their overall referrals, but are number one in growth. The results are even more heavy on social for news startups like CapitalNY, Doctor said, who get 40% or more of their traffic from social. And of course, the quality of these referrals is often better than those readers who come from search. They yield better conversation and are more likely to become regular users of the site, he said.

Though many news organizations have driven traffic organically, The Washington Post recently bought #Election as a “Promoted Trend” on Twitter, which then highlighted its tweet above others using the hashtag in Twitter conversation, likely resulting in a big increase in referrals from visitors who came across the Promoted Trend above all others in the Trends sidebar.

“When we talked with Twitter about the idea, we thought it was a great opportunity to be innovative, go to readers and highlight our content front and center with Twitter’s vast and engaged audience,” said Katharine Zaleski, executive producer and head of digital news products. “The idea wasn’t just to sponsor The Post, but rather, we chose a broad hashtag, probably the broadest for elections, to be able to aggregate the best election tweets from multiple sources and not just us.”

But perhaps more importantly, social amplification has become part of the sell. On top of the site metrics and reach, advertisers want to now know how the content will be amplified off the site with social media. Such is the case with content sponsorships. If an advertiser has its name on a piece of content that they sponsored, they also want to know how many times it was retweeted, shared on Facebook, dugg on class='blippr-nobr'>Diggclass="blippr-nobr">Digg, etc. For example, TIME worked with an advertiser on a “Stay class='blippr-nobr'>Connectedclass="blippr-nobr">Connected” package, which included leveraging social features on TIME.com and its social networks.

Making Ads More Social

Advertisers have begun trying to make ads more social by adding a Facebook “Like” button within the frame or a stream of tweets that make the ad something that readers can interact with. It’s a light-weight way to get users to engage with and even sometimes share advertisements with their social networks while helping advertisers increase their one-to-one relationship with readers by growing their own social following, said Heck from TIME.com.

“Ads are increasingly becoming more social as we’re giving users the ability to engage with and share the ad content,” Heck said.

The idea of course is that users are far more responsive to content recommended by their friends or personal connections rather than content from a branded account or page. At TIME.com, Heck said they’re working on identifying ways to include advertiser branding within shared content. But the details of that formula have yet to be worked out.

Leveraging Social Site Real Estate

Though display ads may not be the future, they can be simple to integrate on social sites. News organizations like TIME and more recently the Silicon Alley Insider have sold their Twitter backgrounds as a social display ad.

Similar to readers landing on TIME.com and being exposed to display ads on the site, Twitter users landing on @TIME on Twitter were also exposed to a display ad in the background. Thinking creatively and putting effort to sell those spaces can make them more valuable by adding another spot for display inventory.

What’s Next? Personalized Social Ads

The start and glimmer of what’s possible with personalized and more socially targeted ads has been the result of news organizations like The New York Times and others selling advertising that specifically targets readers who came to the site through Facebook or Twitter. Twitter itself has targeted its Promoted Tweets in the stream based on relevancy, though it is sometimes tied to a Promoted Trend.

News organizations could take advantage of building structured data to better target their advertisements to readers, and perhaps even making advertisements more useful. Of course, this already takes place at a lot of organizations. At Pegasus News, Orren said its entire business model centers on using structured data to customize display ads with all of its content being tagged using a hierarchical taxonomy of more than 3,000 local topics and geography. But, he said, the company hasn’t yet figured out how to take that offsite or to open the flow of data between its sites and the social web, while at the same time respecting privacy.

Doctor said he sees social media optimization as a driver of audience and engagement, and that engagement getting monetized through targeting, rather than blasting social marketing pushes. Being able to get more sophisticated in targeting individuals and specific communities will make monetization efforts easier.

Social media, which effectively has infiltrated all corners of the web, has great potential in not only bringing in revenue but also making ads more useful to readers while also satisfying the needs of advertisers aiming to effectively reach the public. The social web can change the way we think about ads, by making them social and personalized to create utility for the user.

Robertson, from Yahoo! News, said we’re just at the beginning of this space. Yahoo acquired Citizen Sports close to a year ago and it’s done a good job of bringing in revenue attached to social media streams. Yahoo is working to scale some of the concepts to news, Robertson said.

“This is still a fairly new space with a lot of opportunity for news organizations and brands to experiment and innovate,” she said.

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Most Engaged Brands in Social Media/> - 5 Winning Social Media Campaigns to Learn From/> - HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page/> - 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now/> - A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places

For more Social Media coverage:

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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the art (and science) of bringing a web site to the top of Google and other major search engines for specific keywords that you want to target.

Since being on the first page and in the #1 position for your keywords always means more traffic to your web site, it is easy to see why there is such a high demand for effective SEO services today.

So, what does it take for your web site to rise to the top of Google? A lot of that is dependent upon the specific industry your business is in. For example, it would be fairly easy to rank #1 in Google if you had a unique service or product that nobody else had in Branson. But if you are wanting to rank well for a keyword like "branson tickets", it would be much more complicated, due to the sheer number of other web sites that are also trying to compete for that keyword.

