According to a press conference held with YouTube this past week, they announced a new ad platform called “Sponsored Videos!” How smart of Google (YouTube’s parent company) to take their existing business model for AdWords and morph it into videos.

Do you have a video that you’d like to get in front of your potential customers? Sponsored Videos will let you promote your video by bidding on keywords. Whether you are an individual or a company, you decide which one of your videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube you would like to promote through site search and then which keywords you want to target. And, just like AdWords, you can set a budget as to how much you want to spend on a keyword.

“What we’re trying to do here is bring the best parts of Google and the best parts of YouTube together,” said Matthew Liu, product manager for YouTube Sponsored Videos and I’m betting that they are going to succeed!

Sponsored Videos

With Google’s shares down this week (below $300 for the first time in three years) … maybe it’s time to buy some stock!

Google made an announcement last week that they are now able to (mostly) read text in PDF files.  What does this mean, you ask?  Google already indexes PDF files!  Yes, but before they had to be PDF versions of  files that were digital to begin with (like Word documents).  Now, however, any document that’s been scanned into a computer and uploaded to a website can be “read” by Google.

This opens up vast amounts of previously print-only documents to be ranked on the search giant.  You could scan in and upload all of last year’s press releases, for instance, and have the copy within those PDF files help your website rank better.  Any old document that could be of benefit to users and search engines visiting your site now has the chance of being found and understood by Google.  And the others (like Yahoo) won’t be far behind in adopting similar technology.

With any OCR (that’s the technical term for image recognition) software, however, there are flaws.  No OCR is perfect and you have to take some basic steps to ensure that your scanned documents are presented as clearly as possible.

As always, however, be aware of how new material on your website can affect the user experience.  Don’t dump a whole bunch of content on your website if it’s going to hamper one’s ability to navigate the website.  Anything added should be an enhancement to users, not just for the benefit of more search engine rankings.

Here are some samples of this technology in action.  Clicking on the “View as HTML” links brings up a page with the scanned text, with the search terms highlighted (first listing in the search results):

Example 1: Steady Success in a Volatile World

Example 2: repairing aluminum wiring

[Image Credit]

This is a great example of why it is so critical to optimize interior pages of a website with long-tail search phrases in order to help your potential visitor find exactly what they are looking for …

While smaller, more agile businesses have seized the opportunities that pay-per-click advertising represents, larger businesses are being hampered by perceived skills shortages and technology issues.

A recent survey conducted by JupiterResearch has revealed that large companies spending over $50k a month are having trouble managing their pay-per-click campaigns.

Impediments cited included fear of risking ROI performance, inability to meet financial targets as costs per keyword rise, difficulty proving campaign effectiveness to management, and lack of available tools to handle large-scale needs.

44% of survey respondents said that running a well-managed, large-scale search marketing campaign is more difficult than running an election campaign for public office!

Are you ready?

1. ………………………….
2. ………………………….
3. ………………………….
4. ………………………….
5. ………………………….

“And that, my friends, is all you really need to know about how to create successful Keyword Tag. I’m glad we had this talk.”

Needless to say, we are certainly on the same page regarding the Keyword tag. Although we do still include this tag, it has been close to seven years since major search engines paid much attention to it. Unfortunately, this particular meta tag has been abused over the years – in the late nineties, it was a great way for the search engines to determine the relevancy of keyword phrases in ranking sites in the search results. As it always happens, when people use practices to try and trick the search engines, technology usually wins in the long run.

Two-thirds (65 percent) of CMOs and marketing execs say their ad budgets will decrease because of the troubled economy, but more of their money will go toward digital/interactive marketing than before, according to a survey (pdf) from Epsilon, writes MarketingCharts.

Roughly the same percentage (63 percent) of the 175 CMOs and marketing execs surveyed report that their spending on interactive/digital marketing has risen, while 59 percent report a decrease in traditional marketing spend.

Interactive/Digital vs. Traditional Marketing Budget Shifts

The study also finds that though CMOs are facing tough challenges in the current economic climate, 94 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement, “A tough economic period is precisely the time when marketing plays a key role.”

To offsest budget cuts, CMOs are shifting to more targeted and measurable marketing strategies. When asked how their firm determines target market for each channel, 50 percent said they use data-driven marketing techniques: 31 percent stated they use sophisticated modeling tools to analyze existing customer data (behavioral, preference and demographic) and 19 percent said that they analyze past purchase behavior. In contrast, 28 percent said they made “rough estimates based on past experience.”

CMOs have been early adopters of new media with social computing and blogs receiving the most interest, and instant messaging and interactive TV ads least popular.

Key findings:

• Social computing (including word of mouth, social networking sites, viral advertising, etc.) was the most popular emerging channel with 42 percent of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix.
• Blogs were the second-most-popular emerging channel, with 35 percent of marketers expressing desire to use them and 19 percent already using them.
• Almost one-third of CMOs mentioned podcasting as an area of interest, with 31 percent interested in adding it to their marketing mix and 18 percent already having done so.
• 29 percent are interested in Mobile Devices (phones/PDAs) and 22 percent have added them to their marketing mix.

