Kinetic Typography | Promotional Video

Kinetic Videos – Better Conversions – More Interest

For any of you that need a better reason to use Kinetic Videos for your promotions and viral media (apart from the fact that they look really cool), think of Channel 4 and the kinetic landscape to logo changes, how many times have you managed to look away. After Channel 4 started these kinetic landscapes, they were able to charge more for their advertising than any other UK TV Channel, as people were not channel flipping, they had to stop and stare!

Another recent success is Fords all new kinetic design, made to make the cars look like they were moving when parked up, and it works, I hate Fords, (hate is probably too strong a word, lets say i am not a fan), and I can’t help myself but like the new designs, and I do mean all of them!

Even dancing is kinetic, running, sports, you name it, most people are more interested in something that moves than something that remains stationary, just like cats when they see something move, we are drawn to kinetic videos.

So the next time you are preparing a presentation, or promotional video, think Kinetic, and the chances are your viewers and potential audiences, will not be able to look away!

The video above was created by Kip, who also deals in Website Design and Graphic Design

In marketing terms, the internet can be seen as a hunting ground, and small business is the prey. It can seem that every Tom, Dick and Harry wants your money. They want to sell you something, maybe promise to get you on Google page 1 or just tell you how to spend your precious marketing budget.

Unfortunately, in-between all the hype and too good to be true offers, is some really good stuff from various websites and sources.

So defend yourself!

If you are new in Business, or in fact unfamiliar with sales processes, here’s the one bit of advice you should never forget.

Never agree to anything from a cold call!!

Sound obvious?

Then why do countless people get it wrong, and why are online sales pressure tactics so effective and rogue companies so common?

Now not all cold calls are bad. A lot of telemarketers work long and hard making contacts and try to win you over, and a lot of businesses starting out have to resort to cold calling to get off the ground.

But, and a big but. Never agree to anything from that first call. If you like what you hear, get their contact details, say good bye and do some research. Spending five minutes doing a bit of due diligence without having a salesmen waffling in your ear will save you a lot of costly mistakes.

If a companies product/service is as good as they say it is, then spending 5 minutes on Google looking for testimonials and feedback, and making sure there are no pages of “they’re a con, run away” shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

Trust me, when it comes to things like online advertising, that offer that is only valid if you agree now, will still be valid tomorrow!

Some of the shadier cold callers you need to watch out for.

Unfortunately, as soon as you start marketing yourself, from forums, directories, blogs, articles etc, then the unscrupulous cold caller will strike at some point.

Ones to particularly watch out for are so called Charity or Police Magazines. Be very wary of anyone trying to sell you advertising space in publications that you have never heard of, or allegedly using charities.

The scam is you pay for an A4 advert, it has dubious artwork, you are bullied into a payment plan, which you wont have to pay for x number of weeks/months. You won’t be happy about the exposure you got from the magazine (which will be zero), so you will refuse to pay your bill. You are then passed over to a debt collection agency, which will all be operated by the same company…

Another scam is the SEO one. You will be offered an Google Page 1, all sounding too good to be true, payment plan etc…

The sad fact is, Trading Standards are fully aware, and try and close these guys down when they can, but they resurface under another guise.

The only cure is down to the consumer, ie you.

• Never agree to anything on a first initial cold call.
• If the sales call gets aggressive or the caller isn’t listening, put the phone down.
• If the call sounds interesting, get as much information as you can, get their contact details, do some research and agree to call them back if you are still interested.
• Remember this offer really will be available tomorrow!

If you ever think you have been treated unjustily or think you have fallen prey, then speak to your local Trading Standards.

Don’t be another victim…

Steve Richardson

Owner of My Local Forums and My Local Services – The Online Advertising Directory.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

The ability to get somebody searching on Google, Bing or Yahoo to come and look at your website.

How?

Simple, keywords!

These are the words people type into a search engine to find what they are looking for. Eg if I type tax office into google, I will get millions of results. If I type in Stratford Tax Office I will get in a much more refined search. Getting your website onto the first page of these results is the art (some say religion) of SEO.

I’ve utilised SEO consultants, picked up books, and gained experience over the years by dabbling. SEO is a very emotive field, full of some genuinely knowledgeable people, but also plenty of back bedroom cowboys, including dodgy “blackhat” consultants that will try and cheat, take your money and end up you getting banned. So choose wisely if outsourcing!

So these are my views, and what has worked for me. Other people may have different ideas, some will say different things have a different importance, but at least after reading this, you will be armed to join the great SEO debate.

I’ve broken these down into “Onpage” and “Off Page” SEO, and order of importance.

On Page SEO – in other words things you change on your website or in your code.

