Continued from Part 1

3. Choose the Correct Social Platform to make your campaign ‘Viral’ – The final step would be to identify the optimum social platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace to finally get your campaign going live on them! Right now the three sites that seem to be driving the most traffic are Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, respectively.

Take some time to understand the focus of your site. It’s often better to create campaigns driven towards one social media site rather than create one campaign and blow it over all over the Web. For example, if you’re looking for links for your new website, submit to Digg. If you’re looking to create some sort of viral marketing campaign for your established site, MySpace might be a better option! Follow relevant groups, pages or communities and use incentive programs to invite relevant people to your page or community. Link your page or group by creating worthy content that can be accessible by users from other relevant pages on these social sites.

Once your SEO company is able to optimize for the above 3 steps, it’s a done deal for your SMO campaign to prosper, attract and convert more users turning your SMO campaign into a more viral one & this is when you would realize that Traffic Attainment Phase is indeed, ‘The Tipping Point’ in any search engine marketing campaign.

I think it makes sense to drive traffic from the Facebook ad. campaign to a Facebook page where you can get them to sign up rather than to a website that will hard sell a product. My logic for this – A Facebook user is casually surfing and networking and is not actively scouting around for a product or service like a search engine user that we can target through SEO or PPC campaigns. So he or she is still in the nascent stages of the buying cycle. Keeping this in perspective, “Get them interested and keep them informed should be the mantra”!!!

Not long ago, were websites built with the sole purpose of complementing an ongoing offline business; and today we have millions of websites crowding the internet, relying only on their websites to expand their business.

So, it’s definitely not a surprise to me that online marketing has become an integral and important part of any business today. However, it’s extremely fascinating to know how the new, ‘so called’ innovative avenues for marketing on the internet are created and discovered each passing day. From the host of marketing and advertising techniques available today, one of the recent entrants and, in my opinion, a genuinely effective marketing strategy is ‘Clickable Videos’.

From the day Google started showing signs of evolving into an universal search engine by ranking maps, videos, images etc. along with webpages for search queries, it was very clear where the focus of marketing companies would shift to. Search Engine Marketing companies not only realized the huge business scope in services like Video optimization, Location Map optimization, Image Optimization etc but also realized how much of a handicap it would be if they don’t exploit these avenues, considering the competitive nature of their domain. The result – more services offered and a few actually effective ones like ‘clickable videos’.

Video Promotions and online marketing through videos

Currently, companies and businesses alike use the means of video sharing websites to promote/advertise their website using videos. Popular video sites like Youtube and Metacafe provide a platform for users to share video, but are very particular about the type of links that go out from their sites. All the links going out from these sites are ‘no follow’ (not identified by search engines) and hence do not add any SEO value to the referred website.In such a situation, in the past, the only conceivable way companies could come up with was to use links in the video description, to increase traffic to their desired website.  Thanks to the concept of clickable videos, we have more options today.

Although clickable videos provide the same theoretic effect as a link to the website in the video description, the beauty of the clickable videos lies in the way they connect and interact with the viewer. ‘Clickable Videos’ target the core motivation of the viewers, to become an effective marketing strategy. The people who browse for a video on a search engine or on a video site are not looking for the website or the user who has hosted it. They are only interested in viewing the video for which they have searched for. Clickable videos utilize exactly this motivation of the viewer to their benefit.

Explaining further; video searchers can be broadly classified under two categories – the ones who read video descriptions and the ones who don’t (I know that wasn’t rocket science). In most cases, users who read the description read it before watching the video and do not end up clicking on the link in it, because they are yet to watch the video (their main goal). Once they finish watching the video their focus is already shifted (to the video), decreasing the probability of them clicking on the link in the description, which was read few minutes/seconds ago. As far as users who do not read the description are concerned, they would simply watch the video and, shut the browser or move to another video, without paying much heed to the video description.

