SEO Blog and Web Hosting News

Archive for December, 2010

Whether you wish to promote your business, or as YouTube says “Broadcast Yourself,” video content beats text adverts hands down. First, the viewer gets to see the merits of your products and services instead of being told about them. Second, videos say more in less time so it’s more convenient to the people you want to advertise your business or yourself, too.

Obstacles to Video Advertising through the Net

There are obstacles, however, to maximizing the benefits of video content. The large file size of video content is incompatible with the typically limited bandwidth that visitors to your site have. The inability of the author to enhance visitors’ viewing experience by the use of interactive video navigation controls is also a problem. Different playback standards also present a problem. Furthermore, there is difficulty integrating other data types (text, music, graphics, and other web content) with video adverts.

Flash Videos from Adobe

It is a good thing for internet marketing professionals who wish to use video content for advertising purposes that Adobe has designed a platform for delivering seamlessly integrated and universally accessible Flash Live Video (FLV) content over the internet. By using Adobe’s video delivery options, you can easily put videos on your web site for your site’s visitors or you can readily make video emails and deliver your advertising content to your targeted clients. Adobe has also revolutionized the video sharing industry over the net.

Flash Video Delivery Platform

As the author of the video, you can easily use this platform to advertise your business or to post video for recreational and video sharing purposes over the internet. All you need to do is to create your own video with a high quality video or web camera and microphone then capture and encode it into FLV format using Flash Professional tools.

Once you have your Flash Video ready, delivery is easy. You can embed or link your FLV file in SWF for video email delivery or for integration on your web site. However, this method of internet video delivery is optimal only for very short clips, say 5 seconds of playback time. For longer videos, there will be audio and video synchronization issues.

If you have a longer video clip, and you only expect a few people to watch it, you can deliver your FLV file through progressive downloading. This is a vast improvement over sending your video file embedded into the SWF player. You just need to embed a short preview clip of the entire video. When it is clicked, the user is connected to the Flash Communications Server and the full video is downloaded. Your viewers can play the video as it is being downloaded because FLV downloading is done by segments. There’s no file size limitation and audio-video synchronization problems.

The most wonderful Flash Video delivery innovation, however, is live video streaming, where the entire video need not be downloaded so your viewers are not limited by available disk size, the video is not cached so you protect copyright of the video, you can feed viewers video as you record them to your server, and you can track traffic better using your Flash Communications Server Utilities. This is by far the fastest and most convenient means of delivering live video to the web.

Truly, with skilled video editing and producing and a reliable flash Communications server, promoting yourself, and event or your business through internet video has never been easier.

5 Basic Rules of Web Design the most important rule in web design is that your web site should be easy to read. What does this mean? You should choose your text and background colours very carefully. You don’t want to use backgrounds that obscure your text or use colours that are hard to read. Dark-coloured text on a light-coloured background is easier to read than light-coloured text on a dark background.

You also don’t want to set your text size too small (hard to read) or too large (it will appear to shout at your visitors). All capitalised letters give the appearance of shouting at your visitors.

Keep the alignment of your main text to the left, not cantered. Centre-aligned text is best used in headlines. You want your visitors to be comfortable with what they are reading, and most text is left aligned.

Your web site should be easy to navigate

All of your hyperlinks should be clear to your visitors. Graphic images, such as buttons or tabs, should be clearly labelled and easy to read. Your web graphic designer should select the colours, backgrounds, textures, and special effects on your web graphics very carefully. It is more important that your navigational buttons and tabs be easy to read and understand than to have “flashy” effects. Link colours in your text should be familiar to your visitor (blue text usually indicates an unvisited link and purple or maroon text usually indicates a visited link), if possible. If you elect not to use the default colours, your text links should be emphasized in some other way (boldfaced, a larger font size, set between small vertical lines, or a combination of these). Text links should be unique – they should not look the same as any other text in your web pages. You do not want people clicking on your headings because they think the headings are links.

Your visitors should be able to find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. If not, they are very likely to click off your site as quickly as they clicked on.

Your web site should be easy to find

How are your visitors finding you online? The myth, “If I build a web site, they will come,” is still a commonly held belief among companies and organisations new to the Internet. People will not come to your web site unless you promote your site both online and offline.

