Press Release Vine

A lot of bloggers have weighed in with commentary, observations and opinions. Every time I read a new post about the so called smack-down I imagine some Googlers at Mountain View laughing hysterically and high-fiving each other for turning the tables on the SEO industry yet again.

The situation has even got the SEOs turning on each other. One of the world’s best known SEOs, Jill Whalen, made a post in response to the situation that included a comment about one of the affected sites, Search Engine Guide. Jill’s post has been interpreted in some circles as a type of attack. Here’s the comment Jill made in her post:

“Even my very good friends at Search Engine Guide were smacked down. I hadn’t been to their home page in ages since I usually visit through direct article links, but when I looked at their home page today and scrolled down to the bottom, I was taken aback to see what looks more like a link farm than anything else!”

I’ve known Jill a long time and I read her remark about Search Engine Guide as a quick off the cuff comment, not a deliberate attack. Without putting words in her mouth, I think it sounded more shocking than she meant it, probably because she was typing as a response to first impressions of Search Engine Guide after not seeing it for so long and because (being ridiculously busy) she was probably in a hurry. So the comment itself didn’t raise an eyebrow for me. But I WAS concerned about how the general webmaster community would interpret the comment.

Yes, she has every right to her opinion. But being who she is and the industry reputation she’s built up, Jill has incredible influence over a large number of webmasters and SEOs who absorb her material. Persons reading her article that are unfamiliar with Search Engine Guide may permanently associate the site with the term “link farm” and all the negative connotations that brings. No matter her intent, her remark definitely has the power to hurt Search Engine Guide and their reputation. The site’s publisher Robert Clough obviously thought so, as he was prompted to make an uncharacteristic post in response.

Personally, I think Jill should have considered the possible backlash from her casual comment and worded her post much more carefully. After all, with industry influence comes responsibility. Which brings me to the main point of this article. Google now has extreme influence and power over the Internet. When they make changes to their algorithm or the way they cache and filter web sites, it has a dramatic impact on not just web site owners, but business and life in general. Millíons of people rely on Google to survive, literally. In that respect, this attempt at link bait humor is a little too close to reality to be funny.

With such powerful social influence, I think it’s about time Google started taking more responsibility by being more transparent with their activities. If too many webmasters are doing the wrong thing with regard to linking, or an algorithm change has occurred, why not launch a media release to set the facts straight? Not everyone knows about Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, or has a Webmaster Tools account. But a lot of people read the newspaper. If they want webmasters to co-operate, Google has to recognize it’s a two way street.

By slapping on this latest penalty, (if it is indeed a penalty), Google seems to be claiming to *know* the intent of these sites. But what if they’re wrong? What if, as Jennifer Laycock claims, they are merely selling advertising space without Google being a consideration? There’s nothing in Search Engine Guide’s advertising material relating to PageRank OR Google. To assume they are trying to use their site’s high PageRank as a selling point is pretty arrogant and irresponsible of Google, in my opinion.

Without some type of public acknowledgement from them, we can only assume Google’s latest move is an attempt to control how webmasters use their own web site space. That’s a huge line in the sand they’ve crossed and I don’t know about you, but it makes me nervous.
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 her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at 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.

Almost daily I receive emails from people asking me to review their websites and tell them why they can’t convert visitors to customers even when they are attracting significant numbers of visitors on a regular basis to their sites.

The answer is both simple and complex: simple, because these websites fail to communicate the company’s message in a meaningful manner to their visitors, which means no dialog is opened, and without a dialog, no business can be done; and complex, because the implementation of the solution requires a new way of thinking about communicating with your audience using sophisticated presentation techniques that put a higher premium on creativity than they do on facts, figures and old-school direct marketing tactics.

New Words For A New Web-Business Environment

In the past while I’ve run across three newly coined words or phrases (Communitainment, Branded Entertainment, and Snack-o-tainment) that attempt to capture the fundamental change that has taken place among Web-user expectations.

All of the new terms have two things in common: one, they require the marketer to think of website visitors as an audience and not as customers; and two, they all require the marketer to use entertainment techniques as the basis for delivering content.