1. URL – Ok, maybe too late for this, but if you’re a Taxi operator, then choose a URL with Taxi in the title. Mylocaltaxi.com sort of thing. Priceless free marketing.

2. Keywords – Do some research, if you were buying your product, what would you type into Google? I’m afraid no one cares that you are called ABC Ltd, and won’t type this into Google. You don’t have brand, so work out a set of keywords that you think you can achieve and will give you some targeted visitors. There’s plenty of tools out there to help you, one of my favourites is Keyword Spy.

3. Page Titles – Such a simple and effective fix. Go into your webcode and edit the page title between <title>Steves website</title> If you have a product per page, then get that keyword into the page title, and keep to the beginning of the title tag as close as possible. Try if you can (I never can!) to keep your title around the 64 character mark. Rumor has it Google will look more favorably if you don’t go over this, but don’t worry too much.

4. Page Content – This is your area to shine. There’s no excuses for laziness, no one knows your product better than you. Google loves content. Your page needs to be appealing to someone arriving on your site. If your page title is Steves Beer cans, then Google, you and any visitors will expect that page to be about beer cans. Sounds obvious? So why do so many people get it wrong?

In this daft example, the keyword you want to rank well for is “beer cans”. So the content should be all about beer cans, with keyword “beer cans” placed occasionally in the text.

There is something called a H1 tag, and this is used a primary heading for your content. So you need to get your keyword into this heading. eg <H1>Steves beer cans</H1>

Then you need to add the keyword a few more times into the content. Don’t be daft about it, keep it readable and sensible, but it’s recommended to add it at least once in bold (you can use <strong> or <b> tags).

If you have images in your content, then add the keyword into any alt tags, as this will help your page get indexed in things like Google Images.

Some SEO people and a lot of SEO tools will go on about keyword density, and until recently, I still believed it, but its cobblers, and don’t worry about it. People will tell you that your keywords need to be 4% of the content, and there are mathematical formulas to work it out.. blah blah…

Put them in your page title, H1 tag, about 3 or 4 times in your content, once in bold, plus any image alt tags, and that should do you.

Key thing is, subtlety include your keywords, but keep your content readable and professional. If copy isn’t your thing, then engage a copy writer, just give them a brief and the keywords you are looking to incorporate.

5. Them Meta thingys – In the old days, things like meta tags held an important role in telling search engines what your site was, what the keywords were, and what description to display. They are still used by some search engines, but their importance gets downgraded every year. But still populate these fields. Every little helps!

In the head of your code, under the page title tags, you will see <meta name=”keywords” content=”blah,more blah,waffle”> Enter your keywords in here. But don’t go too mad! Keep them relevant to your content, and don’t spam!

Next one is <meta name=”description” content=”add some good waffle for your site”> This will display under your page title on the search engine results. If you leave this blank, the search engines will grab some text from the web page.

Off Page SEO – or in otherwords stuff you can do without having to edit your website or code. Sometimes referred to as SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

1. Link Building – the basics – The single most important factor of SEO. Weblinks, or as Google see’s them, the currency of authority. The theory goes, if your website is a fantastic resource, has superb content, awesome products everyone wants, then people will naturally link to you. The more people that decide to link to you, Google will reward your status as a trusted resource and grant you a better place in the search engine rankings.

Now the trouble is, everyone is link building. Ideally you want one way links, website B links to you. If you link back to website B, then that becomes a reciprocal link. No problem with this, in moderation. Also links are down to quality. You don’t want pages of spammy reciprocal links to sites completely unrelated to you, and you may actually get marked down.

Remember the golden rule, you have full control of who you decide to link to, and not who links to you. The search engines know this, so if you decide to link to a dodgy/porn/warez type site, then this is classed as linking to a “bad neighbourhood” and you could be penalised.

2. Obtaining Quality links – When you head off link building, what you are looking for are quality links, that will allow search engines to crawl them (index). In otherwords beware of the no follow tag (rel=”nofollow”). Any links with a no follow tag offer little value from anSEO point of view, as search engines will skip over them, but, humans can still click on them, so they can be a good source of traffic. Classic example is twitter. Twitter displays nofollow links, but obviously a lot of people click on them, so poor SEO, but good traffic generators.

There a lots of ways of obtaining links, directories are a good source, both free and paid. Some free directories do nofollow links, so do some homework.

Article writing is another way. Write an informed article about your industry, submit it to article directories and hopefully people will link back to you. This can also be known as link baiting.

Blogs are an accepted way of generating links, that includes answering blogs as well as writing them. If answering, check to see if they are nofollow.

Forums, (like this one, leave your link in your signature), social networking sites, Facebook, Linked In etc. There are multitudes of ways of generating links.

