Gifted to us by some of the online services, RSS feeds have proved to be just as beneficial as they were expected to. With them at our disposal, web monitoring, for the mentions of your brand, your competition or your key execs has become a cake walk.

I use Google Reader for RSS. Here are some of the searches I’ve set up to scan Blogosphere, The News Wires, Technorati, and Twitter:

You will be amazed to know that MSN Local Listing can be done in few minutes.

For your reference, here are the steps:

Step 1 :

Signin in MSN with Live or hotmail ID

Step 2 :

Goto https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx

Step 3 :

Fill here about you business

Click on “Check your Listing”

Note: Here you will have to pass throug 4 steps, after that your submission will to listed in MSN.

Step 4 : These Steps will be:

> Categories

> Review

> Submit

Now your Submission will b verified by the webmaster and would be published in few days.

You can drop a mail at sales@mosaic-service.com in case facing any problem with MSN listing.

When Twitter, Facebook, Google and other reputed social networking websites implemented their own URL shorteners for sharing links, how could YouTube, whose videos are amongst the most shared videos on Facebook and Twitter, stay behind? It has joined the league with its own YouTube URL shortener.

So now if you don’t want to take a risk clicking on links of videos of unknown websites, with YouTube’s URL shortener, at least you can distinguish the links of YouTube videos from the rest.

Of course, that’s beside another benefit of saving you some precious character count, which is, almost necessary, if you’re sharing video links on Twitter.

To use this feature (YouTube URL Shortener), you must first activate the Auto Share feature on your YouTube account. This will link your account to Twitter and Google Reader and help you get any YouTube video shared with your social networking site as soon as you mark it as favorite. The link will contain the shortened version of the video’s You Tube URL.

Alternatively, you can use You Tube’s URL shortener manually by replacing the part of a YouTube video’s URL that says – “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/”.

So for example I have this video URL -

“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7__F5boLIk”

and I replace it simply with

“http://youtu.be/o7__F5boLIk“, the link is good to go.

Apart from Google local listing, now you can go for Yahoo local listing!

Do not wonder…here you can go through brief on that for your reference.

Step: 1

Signin in yahoo local with a yahoo ID

Step: 2

Go to http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

Step: 3

Fill here about you business

Step: 4

Click on “Submit Button”

Your Submission will be verified and would be published in few days!

Enjoy Local Listing in Yahoo.

You can drop a mail at sales@mosaic-service.com in case facing any problem with Yahoo listing.

We took a look at “Market Share” of the three big search engines and saw some interesting trends.

A few notes on the data:

• The benchmark we used was advertising expense; not impressions of traffic volume.
• We looked at Paid Search only, not content or banner deals.
• We studied only the advertising network, not strictly the engine’s domain.
• Our systems are engine agnostic: Our clients do not set engine budgets; with most of them having no budget at all. Based strictly on, where traffic can be purchased within efficiency tolerances, they allow money to flow.

Given that understanding, here’s what we saw over the past 15 months:

Three observations instantly catch our attention:

• It appears that since last August, Yahoo! has regained some ground.
• Google seemed to get a far larger holiday kick than the others.
• Even with its cash back offers and willingness to buy Market Share from Google, MSN failed to make its presence felt. I’m sure others saw Google ads for Live Search on high traffic KW, yes?

While the last two observations are not that surprising, the first one has definitely pushed us to keep a constant track on further developments. It’s probably going to be a story with lots of sudden twists and turns.

While many of us are still gloomy about the downward graph, I am in quite an upbeat mood because of the encouraging signs reflected by comparative analysis. The client numbers were surely bad in April but if you compare them with those of February and March, the numbers were, after all, not that awful. For me, it is definitely an encouraging sign. There are quite a few more signs, which, now I am putting forward to get you in the same upbeat mood too. They are:

• • Conversion Rates seem to have rebounded: Where Q1 saw median CR across our clients 5% below the previous year, so far in April CR is actually up YoY by 3%.
  • Average Order Value seems to have stabilized: Consistent on the downward graph of 5%, as was the case in Q1. It is not falling lower. So be happy.
  • Downfall of competitive PPC Sales slowed down: While the PPC sales were down more than 20% in Q1, so far, in April, the median has moved in the right direction getting restricted at 17%.

However I am not hopelessly positive. I do know there are some discouraging signs as well; some of them being:

• • • Costs are only down 13% Year over Year in April, where they matched sales at over 20% down in Q1. Retailers are pushing the gas harder to try to drive the top line.
    • Brand Sales are still way off: nearly 30% down Year over Year. This is a combination of general traffic volume decline, heavy consumer use of coupons through affiliates and email promos, and in some cases pull back in other offline media channels that drive folks to the web.