Communication + Entertainment + Community

The Piper Jaffray Internet Media and Marketing research team recently released a report entitled ‘The User Revolution’ in which Safa Rashtchy coined the concept of ‘Communitainment,’ a blending of the words communication and entertainment. Rashtchy uses the term to denote the “melding of communication, community, and entertainment,” as a new formula for implementing the delivery of marketing content.

The report points out that “Video ads will be the driver of the next major growth in brand advertising” with the Web being “the leading medium at work and the second leading medium at home behind television.”

For any business that thought they could conduct business as usual, this should be a wake-up call. The Web has changed: the market is no longer content to be informed, they must be seduced, and you are not going to seduce them with key-word density and biz-speak.

Contrary to popular belief you can deliver a marketing message faster, more powerfully, and with better recall using creative video presentations than you can with a page of text. Now no one is saying you shouldn’t have text on your site, but your copy better be damn interesting and well written if you expect anyone to actually read it.

Meaning + Sharing + Experience

The idea of ‘Communitainment’ provides a conceptual framework for creating Web-video presentations that work: your business communication must convey meaning through a focused presentation that uses all the various techniques available to the savvy Web-producer; your audience must see enough value in the presentation that they are willing to contact others in their colleague-community and share it; and lastly, the delivery of the message must create a memorable entertaining experience associated with the product or service provided.

Branded Entertainment

Leta Baker writes in her ‘Adobe Magazine’ article ‘Creative Persuasion: The Rise of Branded Entertainment’ about her concept of using entertaining online video presentations as a means of effectively creating brand awareness.

What Baker is talking about is video that doesn’t hit you over the head with a hard-sell salës pitch or bore you to death with meaningless platitudes, but rather presents entertaining short programs that companies can attach their brand to so viewers gain a memorable positive impression of your company. This is a long-term strategy that takes into account the reality that not every genuine prospect that comes to your website is ready to buy your product at that moment but might, when and if they remember who you are, when they are ready to buy.

There are many ways to implement this ‘branded entertainment’ concept and they all don’t have to be completely devoid of salesmanship. The Apple iPod commercials are an example of what I would call ‘branded entertainment,’ even if Leta Baker would object. Unlike most commercials that people race to avoid, the iPod commercials are actually anticipated: people want to know what Apple is going to come up with next, and the result: iPod has the lion’s share of the MP3 player market.

The Apple Macintosh commercials are another form of ‘branded entertainment’ that involves a salës pitch. Here we have an ongoing campaign with well-developed characters that the audience has gotten to know over the length of the campaign. The audience looks forward to what these characters are going to do next. This does not mean that every PC owner is going to run out and buy a Mac, but over time Apple is getting people to recognize their product as an alternative.

Because the commercials are entertaining, people are listening and waiting for the next installment of the campaign. Audiences are getting the message and that is all any good marketing campaign can achieve.

And here is the big hurdle for many small businesses: good marketing requires patience and should be aimed at opening a dialog, not just making a quick sale.

Most website salës pitches are like bad ‘pick-up’ lines: crude and ineffective; an audience needs to be wooed with tender loving care before you can expect to see any results. If you’re not willing to invest the time and creativity in opening a dialog with your audience, you can forget about using the Internet as a marketing tool.

Snack-o-tainment: Fast Food Entertainment

The term ‘Snack-o-tainment’ was used by Nancy Miller in her ‘Wired’ magazine article ‘Manifesto for a New Age” in which she equates consumption of new media to societies addiction to fast food. If the audience is addicted to entertaining media, we as marketers must feed that addiction.

It wasn’t that long ago that the biggest objection to online video was it took too long to load; now we see it compared to fast food. The fact is video can deliver a meaningful message in the quickest possible way because it conveys content using the full arsenal of communication tools.

We can look to television for a blueprint of how to deliver these bite-sized morsels of corporately nutritious, entertaining, marketing manna.

The thirty-second commercial is an example of just how much memorable content can be crammed into a short period of time if a little entertaining creativity is added to the mix. And unlike television, there is no costly premium associated with time on the Internet, so content can be as long or short as the message requires.

A campaign based on this formula can come complete with plot-lines, character development, and signature music all designed to deliver your marketing message in an entertaining way that will not only get stuck in your audience’s memory, but will be anticipated by that same audience. The famous ‘Taster’s Choice’ soap opera style campaign of years ago was one of the best examples of combining entertainment with a commercial message.

