Unfortunately most email applications, either web-based or locally installed, will not allow you to take the video’s code and embed your video right into your email message. Instead you could opt for a screenshot or frame capture of part of your movie and embed the static image into your email message. This is better than no image at all but wouldn’t it be better if you could simulate the video and engage the reader with a better chance of them clicking through to your video?

Yes, But How Do I Simulate a Video Embedded in My Email?

While flv or other web-based video file formats cannot be embedded in emails, more standardized imagery can, such as gifs and jpgs. The wonderful element of gif images is that they can be saved as animated gifs. There are many pieces of software that will allow you to create an animated gif file some paid and some for free. A simple Google search will yield many results. I’ll leave it to you to sift through and find a solution that is right for you needs. With your new animated gif capable software installed, you will need to play your video and take a screen shot/frame capture at various intervals throughout your video playback. I would suggest no more than 10. Now take your frame captures, crop them to size and add them to a time line in your gif software. (Note, for added effect, I suggest leaving the video player frame around your screen shots/frame captures so that the email reader can see that the animation is indeed a video and not some random image sequence thrown in there. Playback of your animated gif will show a somewhat jumpy sequence of your video clip, that tells the story of your video while capturing the attention of the viewer.

Now that you video is in an abbreviated format and exported as an animated gif, you can freely place the file into your email newsletter just like you would a static image. Now once in place you can set your image to link to the live version of your video on youtube or wherever you placed it, when the user clicks the image (animated gif).

Drop me a note if you have any questions or comments!

Why Can’t Search Engines See My Photo-Filled Site?

The main factors search engines use for determining search rankings, is to read site text and coding to learn what the site is about. Since the search engine spiders/crawlers (or whatever you want to call them) aren’t human, they cant see a picture of a house, for example, and record that the site is about houses. It will see the picture and likely move on.

If you have text converted to images so you can use a special font or another reason, this is a big SEO no no. You should make the change right away to use a more generic font, and replace the image text with real text. The sacrifice of the fancy font will be more than outweighed by the increased SEO visibility. Think of it this way, what is the point in using a stylish font style on your site if nobody can find it?

I Still Want Images on My Site, What Are My Options?

Images aren’t completely invisible to search engines, there are certain “tags” that can be coded and associated with your images so that you can tell search engines what the images are. The Google Images search feature uses these for example. Although, this alone is not enough in itself to maximize your visibility.

Follow these steps to bring your image loaded site into SEO compliance:

1. Remove any text imagery and replace it with properly coded html text
2. Reduce the amount of images on your site or at least reduce their size
3. Add html text to page in the areas where the images have been reduced or removed that talk about the image or content relevant to your site
4. Use appropriate tags (see below) to code your image placement so that search engines can read them. Remember to use descriptive keywords and phrases relative to your company

Which Image Tags Are Important For SEO?

Alt tag: This tag appears when your mouse rolls over an image. It also replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken

Title tag: This tag text replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken. Although similar in nature to the “Alt tag” both of these tags should be used. When this is the case, the Title tag will override the Alt tag for a broken image. The good thing is that search engines pay attention to both the Title and Alt tags.

File name: Avoid using a generic file name like image1.jpg, instead, for SEO advantages, name your file with a keyword or phrase related to your field.

Now you know what to do to have a “pretty” site while keeping it relatively optimized for search engine visibility. Go for it and start making some changes. Let me know if I can help in any way!

Google provides a service where you can create a custom trackable URL using its “URL Builder“. The builder allows you to enter your destination URL as well as campaign information for your link. Once all the information is added, you can click “Generate URL” and you will be provided with a trackable URL. Use this URL for your banner ad or email link. Change the information in the url builder each time, to create a separate URL for each link location. Now every time that URL is clicked you will know exactly where it came from.

The following fields may be defined when composing your URL, not all are necessary (* are required fields):

Campaign Source: *     (the website or newsletter where your ad will be placed )
Campaign Medium: *     (what type of ad will you be placing? banner ad, text link, etc)
Campaign Term:     (identify any paid keywords that will cause the ad to display)
Campaign Content:     (use to differentiate ads, e.g. “free shipping” or “buy one get one free”)
Campaign Name*:     (product, promo code, or slogan)

Unless you want to be very granular in your tracking abilities, only the * fields need to be used. Note that the more information you provide here (fields you complete), the longer the generated URL will be.

I Want to Use This in Twitter, But the Long URL Wont Fit in My 140 Character Limit Twitter Post. Can I Still Use UTMs?

