By M.E. Marra 

Online video has received a lot of attention in Social Media — social search sites such as MySpace and YouTube (owned by Google) that offer groups, profiles, blogs, video posts and searchable databases through which these online communities locate like-minded members and communicate.  ComScore Networks monitored traffic for online videos at five major sites for one month, October to November 2006, and saw traffic bump up by 19%. And it’s not just music videos anymore: A 2006 Online Media Survey from Piper Jaffray found 51% of online video watchers are viewing news videos; while 26% and 41% watched TV shows or movie previews, respectively. Product & Shopping Search.  So much for the news, information and entertainment consumption of online video, noted above. Comparison shopping engines and product shopping sites were quick to adopt images and videos as “search keywords” to access their products. For example, fashion site Like.com offers celebrity look-alike handbags, hats and accessories, all searchable by photos and video clips of the famously fashionable.  Comparison shopping engines — which aggregate different brands and labels at one shopping site – often feature not only search-by-image capabilities to visitors; but some also offer interactive video features for “virtual try-on,” on-the-fly color changes, or matching up clothing separates into new ensembles. 

Video Mashups.  Now a collaboration among Yahoo! Video, Huffington Post political news site and online magazine Slate offers the tools, video clips and access to users who search, create and edit their own video newscasts. These user-created video mashups are set up to provide individualized Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate Videos. However, the video tools’ application to product marketing, search and e-Commerce is only a matter of time. Salon e-Magazine and Huffington Post web site worked with a long list of user-submitted debate questions for presidential candidates, which were asked and videotaped via TV personalities Charlie Rose and Bill Maher, as multiple Democratic Presidential Candidates answered at length. This front-end production of the video clip information base eliminated middle men typical of TV broadcast debates: No pundits, No moderators, No show producers, and No short time clocks or forced sound-byte answers. Enter Yahoo! Video, which stores the scannable video clips and offers Yahoo’s web-based video editing tool called “Jumpcut.” Site visitors select the questions and issues in which they are most interested; pull video clip answers; and digitally cut-n-paste together their own candidate debate tape, including editing out windbags, rambling and repetitive replies! 

Voila! Personalized debate video mashups. Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling noted that this new video widget from Yahoo! allows people to compare interviews and candidate positions “side-by-side on issues of concern. Sort of like online comparison shopping.”  Outside of informed citizenship and individually edited political debate, there are practical and commercial marketing applications for this video editing tool kit.  Eric Cho, in a recent Search Engine Marketing Hints, tried to prepare for the leap from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 applications. Cho speculated that we finally accepted the “old” Web 2.0 innovations of human editors and the influence of social sites, over what he calls “traditional SEO, where we manipulate keywords, get links, submit to directories, etc.” Then comes the latest Killer App, video, which Cho calls the booming media avenue. Cho’s predictions: We’re watching TV; watching our families, friends and social groups; and communicating online, rather than over telephones (landline, cellular of VoIP). And we’re doing all of this via video fed through one single device.   “There will definitely be a big evolution with video search and Video SEO and PPC in the coming years,” says Eric Cho. Blame it on the next killer app: video.

As with all things in life, SEO pro’s have to start out somewhere.  No one just wakes up one day and knows everything there is to know about SEO.  Mastery takes a lot of time, so those of you new to SEO shouldn’t fret.  That being said, newbies should still take special care not to make certain mistakes that could potentially undermine their own marketing efforts.  While the following list of SEO mistakes is by no means comprehensive, I still feel that it’s a good start. 

Mistake #1: Optimizing For Obscure, Long-tail Keywords
Ok, so you rank fairly high for “best search engine optimization company in Smalltown, USA”, but so what?  If no one actually takes the time to conduct such a search then your optimization for that particular phrase is pretty useless, isn’t it?  The trick is to take advantage of the many research tools that are currently on the market.  These tools can help you discern which keywords people are actually entering into the engine query boxes and therefore give you a better understanding of which words your site should be targeting.  Once you’ve discovered which keywords are most popular for your particular industry, go ahead and focus on those for your site.  That way you’ll actually get decent traffic from your optimization efforts.    