Even the lowly jingle can be resurrected to provide some ‘sit-up and take notice’ to an otherwise mundane presentation. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t know the recipe for MacDonald’s Big Mac, based on their fabulously successful commercials, even though they haven’t been aired in years. In fact MacDonald’s current roster of commercials are so forgettable that you wonder why they haven’t brought the old standby back to life.

Another bit of delicious marketing entertainment was the series of Chili’s Restaurant commercials featuring various singers interpreting their ‘Baby Back Ribs’ jingle, which provided far more entertainment in thirty seconds than a full CD of Britney Spears. More importantly that infectious ‘baby back ribs’ song has become deeply rooted in the public’s subconscious, and when the inevitable question comes up, ‘where are we going to eat?’ that jingle starts playing in our heads. If you want to be successful, learn from what works.

Can You Afford To Wait

If your business is expanding as fast as it can with an ever-growing líst of customers and continuously increasing profits, then perhaps you can afford to ignore the changes taking place, and the expectations of your audience. But if things could be better, and if you yearn to improve your Web-marketing, then you have to adjust to new ways of delivering content.

You can’t let out-dated thinking get in your way. There is a difference between twenty year’s experience, and one year’s experience repeated twenty times. There is no point in continuing to repeat old methods that no longer work.

You know things have changed so get ready to deliver your content in a way that will allow your company to become the next great Web success story.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone             (905) 764-1246 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (905) 764-1246 end_of_the_skype_highlighting .

Here is a líst of what I consider to be the Top 10 dumbest web site decisions ever, in reverse order, David Letterman style :

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990′s when I was working for a large Internet agency, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with a major client, during which the client asked him to register CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.

An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he’d had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn’t available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that’s who. I’ll save the company some embarrassment and won’t reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I haven’t let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL’s Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn’t realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed.

Their web design team put up a message that read:

“404 Error. You’ve obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists.”

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendatíon to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot. Persons viewing that page would be clicking the “back” button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don’t understand the “Back in 15 minutes” sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and drop them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn’t that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Bíz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I’m putting up my hand on this one. I’m not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot bíz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time, dot bíz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I’ve ever seen (and some that I hadn’t) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacatíon

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacatíon over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said “closed until after Christmas”. I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? “Why didn’t you TELL ME this could happen?”

And the dumbest web site decision I’ve ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don’t Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia, marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There’s only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don’t even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It’s tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don’t let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren’t in the hands of dummies!
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.

Leased: Identical articles that are well-researched and written, but sold to numerous web sites.

Custom: Well-researched, authoritative content that is tailored specifically to meet the needs of you and your business.

Fluff content is fine for businesses just starting out. It helps you to at least get a place in the race to the top of the search engines, but for long-lasting results, fluff just won’t cut it. The wording is often choppy, incoherent, and doesn’t achieve your primary goal which is customer conversion. Also, if the content of your site is sloppy, it will not instill confidence in a potential customer.

Leased content works well because it is professionally written, topical, and easy to find.

Search engine algorithms favor content that has keywords and phrases that are strategically placed but those words and phrases must also be embedded in text that is lean and carefully crafted for consistent results.

The drawback of leased content is that it can be found in a wide variety of other websites and cannot meet the unique needs of your business or specifically target the audience that you want to attract.

Custom Content

Custom content is content that has been professionally crafted to feature the keywords and phrases that you and an SEO expert have chosen to rank well with search engines and attract your target audience. The strengths of custom content are:

Specificity

You can consult a copywriting firm to construct your content exactly the way that you want it to convey the unique products and services that your business offers and organically build the rank of your site which leads to lasting results.

Readability

Custom content will engage the reader and invite them to read further which entices them to linger at your site and explore the other content.

Credibility

Custom content immediately lends legitimacy and lasting brand recognition to your site because discerning readers can see that you have taken the extra steps to tailor your message specifically to them.

Lasting Results

Web statistics consistently suggest that the best way to earn placement on that key first page of search results and retain your ranking is customized content.

As search engine bots become more and more sophisticated, keyword stuffing and other gimmicks get sniffed out and dismissed because they do not offër the reader any rewards for investing their time.

So, how do I hire a quality content writer?