As well as Twitter, there are other times when the long URL cannot be used, all is not lost! UTMs can be entered into a URL shortener like bit.ly to have the URL size reduced. The UTM will still record the clicks and traffic from the URL since the shortener service is redirecting the URL to the trackable URL NOT directly to your site. Now you can use Google’s UTM feature for tracking specific Twitter posts. In the past you would only have been able to record the number of clicks for Twitter in general. Now you can see which links were clicked the most, and more importantly , which clicks generated the most conversions.

What Does UTM Mean?

The term UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and is the format/coding that Google uses to track your unique urls.

Useful Links

How do I tag my links?

Understanding campaign variables

The UTM URL builder

What is Contextual Targeting Then?

Contextual Targeting works in a similar way except there is not ramp up time needed to gather user data, instead contextual targeting displays ads to users based on the context of the page that they are reading. For example say you wanted to market to ATV consumers online. You will generally gather a lot of user information and can market quite successfully on ATV focused websites. Instead of targeting those sites though, what if you could position your ad in front of a web user reading an ATV-related article on a news website, or a generalized outdoors website that you normally wouldn’t advertise on since its not focused on your industry?

Combine Them

Regular online targeted marketing and contextual targeting can generally be used independently. However by combining standard web targeting with contextual targeting you would have the ultimate targeted marketing solution. Not only would you benefit from web user gathered information, but you would also have the opportunity of reaching the “new” users in your segment. Those users that haven’t been surfing, subscribing and purchasing products online in your industry for very long. Since these users are just learning the industry, they generally will need to spend money on getting into a new hobby or sport, thereby increasing the value of your ad spend further. Yes, you will get some overlap in the audience that you reach, for example, obviously users whom you have data on already, will be highly likely to read an article or access content online related to your industry but on non industry sites, like a news page. In those circumstances you are strengthening your brand to them by repeatedly display ads to these people. They are more likely to remember you or even be reminded that they need to make a purchase from a company like yours.

Have a question about contextual marketing? Send me a note… or leave a response below.

While there are many web developers, bloggers, email marketers, SEO, social media professionals etc. out there, these practices in themselves are not the solution to marketing a company, product or service on the web. Members of this group understand that a successful online strategy encompasses all aspects of these online channels to achieve the marketing objective. Different levels of each aspect are required depending on industry and audience. Named “Internet Marketing Source”, the group aims to bring professionals together in these marketing fields, to learn from each other, exchange ideas and share real life success stories from the field. Join today to broaden your knowledge of internet marketing, and contribute your expertise.

Follow this link to join the “Internet Marketing Source”! http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2475645

Contact us to learn more about how Internet Marketing techniques that will grow your business.

Blogging has become so popular…

It now extends far beyond the “online diary of my cat”, and into the business world. Blogging has become a great knowledgebase resource for business, both to educate the world on your products or services, and to establish your presence as an expert in your industry.

While these advantages are useful and of great benefit to every business, the SEO benefit of Blogging for your corporate website should not to be overlooked. This article will differentiate Blogs from websites and talk about how owning a Blog as well as contributing to other Blogs “Blogging” can increase your web traffic, thus lead flow and sales should also increase.

Note: For the remainder of this article, when referring to Blogs, I am talking about Blogs for business. Although these points could apply to personal online spaces also.

Your Blog

To own and operate an active Blog in your industry means another “channel” to talk about and market your business products and services. It is effectively like having another website. However, a Blog and a website serve two different purposes.

What’s the difference?

The difference between a Blog and a website mainly involves two criteria; content and functionality. Your website can hold a lot more information and more sophisticated functionality, such as complex searches, account login and control panel interface and inventory management. The list could go on, but you get the point.

Blogs are article-based

A Blog is more related to article posting that can include text, images and video. Blogs are informal writings about your business and industry. The intention is to build an audience that is interested in what you are writing and having them “subscribe” to be notified when you add more content.

The Bloggers Goal

The ultimate goal for your readers, is to turn them into leads and finally, paying customers. Blogs are also interactive, which means that your readers can interact with you through posting comments and questions directly on the Blog, these of course can be moderated prior to inclusion on your live Blog.

Many of the SEO techniques that can be applied to your website can also be implemented on your Blog.

Your Blog, however, already has the advantage of being updated regularly (we hope) so that it is already showing Google (and other search engines) that your Blog is current and therefore worth ranking to some degree, in search results for relative keywords.

So, what more SEO can be incorporated?