Just like any other "battle", the more contestants you have playing, the tougher the competition is going to be. And SEO is definitely a battle - make no mistake about it. The modern-day SEO arena is home to some of the most ferocious Internet and Web-based marketing tactics known to man.

The reason for this highly-competitive force is the nature Internet marketing itself. Most businesses have embraced the Internet and World Wide Web as their primary channel for marketing, advertising, and information distribution channels. More and more businesses are trying to gain popularity and showcase what they have to offer to the entire world - not just the locals.

And it makes sense. The more people you can reach on the Web, the more customers and clients your business will attract altogether.

But still, there are a large number of web sites that only use minimal SEO tactics. And it's almost shocking when you analyze a web site and clearly see that even text-book SEO elements have been neglected or omitted entirely. These are the same web sites for the businesses that are struggling to make ends meet, especially in the economic turmoil we are facing at the moment.

And what about the web sites for those businesses that are actually being prolific, in spite of the economy? Those web sites are the ones that have implemented professional SEO services to gain a better position in the search engines. And they are thriving!

It's a well known fact that if your web site is not listed on the first page of Google, you are missing out on about 70% of all traffic on the Web today. That's a pretty big number. But it's very true. If your business is going to be successful on the Web, then you need to invest in a SEO campaign that can bring you all the way to the top.

And when you consider the cost of traditional advertising methods vs. SEO / SEM, you can clearly see that not only is SEO more affordable, it's also more effective. By investing in quality SEO, you'll see a much larger return on investment than you would with radio, TV, or yellow page advertisements. Plus, all of the traditional advertising methods restrict you to the local or regional market.

An effective SEO campaign will allow you to reach people from all over the world. Now that's powerful!
You really need to have your web site optimized for the search engines by a qualified SEO professional who can deliver the search engine optimization services you need to stay ahead of the competition.

Here are a few tips to consider while you are seeking the right SEO professional to help your web site get a better rank in Google:

1. Find an SEO professional who is familiar with the market you are in. By understanding the competitive nature of your specific industry, your SEO professional will be better equipped to provide you with effective SEO services.

2. Ask to see examples of previous SEO campaigns that were a success. It is best if they have previously successful SEO campaigns that were for your particular market / web sites related to yours specifically. That way, you'll know they fully understand how to compete with the other sites in your arena.

3. Find out how long it will take before you begin to see some results and improved search engine rankings for your web site. All quality SEO work takes time. It can be weeks or even months before you start to see your web site climbing up in the search engine results. It's better to have an accurate time estimate before you start so that there are not any surprises later on down the road.

4. Ask the SEO professional what exactly will take place during the SEO campaign. Often times, many search engine optimization "experts" will be cryptic and try to avoid this question. And often, it is indicative of an inexperienced "wanna be". Any good SEO professional worth his salt will be able to tell you exactly what will occur during your SEO process.

5. Avoid any SEO professional who claims to give you "x" amount of links for "x" amount of dollars. For example, if he tells you something like "I can give you 500 links for $500...", then it is probably not going to be very effective SEO. All true SEO experts know that it's the quality, not the quantity of links that matters the most.

6. Ask to be kept up-to-date during your entire SEO campaign. That way, you'll be able to keep up on what is really going on, what work is being performed, how many hours are being invested, etc.

7. Find out ( before the SEO campaign begins ) what it is going to take to maintain the higher search engine position after you have reached it. All good SEO experts know that getting to the top of Google is only half the battle. Once you are there, it will require some attention and a little on-going work to insure that your Branson web site stays up there.

8. Make it very clear in the beginning that you do not want any "black hat" SEO techniques used during the process of your SEO campaign. Black hat SEO is the practice of implementing questionable SEO practices in the eyes of Google and it will certainly get your web site banned from the Google index!

Remember: always ask questions and stay informed. By keeping these tips in mind, you'll have better chances of finding the right SEO professional to provide you with a very successful and effective SEO campaign.

Here at Digital Spiral Web Design, we specialize in affordable and effective SEO services for web site owners. We know what it takes to have success when competing with other business web sites in the search engines.

Already, we have launched several successful SEO campaigns and have achieved over 100 first-page placements in Google! We have the SEO knowledge and experience required to provide you with the best SEO services for your web site.

-Cole Pannell

Digital Spiral Web Design

http://www.digitalspiralwebdesign.com

info@digitalspiralwebdesign.com

Article Source:

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cole_Pannell

Cole Pannell - EzineArticles Expert Author

Monday, November 15, 2010

9 Tested SEO Tips

Self-Serve “Real Time Ads”

Revenue Share

In-stream Advertising

Selling Traffic and Amplification

Making Ads More Social

Sponsored Contests and Social Campaigns

Leveraging Social Site Real Estate

What’s Next? Personalized Social Ads

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

For more Social Media coverage:

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