“In this economic climate, marketing executives are seeking accountability and measurable results,” said Mike Iaccarino, CEO of Epsilon. Data-driven marketing is an increasingly important component of corporate marketing campaigns as senior marketers employ sophisticated segmentation strategies to recruit and retain customers.”

About the survey: The survey was conducted in August 2008. Participants included 175 US CMOs and marketing executives of some of the largest brands in the nation. Some 27 percent of respondents work at companies with $10 billion or more in annual revenues last year.

URL Rewrite Rules for SEO

Google claims to have made progress with their algorithm’s ability to crawl, understand and index web pages with dynamic URLs.  In the past Google, and most search engines, have had difficulty crawling and indexing pages on the Web with dynamic URLs so the recommendation from an SEO standpoint has long been to use what’s called a URL rewriter to turn ugly URLs into pretty ones.  This is a complete 180° from all previous SEO Best Practices.

Dynamic URLs are generally long and ugly, as in the one above.  Normally we would always recommend changing a website so that the URL looks much better, say from what’s above to “Amazon.com/books/author/johnson/title.htm” as an example.

As with any rule, however, there are exceptions - Google admits that URLs with “too many” extra bits can still cause its spiders a hard time.   But for most websites, they’re now adamant that alterating the URLs of web pages to make them static and less ugly, can and will actually hurt that page’s rankings.  From the updated guidelines:

“…in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.”

What do you do if you’ve already been rewriting URLs for years?  It really depends on your website and its URL structure.  It can be advisable under certain circumstances to keep some of your URLs rewritten and some dynamic while in others to stop rewriting all URLs and go back to the original dynamic ones.  Be sure to consult an expert before making any sweeping changes to your website as there are other things to consider beyond just Google, like usability for instance: CTR (click-through-rate), for pages with URLs a user can actually read, can be higher than the long ugly ones.  It’s important to analyze all aspects of your website’s structure before making dramatic changes.

Google Earth Satellite Geo Eye

Google’s satellite, a proprietary satellite launched with Geo-Eye, has entered orbit.  It’s apparently not the most advanced but will be merging its imagery with other satellite imagery to create single high-resolution images through a process referred to as “pan-sharpening.”

More on the deal here.

You may be thinking ‘wow, there’s got to be a lot of satellites orbiting the Earth now’ and you’re right.  In fact, using Google’s Earth application it’s possible to see, in real-time, all satellites currently orbiting the Earth.  You can even click on them to view specific info about each.  To access the information, which you can subsequently then bookmark and save within Google Earth, access the KMZ file here.  A KMZ/KML file is a special type of file used to access custom information integrated into the Earth application.

Interested in putting your business into Google Earth?  We offer a service to create custom KML files for your business including fly-bys of locations, logos and information overlayed onto the Earth and much more.

Way back when on April 23, 2005, the first video was uploaded on YouTube. And the rest is history!

In May 2008 issue of our newsletter in the “Weather Watch” column, we talked about the value of implementing videos in your company’s online marketing strategy. A great video can have a viral affect; the content can drive more news in order to promote your brand; and if optimized correctly, search engines can pick up the video to include in search results. And, of course, distribution online is huge!

So in July 2008, do you know how many videos were viewed by Americans? Accordingly to data from the comScore Video Metrix service, would you believe more than 11.4 billion or 558 million hours of online video viewed.

What are people watching? Not surprising, Google sites ranked as the top US video property with 5+ billion videos viewed – that equates to a 44% share of the online video market with Google’s YouTube accounting for more than 98% of all videos viewed.

A few other tidbits from the comScore report indicated that 75% of the total US Internet audience viewed online videos – the average video viewer watched 235 minutes of videos with an average video duration time of 2.9 minutes.

Think it’s time to join the online video revolution? Ask yourself if you think your potential customers might be online looking for a video of your product, company or maybe a vacation destination? Needless to say, online videos provide endless opportunities in which to promote your business.

Google’s Comic about its Chrome browser by Scott McCloud

Google announced the existence of its new open source project: a web browser, dubbed Chrome, to compete with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera (and whatever else people are using to view the web these days).  It’s a crowded market and despite being Google, they’ll have to convince people to migrate and accustom themselves to yet another application.  I certainly think they have some nifty ideas for their new baby, especially the parts that treat and present web applications more like full-featured desktop applications.

So far, though, the coolest part is how they announced it, by commissioning Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame.  Scott is a pre-eminent authority on the medium of graphic novels and his books are required reading in college courses ranging from Composition to Film.  The 38-page book is available online and provides a fairly elegant means to see the upcoming browser and its features before it actually exists.

Google: First your search engine, now your browser; next your Operating System.