With any SEO strategy a keyword list should first be created, based on industry keywords and phrases used by prospects or customers to search for your product. Creating a keyword list is a whole other article. So lets assume you have a list of around 10 common keywords and phrases already. The process now is simple, make sure that your articles and posts use these keywords often.

Don’t overdo it!

That could backfire, and count as point(s) against you! Intersperse your words throughout your Blog, sometimes your Blog post might be specifically relating to one or some of your keywords. Great. You shouldn’t have a problem using them here.

Use your posts, articles and images to direct traffic to your website

Of course it goes without saying that your posts, articles and images should be directing traffic to your corporate site, through obvious links, links from images or “for more information” comments and even the headings. Again, don’t over do it as you may deter readers as well as search engines noting your content as possible spam.

Host it yourself

One key point to mention when setting up your Blog is to host it yourself. Don’t use a free Blog url e.g. http://myblog.wordpress.com. Doing so helps Google see that you are not a serious player in the industry and may discredit you because of it. Sure, you can use free Blogging software like WordPress or Blogger, but make sure you register a domain name and install the Blog on your own server space. This will effectively “add SEO value” to your online space.

Blogging on other Blogs

So you have a Blog in place and its generating a decent amount of traffic for your brand and your corporate site, is there anything else? Yes, now that you have become familiar with the concept of Blogging and writing Blog posts, its time to start Blogging on other industry related Blogs.

There are millions of Blogs to choose from

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are millions of Blogs out there. That said, there stands a strong chance that there are already Blogs out there in your industry, regardless of how small a niche your business operates in. Try this, run a Google search for your keywords and include the word “Blog” in the search term. You’ll probably come up with a list of other Blogs in your industry. Check them out, look at the types of articles they are writing. Not only will this give you some ideas for your own Blog, it will probably present topics that you feel you can add something too, and maybe even comment about.

Don’t be shy, scroll to the bottom of the post and add your thoughts or comments about the Blog post

Always be sure to include a link to your own Blog and website in your response. Now, when other readers of their Blog look at the comments and read what others have said, they will come across your comment and links to your website.

Click-throughs

You already know that the reader is interested in your subject matter because they are reading a similar industry-related Blog to yours. Because of this, they are more likely to click your link to read more. This is called a “click-through” to your website. Great news. Best of all its a free source of traffic generation!

Get Google to vote for you

This benefit extends one step further in that now you have a link back to your website from a different website to one owned by you. Google counts this “backlink” as a “vote”. The more votes you get, the more reputable your website becomes in the eyes of Google. Get backlinks on popular and important websites, and your website becomes even more important to Google.

Don’t be tempted to SPAM

Be careful though, simply visiting Blogs and posting links to your website without contributing to the Blog with valued comments is seen as spam, both to the Blog host as well as Google. Doing this will work against your SEO efforts. Regular posting of quality comments and input to other Blogs will help you establish yourself as a “key player” in your industry, help build a reputation online and links back to your website. The results are increased leads and sales from a growth in web traffic.

Using these Blogging methods will generate traffic to your site

Use them wisely though, SEO is a sensitive piece of your online marketing efforts. Overdoing one aspect can work against you, not for you. By consistently publishing relevant Blog content using your keyword list WILL increase traffic to your website. How much traffic directly correlates to the amount of effort you put in. The more posts, articles and comments you submit, the more traffic you will generate to your website.

Ask us about setting up a blog for you or developing a custom SEO strategy and start increasing your web traffic today.

The ultimate goal of every web site is to attract visitors in the effort to showcase a product, generate interest and ultimately sell a product or service. This maybe directly through an online shopping portal or indirectly via a lead generated from the web site. Either way, the goal is to use the site as a sales tool. What value is that if nobody is looking at your site?

With 10’s of billions of web sites currently on the internet “How do you make your web site visible?”. The answer is by employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to help lift your web sites ranking. This means, to place your site higher than other related web sites for web searches on your type of product or services.

Strategy: How do I Make My Website Visible to Search Engines?

Unfortunately there is no straightforward answer to this question. There is no “magic” formula that can be applied to your site to make you come out on top of the search results page. If there were such a formula, the person who conjured up the methodology would be a worldwide known “magician” and VERY rich. Instead we have to focus on what we do know about Google and other search engines and the protocol they use (called an algorithm) to prioritize one web site over another for specific keywords and terms. As we learn about these algorithms we can start to apply them to web sites and monitor the results for effectiveness. Many businesses are set on wanting to achieve number one placement in search engine results, not realizing that there are literally hundreds of variables that have to be considered and implemented in the “correct” priority order that the search engine specifies to have a chance at meeting this high goal. In other words, it is impossible to make that guarantee. Note, be wary of any company that claims to get you number one placement on Google. They are making a guarantee that he cannot follow through on and will probably take your money and disappear.