3. Anchor text – This simply is the text you want to display when someone is linking to you. In other words think keywords! If your URL was SEOsteve.com you might want the displayed text to read SEO 101. Code wise, this would look like this:
<a href=”http://seosteve.com”>SEO 101</a>

Anchor text is extremely powerful. I personally would say it is the most important aspect of SEO, and even if your web page had poor content, little optimization, get 50 websites to show your URL on their homepage with your anchor text keyword, I’ll bet money you’ll get a decent ranking on Google.

4. PPC – aka Adwords. Google Adwords and similar give you the ability to short cut the SEO process, which is known as organic SEO, and go straight for the kill. In otherwords you take out adverts on Google and display in the sponsor links. The process is similar, you choose your keywords, then you decide a budget. When someone types in your keyword, Google holds a little auction, and the top 10 bids will display in the sponsor links on Page 1. The process happens in a split second, and the deepest pockets win.

But it doesn’t have to be expensive, and with Google regularly handing out £50 vouchers (just google “google vouchers”) it’s agood way to experiment for a few quid a day. The key to adwords is to tweak and test, tweak and test. The interface is straightforward and most newbies pick it up quite quickly.

If you can get a decent conversion going, ie x% of clicks on your advert = x% of sales on your site, then it can be quite profitable.

To learn more about adwords, just Google “Adwords”

Summary

The thing to remember with SEO is that far from being overly complicated, it is actually very laborious and time consuming. There are more complicated tips and tricks a good consultant can advise you on, but the basic fundamentals don’t really change. If you’re doing it yourself, then decide on the value of your own time not running your business, and generating revenue, versus the value of employing anSEO consultant who will take the pain from you.

But do your homework. Everyone will promise you “top of Page 1 Google”. You may be top of page 1, but not for any worthwhile keyword that will generate targeted traffic and potential customers. Be wary of being tied into 12 month contracts. I think 3 months is a realistic time to start to see results. Maybe not page 1, but an increase in position, increased links etc.

Happy SEO‘ing!

Original article:
SEO 101 for laymen and newbies

Steve Richardson

Owner of My Local Forums and My Local Services – The Online Advertising Directory.

NEVER underestimate the power of SEO…

Anyone who has a website will be very aware of the phrase “SEO”, but most website owners don’t really understand exactly what “SEO” is, what works and what doesn’t.

I’m a locksmith that offers a 24hr emergency locksmith service covering the Wolverhampton area and my keywords are all related to locksmiths, wolverhampton and emergency services. Sometimes I appear on google, sometimes I don’t.

However, I decided to add a couple of videos onto my website via “youtube” to highlight the dangers of poor fitted locks which I come across on a daily basis and if I come across them then unfortunately so do criminals who are also looking at houses where they can quickly gain entry to.

Then, yesterday, I had a phone call from a guy based down in Sussex who had found my video on google whilst searching for a locksmith, as his front door lock had jammed. He would of never found my website if I hadn’t uploaded the video and I managed to talk him through a couple of locksmith techniques and because he came from a engineering background he managed to open his front door lock.

Did I make any money??.. of course I didn’t, but it certainly highlighted the importance of “SEO” for any website…

Do I understand what “SEO” is???… of course not… but I do know one thing…. Uploading videos onto a website via “youtube” does help.

Richard

www.hardysure.com

(1907 views!!!!)

I received an email the other day offering a swimming pool domain for sale, so I forwarded this to a client (who obviously deals in swimming pools!). Unfortunately they wanted over £600 which is way to much for a cheeky forwarding domain. But this got Mark thinking, so he bought 3 domains and redirected them to his main website London Swimming Pools, this is quite a common practice with a lot of website owners that are proactive about their businesses.

But to really benefit from the new domains it pays to actually put websites up on them, so yesterday, between the two of us, we decided to choose a search term (London Swimming Pools) for his main website and set about increasing its position in google.

Bear in mind this was only yesterday afternoon, I put up 3 wordpress websites for Mark to add content to later, as his main website is WordPress I knew he would find his way around these easily enough.

What Was Done:

• Changed Permalinks to SEF (Search Engine Friendly)
• Added Free Themes (A Different one to each)
• Named Pages Blatantly For SEO
• Edited footer.php to add a link to Marks main site
• Added a Gallery to each site (images SEO titled/named)
• Checked current search term position

Now, fastforward less than 24 hours, I noticed that the search term position website page was still open, so did a quick check, and his main site has already moved 5 places, and this is without any content on the new websites themselves, from 41st to 36th. So I sent a quick email to Mark, and then thought it worth sharing this as a blog for others to do too (and obviously add a few more links with his anchor/search term).