The beauty of clickable videos lie in the fact that they aim to grab the attention of the users when its most likely to; while watching the video. They bank on the psyche of the viewers to impulsively click on an available link, embedded in the video, when their interest level in the video is maximum. At such a point clicking on a video link which reads ‘Click here for similar videos’ or ‘See the full video here’ becomes an obvious choice for most people. The logic is simple and the result – a highly effective marketing strategy.

Today, the rate at which internet marketing is growing it would not be wrong to say that numerous services, like ‘Clickable Videos’ are being introduced day in and day out by various Internet Marketing Firms, just to add more numbers to their service portfolio. Not all of them help meet the goal of, promoting your website/business. What sets an effective strategy apart from an ineffective or a mediocre one is its potential to complement a user’s goal and objectives.

My advice – If videos form an integral part of your business or your business promotions, clickable videos might just prove to be the answer to your online marketing woes.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin while studying at Stanford  developed Google,  which would provide better and quicker search results. After months of hard work and analyzing the content  present on the web they developed the Pagerank system wherein it was decided that they would rank a page depending on the content of the website, no. of incoming links and hyper text matching. The most important factor was the no. of links pointing to one’s website. In a real world scenario links represent votes and the more no. of votes a candidate has he wins. It was as simple as that however somewhere down the line the concept of “relevant links ” was introduced. According to this concept, if your website talks about watches and if you receive a link from  a website that talk about animals, this link adds no value to your website. It was argued that only relevant links mattered. It was argued that relevant links meant that someone who has a website providing the same services/information  as you is willing to link to you, thus meaning that he holds your website in high esteem and therefore more the no. of relevant links that you get the more important your website is and it should be placed higher on the Search engine results page(SERPs ). However, I don’t agree with this concept in totality and have listed a few of my reservations.

Relevant links means linking to your direct/indirect competitors and why would you want to do that. One might argue that one gets a reciprocal link in return but it does not make too much sense. Why should I push my competitors ranking up in a bid to push mine? In the real world would the Chairman of company A which manufactures mobile phones  use company B’s  mobile phones and ask “B’s” chairman to reciprocate? It just does not make sense.

Most of the search engines consider data within the anchor- text as content present on your page. This leads to a situation where in the k/w density of your links page increases and the search engines start ranking your links pages. Yes, I know you are beginning to argue that if this is the case then you resources page might be banned because of heavy k/w stuffing. However, this is not the case if you look at the links not all of them target the same k/ws. Coming back to my point high k/w density results in the links page getting ranked and getting a link page to rank higher than all the other webpages is the perfect way to lose traffic !!

Within the domain of relevant links also, Webmasters have different sets of rules. Will a webmaster of  a footwear website refuse a link from BBC.com  just because the two are not related. Take it one step ahead, would that webmaster contact BBC.com and ask them to remove his link. Another point is that if your website has been tagged(Digg, Delicious etc..) by 100 irrelevant websites/  bloggers are you going to contact Google and tell them not to consider these tags. There can’t be different sets of rules for different websites.

I am doing reputation management for one of my clients. We used a lot of socio – media forums and focused on building a certain brand image for the client.  We observed that all though these forums  did rank on all the search engines they did not make it to the first page. We decided to build links to these forums. One way to do this was to create more forums and link them to the ones already ranking. This idea was discarded because generating original content was too time consuming and we really needed to show quick reesults. We decided to use our existing sites and create links from there to our forums and to the main client site. Two months later, we have the results that we wanted. We were very happy that our project was successful however I had some doubts.

The sites that linked back to these forums and the main client site were in no way related. I would classify them as “irrelevant links”, however they worked. These irrelevant links helped push up my web pages and I achieved what I set out to. What I infer from this is that if the websites linking to you are content rich  are useful and generate lot of traffic and leads then the search engines give a lot of importance and these links count very  heavily.

What anyone who is working in the SEO field needs to realize is that search engine algorithms are constantly evolving and one needs to keep abreast with the developments,  else he  runs the risk of losing the race completely.