Sure, anyone can write and practice keyword stuffing. You see it on hundreds of sites everyday, full of fluff-content that was written cheaply, and reads cheaply. Even the most basic conventions of writing are abandoned, simply to reach a high word count. Because of this, readers are having a hard time finding good, quality content. They want information, not gobbledygook.

Ask for Samples

The first rule in hiring a good content writer is reviewing their work. Ask for writing samples, as well as references. They should know the basic conventions of writing, and excel in creating informative, easy-to-read content that people will understanding.

Work Ethic

Good content writers, like any job, should also have a good work ethic. Meaning, they respond quickly to emails, meet deadlines, and keep in constant communication with the customer. People that are conscientious and prompt in their correspondence are likely to be quick and efficient in their work. This reduces the chances of procrastination as well. A good content writer will use the entire time to work on an assignment and produce good, thorough copy, while a sloppy or lazy writer will wait until the last moment and squeak in an unpolished product right before the deadline.

You Get What You Pay For

As the old saying goes, “You get what you pay for.” There are plenty of desperate writers out there that will work for peanuts, but it is an ínvestment to hire a more proficient writer at a higher rate, and you will have much better results on your ínvestment. If you need quick, cheap content, then there are plenty of people willing to produce it. But again, if it is written cheaply, it will read cheaply.

Knowing the Audience

A good content writer should also have a feel for their audience. Any good writer can complete an assignment, but someone that is in tune with their audience can connect with readers much better by tailoring their copy specifically to them. A sympathetic writer should be able to imagine a piece of writing from the audience’s perspective and detect what that reader wants or needs from it. This comes from in-depth interviews with the client, and really learning what message they want to convey to their readers.

Trustworthy

Lastly, a good content writer should be trustworthy. While representing a company or employer, a writer must be privy to certain information in order to write effectively. Make sure the writer you are hiring has a good business ethic and won’t turn his back on you or exploit your ideas once he is gone. Although it is possible to work with someone and still withhold sensitive business tactics or information, it is much easier to work with someone that can be trusted in an open correspondence. And even if you do trust the writer, it is always smart to get a signed contract.
About The Author
Devin Hansen is the owner of SEO Copywriters, a web-content development company based in Illinois . With a staff of American writers and editors, they produce high-quality, unique content for any business in any industry.

Websites that consistently under perform and that don’t meet business expectations generally suffer because they are not designed to hold viewers attention long enough to communicate a clear concise marketing message.

When Words Lose Their Meaning

Marketing is one of those words that has lost its currency because it has been tossed about with little respect for its meaning. To many, it’s merely just another word for advertising, which of course it is not. To the more sophisticated it takes in all the disciplines of branding, positioning, identity, advertising, and more. Above all marketing implies a strategic approach to implementing these tactics.

For companies interested in using the Web to further their business objectives, Web-marketing is the execution of a communication strategy through the creative implementation of multi-sensory signature presentations.

Semiotics: The Study of Signs

“Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind,
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign.”
- Five Man Electrical Band

Like the lyrics of the song, ‘Signs,’ by the Five Man Electrical Band’ suggests, we are surrounded by signs, the interpretation of which creates our reality. The study of signs and how meaning is derived from them is called ‘semiotics.’

We are bombarded by signs, not just images, but the words, voicing, gestures, posture, attire, and movements of the messengers, as well as the music and sound effects that accompany the presentation; not to mention the chosen media itself.

Each of these elements is a language all its own. And like all forms of language if you don’t learn the rules, the grammar and syntax, you can’t communicate coherently.

A Little Yiddish May Help

Yiddish is a language of idiom, of colloquial metaphor, a series of expressions that by strict interpretation of the words mean little, but through the common experience and relevance of the listener mean more than mere words can imply.

In Yiddish there are many ways to tell somebody to ‘drop dead,’ not a very nice thing to say to someone, but a sentiment that is often expressed anyway.

So how then do you tell someone how you feel without resorting to the crude direct approach? In Yiddish you would use one of the many expressions available such as, “zolst vaksn vi a tzibele mitn kop in dr’erd!” which literally means “may you grow like an onion with your head in the ground,” a far more colorful, poetic turn of phrase with humorous undertones that softens the intensity of the raw meaning.