Strategy: On-site and Off-site SEO

There are two main categories within the SEO world “Onsite” and “Offsite” SEO. Lets talk about Onsite a little.

Onsite SEO refers to optimization techniques that are applied directly to your web site. Some examples include: head tags, meta descriptions, CSS coding, and keyword integration. It is important to make sure that the basics are covered here first, since this is where your visitors will be directed to and your sites relevancy to keywords and search terms are Google’s high priority. Look at it this way, Google as high street store obviously wants its customers to be happy with its service. For this reason, Google will want to make sure that the search results it presents to its customers are the most relevant to the keywords entered into the search box. Here’s an example: Lets say your company sells clothing, men’s, women’s, children’s and baby clothing. Although you sell clothes for both genders and different ages, your forte is the women’s division as you carry designer brands that are popular with today’s fashion trends. You have several competitors that you would like to appear above in search results for “women’s clothing”. However, your competitors ONLY sell women’s clothing, and a lot of it. Which site do you think Google will see as more relevant to the term “women’s clothing”?? Of course it is the site that only sells women’s clothing. Yours, while containing many ladies items, becomes somewhat neutralized by the fact that there is a lot of other items that would fit into other categories than the search term in question, like “men’s clothing” or “babies clothing”.

The second SEO category is “off site” SEO. This term refers to optimizing yourself on web sites that are not owned or controlled by you. Google looks at the number of web sites that link to yours as a key factor in ranking your site. These types of links are called “backlinks”. The reason for the importance here placed by Google is that you cannot generally control the content of other companies’ web sites, therefore you cannot easily put your web link all over the net. Instead the web site owner has to be willing to put your link on their site, they are only going to list your URL if they like or approve of you. It works like a referral, you are not likely to refer your kitchen remodeller to a friend if you think they did a bad job on your own kitchen are you? To take this practice one step further, Google will look at your web site more favorably if your link appears on an already highly reputable web site. As easy way to get your link on another site is to create yourself a FaceBook business page and list it there. But what if you write an article that gets published on the New York Times official web site? The difference is huge. Our focus for offsite SEO is to achieve a large quantity of backlinks to your site with as many as possible being a part of existing reputable sites. Although backlinks play a big part in offsite SEO, they are not the only practice that make up this SEO category. Creating profiles optimized with your chosen keywords on other sites, as well as additional techniques are also valuable pieces of the puzzle.

Strategy: Our Approach

So then, although our SEO techniques will help increase your search engine ranking for your identified keywords, a guaranteed number one search results placement, as previously described, is not an achievable goal. Instead, our approach is to work in terms of increasing traffic to your web site and employing multiple SEO techniques to achieve this goal. We start by focusing on those SEO techniques that we have found to be most important factors to top search engines. In particular we focus on Google, as it is the most popular search engine on the internet today.

To help you understand here’s an example scenario. Say you have 2,500 unique visits to your site each month. From those visits you manage to convert 2% into leads, either by information request through the web site or emails, phone calls etc. Of those 50 leads, 5 convert into a sale. Maybe your product is several thousand dollars.

Now, you hire us to increase your traffic. You retain us to double your monthly visitors to 5,000. It would be fair to say that this will in turn double your lead quantity, correct? So you may get 100 leads and 10 sales. The question becomes, will the increased profit from the doubled sales justify the cost of the SEO to double you traffic? I’m sure that the answer would be yes.

Conclusion

With billions and billions of web sites currently on the internet (and growing rapidly by the day), SEO is needed by every business who’s goal is to sell or generate leads through their web site. There are many, many variables and techniques that can be applied on and off your web site to help increase search engine visibility. Our past experiences and expertise can be applied here to focus on those techniques which are most relevant and important to the Google search engine. Our techniques will guarantee a lift in your search ranking, however, specific search result placement guarantees cannot be made BY ANYONE.

Let us increase your search ranking and watch your sales rise.

Contact us today!

There’s a popular saying that most have heard, “Never judge a book by its cover.” Although these words of wisdom are well known through the generations, I would not hesitate to place a bet that more often than not readers judge a book exactly by the cover (or at least it plays a large part in the decision process). I know that I am just as guilty as most.

