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.

Tweeting via SMS has been an option that was available to many in different countries but not in India. Recently Twitter made an announcement that it has secured an SMS deal with one of the India’s largest mobile phone operators Bharti Airtel. The subscribers of Airtel can now text or message 140 characters via their mobile phone directly to the twitter.

This will further broaden the reach of Twitter as they will have access to millions of potential users. India has one of the largest base of mobile phone users which keeps on increasing day by day. Such kind of growth has the capacity to fuel excellent growth for twitter. This will further fuel the growth of Web 2.0 concept in India.

You might have heard of Amazon revolutionary E book reading device “ Kindle “. Kindle is an electronic e book reader that allows you to upload thousands of e book & take them anywhere for convenient reading.
Now Google has planned to enter this market & deliver e books to any device just with the help of a browser. The service will be know as Google Editions & will be launched around first half of 2010. Google is tying up with thousands of publishers & will feature around 500,000 e books. Books can also be bought through partner sites such as Barnes & Nobles. Amazon is also considered to be potential partner for Google but given the situation that they would prefer to sell their own title s for use on the Kindle, it would be interesting to know how they cope up with the Google.
However for consumers it seems pretty good news as they will have more option to chose from & this will definitely give a boost to e book market.

People using blogger.com for their blogging needs can rejoice as blogger has added a couple of new nifty features.

1. You can now verify all your blogs automatically using webmaster tool verification on Google Webmaster’s Tool.
2. Star Rating can be added below each post for better user interaction.
3. Import/Export button enables you to backup your blog into a single XML file.
4. You can embed a comment form with support for Open id & Google Account Authentication.
5. Images can be dragged & dropped for better image placement & better HTML handling.

SEO and SMO are two of the bigger concerns for webmasters and Bloggers, as they can both have substantial impacts on the amount of traffic a website or blog receives.

SEO has been a common activity of website owners for years now. It is no doubt effective. Search Engines sends tons of free traffic to those with the high rankings for popular search terms.

While Social media optimization has only become popular in the past few years as the use of social networking sites has exploded. When compared with successful SEO, social media traffic is less steady. Those who use social media effectively can consistently draw traffic with new content.

One of the biggest differences between SEO and SMO is the networking aspect. SMO is heavily-reliant on networking and strong profiles, while SEO can be done without this.

Success can be accomplished from day one of a new website or blog. There’s no need to wait to become a trusted domain. While in SEO, one has to wait for a longer period of time to get rankings so that you can get relevant traffic to the website.

The structure of your website isn’t really important like it is with SEO.

Some Comparisons and Similarities of SEO and SMO:

Link Building:

SEO – Inbound links are a large determining factor in rankings.

SMO – Links are a result of success, which means that SEO benefits from good SMO.

On Page Elements:

SEO – Title tags, headers, image title, bold text and use of keywords are all influential on search engine rankings.

SMO – Coding and tags are not so important, while visual attention grabbers make a bigger impact.

Titles:

SEO – The title tag of a page tells the search engines what a page is about and carries a lot of weight in the rankings.

SMO – Titles and headlines are extremely important for grabbing attention and getting users to click-through.

Content:

SEO – Quality content is important in order to rank well.

SMO – Quality content is important in order to hold the readers’ attention and win their approval.

Analysis:

SEO – Analysis is necessary in order to know which changes have made an impact (positive or negative) on the site’s rankings.

SMO – Analysis is necessary to know what types of content draws interest.

Predictability / the Benefit of Experience:

SEO – Experts are able to reproduce success with new sites (although it’s not as easy as it sounds), as the same elements can be applied.

SMO – Those who know the social media audience can recreate success by publishing posts and headlines specifically for this purpose.

Success Breeds More Success:

SEO – Trusted domains will have a positive effect on all pages, including new pages.

SMO – Power profiles on sites like Digg can keep traffic flowing with new submissions.

I believe that SMO is the best way for new websites and blogs to draw visitors. This early success with social media can have long-lasting effects on search engine rankings as well.

Hello Guys, I am sure you would know that Facebook, Myspace & Twitter are very popular social networks. However, many marketers make a common mistake that they think that all the social networks are same. Therefore, they do not prepare and follow a customized strategy and promote the campaign in all the networks with same style and approach.

Social networks utilize the sites Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Linkedin in different ways depending on their age. Therefore, having same promotion strategy will not work. Here are the recent stats available for your reference.

Thus I would suggest to have customized strategy based on the stats given should be applied for all of advertising campaigns in Social Networks especially for the major ones.

For more information, Click here and type “Common Mistake, Social Networks” along with the website URL.

Friends…there has been major ups and downs in terms of visitors for some of the Social networking sites.

If you see closely, the big winner in the social networking area has been Twitter which jumped from the 22nd most visited social network at the start of 2008, to third most visited in January with a growth rate of 1,227%.

Flixster is also showing good results. However Bebo and Hi5 are going backwards… For more information Click here and type “The Big Mover”.

Are you not getting hits on your videos? Here are the secrets to find tips that will help in increasing hits on videos:

We could add more keywords in the videos so that they appear in searches

Through Social Book-marking and networking sites, we can promote our video links. We can link to all our social media profiles. Also, video links could be sent out to friends in a network or group.

We can use niche forums to promote videos. We can participate in forums with links to our Youtube videos. Links could also be added in the signature.

We can embed some simple HTML code in Blog posts, and the Blogger community will soon get to know about the videos. We can add blog posts with You tube videos and those posts could be digged/boomarked in sites like dig.com. This will bring relevant traffic to the site as well as increase hits on videos.

Create more social media profiles and have a link to video channel page. Links to video from social media profile pages. We have a few profile pages in social media/networking sites.

Optimizing the video to have the thumbnail you want users to see. Normally Google picks thumbnail by default.

Hits on videos could increase with the increase in the number of friends or followers in social networking sites.

More participation in Youtube: making friends, commenting on their videos, rating their videos, telling them we’ve rated their videos & getting them to do the same for you.

Do follow all the above strategies; you will definitely see a substantial increase. If you have any queries and know more in detail, click here and type “want to know more about video promotion and clicks” with the website URL.