Our everyday language is full of idiom and metaphor and for the most part we don’t even notice. If we want to outwit our competition, we instruct our staff to “take no prisoners” and if we are successful we ‘blew them away;’ business often resorts to war metaphors to emphasize the enormity of the stakes involved in business initiatives, or should I say ‘campaigns.’

And it is not just written and verbal communication that is perpetually encased in a cocoon of evocative metaphor. Visual communication, including images and video, has its own idiomatic metaphorical sign language that helps communicate a message in meaningful short-hand. The producers of 30-second TV commercials are expert in this style of communication, how else can a complete marketing story be told in 30 seconds?

Fear of Meaning

Most business communication is shrouded in a haze of protective ambiguity caused by the fear of making a decisive statement of who you are, and what you stand for. This kind of defensive thinking may protect your company from some criticism, but it also distances you from your real audience, people and businesses that could be responsive to what you have to offër.

Advertisements, videos, images and copy designed to not offend, will fail to communicate meaning and if what you have to say is not meaningful, how can you expect your audience to respond? Bland royalty-free images, stöck video clips, and talking-head presentations of statistics and specifications will guarantëe all the monëy you spent on generating traffíc will go down the drain as visitors leave faster than they arrive.

Instead of just looking at how many hits your website is getting each week, take a look at how long they are staying on your site. If people are leaving within a few seconds of arriving, then they have determined you have nothing to offër them, which may or may not be true. You need your website visitors to stay long enough to get the essence of your marketing message and if they aren’t, then maybe it’s time to rethink the message and how it’s being delivered.

Relevance of Character and Situation

When we create Web-video commercials we need to tell a story that the audience can relate to. This story should be a metaphor that draws upon the audience’s own experiences, and if done properly it should allow the viewer to let down their natural salës defense mechanism and let the humanity of the characters and situation penetrate on a meaningful human level. This style of presentation makes the point and delivers the message in a much more effective manner than a hit-you-over-the-head, hard sell style commercial, or a meaningless exhortation of business platitudes.

Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa, a sociology professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, in the ‘Psychology Today’ article, ‘Friends In Cerebral Places’ by Kaja Perina states: “The human brain is hardwired to respond to stimuli as it did in its ancestral environment, where television and movies didn’t exist. Kanazawa says that we have evolved to believe that ‘all realistic images of people you encounter repeatedly are friends and family.’

In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness there was no one-way acquaintance, as there is today with celebrities.”

The implication of Kanazawa’s research for the Web-marketer is significant. If you as marketers can create websites and webmedia presentations populated with ongoing characters to which your Web-audience can relate, then you have solved the biggest obstacle in the Web-salës process: lack of trust.

People buy things from people they trust, people they know and like, and people to whom they can relate. You can establish this relationship with a continuous campaign of audio and video presentations delivered by characters representing your company’s personality, delivering a message that improves your audience’s lives or business interests.

The Familiarity of Presentation Genres

An effective Web-commercial must touch your audience in some way. One method that we use to make this connection is through the exploitation of genres.

Genres are storytelling formats with built-in conventions, rules and guidelines. These conventions provide a communication-shorthand allowing Web-storytellers to deliver rich content in an economical use of time and space.

Since the audience already understands what the conventions of the recognizable genre are, resources need not be wasted establishing a frame-of-reference that is built into the genre itself.

It is here that the Web-commercial producer must expand the concept of genres beyond that which is normally understood. Everyone understands the western, detective, romance, and sitcom styles of storytelling genres, but genres exist beyond the confines of literature, movies, and television series. Genres also exist in the truncated world of television commercial storytelling. Take for instance the current ubiquitous series of Macintosh television commercials that have been copied numerous times by many people on the Web and even on television itself.

The use of genres as a method of presenting Web-commercials provides a set of expectations for the viewer or what has been referred to as ‘cultural capital.’ While the recognition of the familiar provides a connection, its creative manipulation provides enjoyment and more importantly aids memory and enhances recall. You can see an example of this genre manipulation at http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads.

The Bottom Line

If real estate is about, ‘location, location, location’ then websites are about, ‘communication, communication, communication.’ The skillful Web-marketer will understand this and use their website the way it was always supposed to be used, as a means of communication; but that communication no longer has to be delivered in mere text förm, but rather it can now be delivered using all the multi-sensory media tools available. The caveat, of course, is knowing how to use these tools properly.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone             (905) 764-1246 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (905) 764-1246 end_of_the_skype_highlighting .