Now my advice to Mark has been this, throw the odd update on these websites, but do not worry too much about them, they will not need the maintenance that a usual website needs, but worth updating here and there to keep them semi fresh. And we will keep an eye on them over the next few weeks.

Mark Pitts: Mark runs a family company that looks after swimming pools in and around London, from servicing and repairs all the way through to Home Buyer Reports (making sure a pool is working properly before buying the house it comes with!). He is constantly looking at new ways to promote his website, and this has given him huge growth online, with his website now attracting thousands of visitors each month, and it is a real pleasure to work with clients that are so involved with their online marketing, you can find out more about Mark and PSP by clicking this blatant SEO link London Swimming Pools

Latest update: Day 2

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer

Click Here for The Original Article

For several days now, Google and Microsoft have been involved in an increasingly bitter argument over Bing (news, site) “stealing” Google search results. That argument has now gone personal, in public, to the discredit of both companies.

Seconds Out, Fight
Spats between tech companies have been an on-going feature of the industry; Apple vs. Adobe’s Flash, AMD vs. NVIDIA over video performance, Microsoft vs. Apple over everything, and Apple vs. the mobile industry. Some arguments rumble on for years, some fade out, only to flare up years later.

This latest scrap has seen Google accusing Bing of stealing its search results from Google’s own data. Microsoft replied by accusing Google of poisoning caches and other methods to “frame” Bing. All we need is a butler and a candle-holder and we’d have a great game to play.

Search Getting Personal (But Not Like This)
Most of these arguments are managed carefully via press statements, snide remarks to journalists, keynote off-the-cuff answers and so on. Rarely do we get to see representatives of two companies go at it face to face.

Yet, this is what we get in this video from Big Think’s Farsight 2011, an executive from each company trading barbs and getting personal, with some interesting high-level insights in the future of search (which is what the event was about).

Matt Cutts from Google states his position and the history of the issue while MIcrosoft’s Dr. Harry Shum seems to think this is a storm over semantics, if anything.

The Bottom Line
At the bottom of this story are some highly technical issues that see Microsoft state that it uses thousands of sources to generate Bing’s search results — and it does not deny that one of those sources might be Google.

Does Google own data that appears in public places or such nebulous concepts as random search strings? There is now endless informed opinion across the Web on the subject but while it makes for good headlines and even some decent amateur theater, it would take an army of lawyers years of work to get to the bottom of this one.

The government is considering plans to increase the speed limit on the nation’s motorways to 80mph in order to ‘increase productivity’, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond has said.

He also indicated that action would be taken by the government on record fuel prices in the Chancellor’s budget next month.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has offered to dispose of most of the Sky News channel to allay concerns about the planned take-over of all of BSkyB.

News Corp would either sell outright, or else separate off, the news channel to allay concerns raised by regulator Ofcom about media plurality.

The BBC’s Robert Peston understands it is likely to be enough for the BSkyB takeover to win government approval.

That could come tomorrow but ministers may still want a public consultation.

‘U-turn’
One possibility is that a demerger of Sky News to BSkyB’s existing shareholders has been agreed.

That would mean News Corp retains its 39% minority stake in the channel, while taking over 100% of the rest of BSkyB.

“Some will see that as a U-turn,” said Mr Peston – as Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt had promised to heed the advice of regulator Ofcom, who wanted the deal referred to the Competition Commission.

Continue reading the main story
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Start Quote

If Mr Hunt allows the bid to proceed, which is what I expect, some will see that as a U-turn”

Robert Peston
Business editor, BBC News
The European Commission has already ruled there is no reason to oppose the takeover on competition grounds.

However, Ofcom had raised concerns about the impact on media plurality and choice of news if News Corp controlled Sky News in addition to the newspapers it currently owns – the Sun, the News of the World, the Times and the Sunday Times.

‘Smoke and mirrors’
In order to make a sale of the news channel viable, the BBC understands that Mr Murdoch has also agreed to provide it with a long-term contract that will have the effect of subsidising it for many years.

“If the purported remedy leaves Sky News dependent on News Corporation for its money that will not be true independence,” said a spokesman for an alliance of media groups opposed to the takeover.

“Smoke and mirrors will not deal with the plurality concerns expressed by so many,” added the group, which includes the Guardian, Associated Newspapers, Trinity Mirror and the Telegraph.

“A lot hangs on the fine print of the offer from News Corporation. We will oppose any unsatisfactory arrangement and consider all legal avenues available to us.”

Even if the deal gets the nod from Mr Hunt, News Corp has yet to gain approval from BSkyB’s board.

Original Story Here . . .