Actually, according to me, retailers still face a sizeable drop in the number of consumers shopping, but those who are in the marketplace do not hesitate to spend big bucks. So we need to be neither too positive nor too negative. Adopt the middle path and keep going on.

As opposed to traditional online advertising, which involves a lot of money, social media optimization, has literally marked the beginning of an era which involves free-of-cost online advertising and marketing. It integrates brands with social networking websites which offer extended visibility to the brands, inside their networks, free-of-cost. And then they enable their users to directly interact with brands. In the long run, this situation is definitely going to re-structure the field of PR and market communications as communicating to a “disperse crowd” is a huge difference from directly getting in touch with one’s customers.

Although quite a popular Internet marketing tool now, social media campaigning still does not have a clear definition and well charted methods to achieve the goal of marketing. This is probably because the communities, targeted during SMO activities, are strongly dependent on the brand. For example, social media optimization for a mountain bike vendor differs a lot from SMO for a music label. However, there are still some basic questions, the answers of which, if you find before the initiation of your SMO campaign, can guide you, quite a bit with the whole process. They are:

• Where do Internet users interested in my brand spend maximum time online?
• Which placement possibilities do these communities offer?
• Which type of media can be used to leverage brand awareness?
• How much effort has to be put into daily routine? (There’s nothing worse than a “dead” profile)

In the current era, video communication, through Internet, is one of the most efficient means of reaching your prospective customers and promoting your products or services. In fact, video optimization over the web can get you whooping rise in your sales because visual marketing has the maximum capacity to influence and convince people. To have an effective video optimization, here are few suggestions:-

1. Use Keywords – Insert the most popular keywords in the file name of the video. Also, while tagging the videos, after uploading them on the video networks, use relevant keywords so as to make it easier for people to find your video.

2. Create Video Feed - Create RSS feeds of all videos in a collection; with each feed containing a different video in the enclosure field. Then go for optimizing the feeds using related keywords.

3. Increase Exposure – Host your videos not only on your website but reputed social networking portals like YouTube.

4. Create relevant video name and description – Create the video name and description fields using keywords that relate to the content of the video. Also try to make the title and description interesting and relevant so as to encourage viewers to click-through.

5. Create Google Video Sitemap - Create a video sitemap for the search engines. If you need any help on what to include in these sitemaps, you can contact Google Webmaster Central Blog at  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. … emaps.html .

6. Optimize Landing Page - Optimize the landing page of your website and follow it with embedding the video in any of your web pages. Finally, use standard SEO techniques to optimize that webpage for the search engines. Use keywords that relate to the video on the page that contains the video.

7. Embed logo and URL in the video - Brand the video with your logo in the initial video splash screen, and include your website address at the bottom of the video to increase your brand exposure.

8. Leave them wanting for more - Every promotional video that you create should be a teaser and leave the audience asking for more. Engage the audience, but try to encourage the viewer to visit the website or view other videos to learn more.

9. Promote on the YouTube Feed - YouTube creates an RSS feed for every user account. In addition to manually creating an RSS feed, you can also use the YouTube feed to promote your videos. The formatting details for the YouTube video feeds can be found at  http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/username/uploads (replace “username” in the url with your own YouTube account username).

10. Anchor Text – Anchor text, which is used to link to the videos, should be created using keywords which relate to the video.

11. Video Submission - Submit your video to all the video and video podcast websites. Here are a couple of resource sites you can start with:

a)  Podcast & Video Submissions at http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm

b) 140 Places to Submit Your Video List at http://www.stephanmiller.com/my-link-li … ideo-list/

12. Views tracking and revision - Track and review the number of views that a video receives. It helps you gauge the strengths and flaws of your creation. For example, if you keep a track of whether the viewers watch the full video or not and subsequently, find that a substantial number of viewers are abandoning the video before completion, you can get the idea that your video is unduly long and could benefit from trimming.

14. Use social bookmarking - To draw additional attention to the videos, use social bookmarking. This will also help in receiving greater number of incoming links, which will, in turn, help improve search engine ranking.

During their budding years, that is, around the turn of the century, successful SEO and Internet marketing simply meant stuffing your title, description and keyword tags and the content area with the relevant keywords and having a high keyword density.
However, over a period of time, when keyword density became more of an SEO trick than an SEO tool, for getting a high rank, it lost all relevance for the search engines. Sure, it is still needed but it’s not the only thing that would get you a high ranking.
If you want a real case study as a proof for it, you can take my case. I do not really care about the keyword-density when writing my content. My articles hardly have a keyword density of 2% and still they work fine for me. This shows whether I have a 2% keyword density or even lesser than that, rankings of my content pages would not really suffer simply because of that.