In a perfect world, where there were no scoundrels, this might not be a factor. Everyone would organize their web site information so that a visitor could easily find what they are looking for, and life would be good. But we certainly don’t live in a perfect world and scoundrels are everywhere.

So we are at the mercy of the search engines to help us sort through the clutter to find what we want. And that’s the value that the search engines provide, accurate and meaningful search engine results that are related to the search terms or phrases. So it goes back to the quality of content, that’s the only common factor in all 3 major search engines’ ranking methods.

Each of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) search engines use a little different method and technology to arrive at any given web site’s ranking under specific search terms. As mentioned above, no one knows exactly how each method works. But you can test different strategies and methods to see how they impact your rank.

And therein lies the only true method of determining what the search engines might look for when ranking your web page on specific search terms. I’m sure most of us are aware that most processes can be expressed in mathematical equations. I’m not sure if that’s the best method for search engine ranking, but it is the most popular for the search engine ranking process.

And consider the fact that when someone has determined (or thinks they have determined) one of the factors used in search engine rankings they beat it to death. Every discovered aspect in the past few years has been exploited immediately to the point of the search engines abandoning the tactic. As soon as the search engines see that someone can beat the system, they change it.

That’s one of the big reasons you see constant change in ranking methods. Since there is a tremendous amount of revenue at stake for all concerned, i.e. sales of products and services for the web site owners, plus the advertising revenue for the search engines, any advantage is huge.

If you would have tested and tracked all the changes and methods in search engine rankings for the past few years, one constant factor would stand out. This is also one of the most misunderstood and often overlooked elements in search engine ranking for a specific term.

So what’s the one thing that the search engines can’t change about their mathematical algorithms? You got it, CONTENT! The search engines can play with the process, methods, or means to judge web site content. But, if web site owners stick to the basic philosophy of providing meaningful content, in relation to the search term, the impact of changes are far less, if even felt.

And that is where many web site owners run afoul of getting good search engine rankings. Many jump on the bandwagon with every new revelation in search engine strategies based on the latest changes. It’s the old forest and trees scenario, Internet style. Even if you get a slight advantage from all these “new” tactics, it will be short lived. As soon as the search engines catch on that you are working the system, they will change the system.

So the best way to íncrease your rankings for a particular search term is to provide meaningful information or content based on that search term. Here a few guidelines I’ve found that help:

• Make sure you focus on the subject matter (don’t try to satisfy too many terms with one web page).
• Get inside the searcher’s head – figure out what they want and give it to them.
• Be specific and provide details – don’t generalize and be descriptive.
• For a sales page use benefits and features to fully explain the problem and the solution.
• Update your information often – setup a schedule to update and add more content.

There are many sub factors that can have an impact on how well the search engine bots can determine the value of the content. The search engine bots are software programs that go out and “read” your web page and then provide the information to rank your web pages on what they discovered.

You’ll find many “experts” who will give you a hard líst of items and how to present this information. And I don’t disagree with suggestions to include the search term in your web page in key areas like title, description, and font designations like H1. That helps the search engine software bots to determine the content.

But I’ve seen web pages with no meta-tags, title, or description but that had rock solid content and still had high search engine rankings on a particular search term. So make it easy for the search engines, but always remember that the content is the single consistent factor in search engine rankings.

There are a lot of different aspects to consider when trying to improve your search engine ranking, and íncrease search engine traffic. The keyword and phrase research, interpreting the search term or phrase to provide the best result, reviewing other popular web sites with the same intentions, linking to other like content web sites, and more. How you present the information and content is also an important issue.

But all those factors come after good content. So if you start with providing the best content, you can’t go wrong. After all, this is both an art and a science, not to mention a moving target. If you would like to learn more, please visit our other article links below.
About The Author
Visit jd WebWorks, to see some recent case studies and get better results with SEO Web Site Design

Dead is taking it a bit far. SEO is not exactly dead. A better way to describe it would be to say it dyed (changed).