Mistake #2: Focusing Solely On the Homepage
It’s imperative that you don’t neglect your internal pages because more than likely visitors to your site will arrive there not by the homepage, but by one of these internal pages.  You should think of these pages as being just as important as the homepage itself because they are more often than not the gateways to your main site.  Make sure that each page has its own title, headers and content and that each page can stand alone as a good representation of your company and site.  Also, it’s important that each and every page is easily navigable and provides access to your homepage and other pages.  You don’t want your visitors getting lost because that will only frustrate them and cause your click-through rate to go up.

Mistake #3: Too Much Attention To Meta Tags
Once upon a time, long long ago in the magical world of SEO, meta tags were an integral part of any SEO campaign.  However times have changed and that fairytale has long been over.  Meta tags aren’t that important anymore when it comes to optimization because they were abused to death in the past.  They affect rankings very little, if at all, these days.  The only thing they’re really good for in this day and age is showing what a page will be about in the SERPs.  For this reason they should not be disregarded altogether.  But it’s unwise to give meta tags too much attention when there are other more important things to be focusing on.

Mistake #4: Disregarding Bounce-Rate When Looking at Site Traffic
It’s really easy to get over-excited about high volumes of Internet traffic, but if you’re focusing too much on numbers and not enough on analysis, you could be causing problems for yourself.  You can get tons of traffic all day long, but if your visitors aren’t sticking around and checking out your other pages, then what’s the point?  That’s why it’s very important to consider bounce rate when analyzing traffic rates.  Bounce rate tells you how many people are clicking links to your site but aren’t staying around long enough to convert.  If you see that a very high percentage of your visitors are bailing after visiting only one page then there must be something seriously wrong and you should be looking into it right away.  Experiment with ways to keep visitors wanting more.  It’s a lot easier to make site changes that’ll keep visitors lingering and viewing other pages than it is to optimize a site allover again for brand new visitors. 

Mistake #5: Believing That In-bound Links are the End-All, Be-All
Getting in-bound links is important because it helps search engine spiders find your site so that it can be indexed and ranked, but it’s not the only way to optimize your site and it can certainly be overdone.  If you have too many poor-quality, spammy-looking links pointed to your site, you make rank high for a short time, but you’ll ultimately tank in the SERPs.  Make sure you use legal, white-hat linking strategies and that you look at it as a piece of the SEO pie—not the end all. 
 

Advertisers pay for clicks, and publishers make commission on each click that their traffic source provides.  Yet the very model of pay-per-click advertising opens itself up to fraudulent activity, putting advertisers at risk of paying commissions to publishers with poor quality and/or synthetic traffic.

As a result of click fraud, advertisers suffer decreased ROI, and subsequently the entire industry is placed in jeopardy.  Advertisers may lower their bids or pull their PPC campaigns altogether.  Legitimate publishers are left with reduced commissions, and the result is that both sides of PPC networks deteriorate.  The entire industry is threatened.

Detecting and preventing click fraud is the only solution to this powerful and pervasive force that has tainted the PPC advertising industry to the detriment of advertisers, legitimate publishers and PPC search engines.  This task rests in the hands of PPC engines themselves.

And while no one organization will ever be able to say that they have completely eradicated click fraud from their networks, recently there have been considerable strides taken to combat click fraud, with many second and third-tier PPC search engines dropping significant portions of their syndication networks because of some blatant fraudulent activity.

PPC engines need to have the capacity to understand the value of their traffic and be able to distinguish high-quality traffic from poor-quality sources.  The development of proprietary tools to analyze traffic data for advertisers is the best way to deliver solid ROI consistently.  Nothing speaks louder than hard data that show conversions with traffic sources and the revenue this spend generates.  For example, GenieKnows.com employs a traffic-analysis team and the proprietary technology of the Genie Shield product to deliver conversion tracking, which eliminates automated clicking by detecting and removing paid-to-click traffic.  It also analyzes click patterns based on user activity and micro-manages traffic sources on a per-URL or per-IP basis.

With proactive measures in place, PPC engines are able to strengthen relationships with advertisers, optimizing their campaigns to ensure that their ROI continues to grow.  Naturally, if an advertiser is making a profit on their PPC campaigns, they will certainly want to reinvest.

There is a wealth of potential waiting to be realized in online advertising and within PPC advertising specifically.  While billions of dollars are currently spent annually, billions more are still waiting to be invested, provided that advertisers’ spends are met with profitable conversions.