In a similar way, web users (and that’s approximately 1,086,250,903 users

worldwide according to www.internetworldstats.com) tend to judge a company by its web site. That is because today, web sites have become the first point of contact for many customers, whether they are researching an industry, shopping for products or searching for news. In the case of the die cutting industry, the customer is likely to learn about your company from the Internet; thus creating a positive first impression is essential. Recent studies show that a web user is likely to make a judgement about the company based on the web site appearance within 50 milliseconds of loading a web site. Here they will make a decision if to stay on this site and learn about the products and services offered, or move on.

A recent client of Beamond Creative, LLC had minimal content and a very basic layout. We had the opportunity to revamp the site and turn it into an information resource on their industry as well as a showcase of their products and features. Word about the new web site soon spread. Coupled with several ongoing public relation efforts, the client saw a growth in online traffic of 1000% + over the following 24months.

So does your web site provide an accurate first impression of your business as a whole? Will a web user hat finds your site perceive you as a start-up company or a multi-million dollar business?

The answers to these questions depend on a number of elements: overall design, functionality and content.

Web design

Today, web sites can be created with many different types of software applications, each providing pros and cons (in some instances only cons) for the features integrated into the software. These determine the complexity of the web site you are able, (with the appropriate skills) to create. Unless you are a computer whiz or have experience with building web sites, it is not the kind of business tool that is a simple point and click application to get set up. For this reason, there are many web design companies that will provide you with the service. Again, different companies will provide you with a web site at different rates. Some “template” orientated design companies will allow you to choose from several templates, a web layout to which they will add your given content. This may be a low cost option but is best kept away from unless you are looking for a standard web site that may turn out to be the same as the guy down the street. To define yourself and stand your ground in this highly competitive industry, it pays to seek a design company that has experience in your industry and will provide you with a completely unique web site. However, be warned, you will always get what you pay for!

Functionality

When functionality is added to a web site, it enables the user to become engaged in the site. By this I mean that the user will have the ability to interact with your company through your web site. Maybe they will be providing feedback through an easily accessible simple form, inquiring more about your product or searching a database of information specific to your business. Users could sign up to create an account, profile or similar feature and log in to gain access to “their” area. Whatever functionality you include in your site, you can be sure of positive results by engaging your users and allowing them to become more familiar with your product or service.

Content

There’s no point having a web site that looks great and works well, if when the user starts to browse around, they realize that there is nothing, or little, worth looking at. Well-written content that focuses on the customers’ needs will draw them in to your site. However, written text alone is not appealing to the viewer and should be broken up accordingly to maintain your users interest.

Web sites vary dramatically in appearance, content and functionality, with several pros and cons for each aspect. I would place all web sites into the following three main categories:

Static web sites are more of a brochure-based web site, showcasing the company’s products or services, maybe includes a contact form or two.

Pros: Low cost, quick set up, easy updates, will perform on all computers, all hosts support this kind of site.

Cons: Lacks functionality. Serves little more purpose than an online brochure.

Dynamic web sites feature all that is included with the static site, as well as a lot more programming that allows for database integration, online shopping store, username and password login features and more.

Pros: Great amount of depth to engage with the user, functionality, generate revenue from selling products and/or services online, simple updates with a content management system (CMS), register users and track usage (regional, national interest), automated functions.

Cons: Web host will need to be compatible, more advanced programming requires a company who knows what they are doing, more expensive for initial setup.

The third and final category is for Flash web sites. These sites can include all of the above and much more. The purpose of a flash web site is to provide visual appeal “eye candy” and is graphically superior to other types of web site and usually includes audio, animation and flowing imagery.

Pros: Slick and smooth looking site, all functionality can be included and displayed more attractively, include animation, audio, custom games and gimmicks, makes your site stand out from the rest.

Cons: Sometimes difficult to establish presence on search engines. Users are required to have flash player installed (although 97.5% of web users have the ability to view flash content). Updates need to be made by your designer, longer page load times with intense animated content.

In summary…

Creating a stunning first impression online highly relies on how quickly your site loads and how visually appealing it is to the user. However, there is much more to your web site than how it looks or just simply having an online presence. You need to fully evaluate your web site goals and establish exactly what and how you want to be perceived by web users. Remember, these users are potential customers, who in this advancing Internet age, will more than likely first learn about you through the internet. Show them, engage them, learn about them, and sell them.

Make your first impression an eye-opener!

Take a look at a few web design samples in our portfolio