SEO has evolved so far and so quickly in the past six months that it as a practice is hardly recognizable from its humble roots, much like a Neanderthal placed beside any given Homo Sapien. The thread that ties the past to the present is search. Everything still comes down to some sort of search. Nevertheless, the traditional view of SEO services is over. Having languished in a virtual state of stasis for most of the past year, the concept of traditional, SERP based SEO went to rest sometime in the early spring.

With the introduction and rapid advancement of social networking, the attention of the search marketing world and Internet users has quickly spread outward, away from the common search engine results pages. While Top10 (first page) placements are still extremely important traffíc drivers, information seekers rely on social media, RSS feed-readers, specific vertical search tools and multimedia as frequently as they do on traditional search engines. (That’s why the traditional search engines are branching so far out into social media.)

This has led to a surge in the development of SEO based techniques to work within social media environments. Clients now require social profiles for their businesses, themselves and their key staff, along with the proficiency of a skilled social networker to keep those profiles popular and polite. Fortunately adaptable SEOs will find many of these tasks fall within skill-sets that are very similar to “traditional SEO”.

Another critical service popping up in many SEO firms is called reputation management. With literally thousands of potential venues open to anonymous or unmoderated postings by the public, largër companies often require professional assistance monitoring and maintaining the numerous representations of their online reputations. All too often though, the majority of us don’t need someone else to make us look bad online. We’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.

Take a second to think about this question. How many profiles do you have available to searchers in how many different venues?

Try to consider everything from a database of church members to the dating site one might have signed up with to the websites of local business association. Now add MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, and any other largër social network you or your business might have joined. Though much of it might be restricted to members-only searches an enormous amount of personal and business information is floating around to be discovered, vetted, and compared with that of other potential employees or vendors. For some, that constitutes a reputation management problem. Who better to find and attend to such problems but companies that already specialize in performing searches and creating high ranking documents?

The final nail in the coffin of traditional SEO was the introduction of Google’s personalized results. Though personalization and localization will be good for adaptable SEO firms, the direct interests expressed by each unique user will increasingly determine which documents are consistently placed in that user’s results. That means SEOs will have to do more work on each file doing little things such as placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking (which requires the establishment of even more business profiles) and building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO tasks covering titles, tags, text, structure and links.

Covering all those bases is not a simple task but much of the basics remain the same. The principle application of search is used in an increasing number of venues. While each search application differs from venue to venue, they perform the same ultimate task. Most fall into a limited number of types that experienced SEOs have likely dealt with before. For instance, tagging images at Flickr or documents at Digg is much like adding the keyword meta-tag was for Alta Vista. Similarly, writing great personal or business profiles is much like writing a strong description. The same principles apply from keyword to copy.

Full-scale service is going to cost a lot more for SEO firms to provide in the near future. A worry in the business end of the SEO industry is that tomorrow’s services (slowly being introduced today) will cause a shake-out in the industry as less adaptable firms fall by the wayside and smaller business clients struggle to afford an increasingly expensive set of services. The small business situation will cause its own short-term stirrings in the industry as the standards of SEO services start to imitate other vertical markets.

For businesses currently relying on SEO services as a primary traffíc driver, the warnings have gone out long before this one but… Adapt now. Your advertising dollars are already moving away from the mainstream media (newspaper, TV, flyers, etc…) and towards the digital media. That trend will make digital media the number one advertising venue by 2011 according to the influential VSS Communications Industry Forecast, issued earlier this week. While hardly advising immediate abandonment of the mainstream media, I strongly advice a hard look at how next year’s marketing budget is going to be used. You’ll likely get a lot more mileage from the viral power of a 3-minute YouTube video than you would from a month of localized 30-second spots. At the same time, you might want to take a very close look at what others are saying about you or your business online. If you find that nobody is talking about you or your business, or that they are talking trash, you might want to do something about it.

The bottom (and hopefully last) line is simple. A new generation of highly wired consumers is looking at monitors more than they are print or television. The weíght of their bulk is fundamentally changing how they and other consumers use the Internet. Though it is, and likely always be, about search, it’s not necessarily about search engines. Like I said to start, a shake-up is coming in the industry and like most shifts it is going to produce interesting results.
About The Author
Jim Hedger is Executive Editor of SiteProNews.com. He is also a consulting SEO and writer for Metamend Search Engine Marketing and Enquisite Search Analytics.