Web sites are promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, banner advertising, electronic magazines (e-zines) and links from other web sites. If you are not familiar with any of these online terms, then it is best that you have your site promoted by an online marketing professional.

Web sites are promoted offline via the conventional advertising methods: print ads, radio, television, brochures, word-of-mouth, etc. Once you have created a web site, all of your company’s printed materials including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc. should have your URL printed on them.

Not only should your web site be easy to find, but your contact information should be easy to find. People like to know that there is a person at the other end of a web site who can help them in the event that:

1. They need answers to questions which are not readily available on your web site;

2. Some element on your site is not working and end users need to be able to tell you about it, and

3. Directory editors need you to modify parts of your site to be sure that your site is placed in the most relevant category.

By giving all relevant contact information (physical address, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and email address), you are also creating a sense of security for your end users. They can contact you in the way that makes them feel the most comfortable.

Your web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site

Just as in any document formatted on a word processor or as in any brochure, newsletter, or newspaper formatted in a desktop publishing program, all graphic images and elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should remain consistent throughout your web site. Consistency and coherence in any document, whether it is a report or a set of web pages, project a professional image.

For example, if you use a drop shadow as a special effect in your bullet points, you should use drop shadows in all of your bullets. Link-colours should be consistent throughout your web pages. Typefaces and background colours, too, should remain the same throughout your site.

Colour-coded web pages, in particular, need this consistency. Typefaces, alignment in the main text and the headings, background effects, and the special effects on graphics should remain the same. Only the colours should change.

Your web site should be quick to download

Studies have indicated that visitors will quickly lose interest in your web site if the majority of a page does not download within 15 seconds. (Artists’ pages should have a warning at the top of their pages.) Even web sites that are marketed to high-end users need to consider download times. Sometimes, getting to web sites such as Microsoft or Sun Microsystems is so difficult and time consuming that visitors will often try to access the sites during non-working hours from their homes. If your business does not have good brand name recognition, it is best to keep your download time as short as possible.

A good application of this rule is adding animation to your site. Sure, animation looks “cool” and does initially catch your eye, but animation graphics tend to be large files. Test the download time of your pages first. If the download time of your page is relatively short and the addition of animation does not unreasonably increase the download time of your page, then and ONLY then should animation be a consideration.

Finally, before you consider the personal preferences of your web page design, you should consider all of the above rules FIRST and adapt your personal preferences accordingly. The attitude “I don’t like how it looks” should always be secondary to your web site’s function. Which is more important: creative expression/corporate image or running a successful business?

Getting visitors to your website has been the ultimate dream of internet marketers. More traffic equals more money, so they say. But how can you do it without spending a fortune?

Unknown to many there are a few ways of getting visitors to your site without risking a lot of money. But remember, it’s not that easy. It takes more work. So, if you would rather work instead of pay to get visitors to your site, then here are a few things you can do:

1. Submit articles to article directories. This is probably one of the most effective ways of getting traffic to your site. By submitting articles with a link that points to your website, you are assured of long term traffic. As long as your article stays in the directories that you submit to, people can find it and the chances of getting traffic to your website is increased. A few of the article sites where you can submit to are goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, ideamarketers.com, articlecity.com and articlesfactory.com.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s not really rocket science. SEO is simply a technique that you implement on your site to rank higher in the search engines. Here are the things you might want to implement right away:

a) Your domain name should have your keyword in it.
b) Title tag of each page of you site should contain your keyword.
c) Your keyword should be on the first paragraph of your page.
d) The image alt tags should contain your keyword.
e) The file names of each page of your site should also have your keyword.

3. Create a blog then link it to your site. Postings at Blogger are easily indexed by Google. Updating your blog is feeding the search engines. Each time you put fresh content out, the search engines will notice it and come running to eat it all up. Putting your keywords in this fresh content will help you rank higher in the search engines. Your site gets updated a lot if you link your blog to it. Blogging is easy and it adds a lot of pages to your site. You can get free blogs at blogger.com and wordpress.com.

4. Posting in forums related to your topic. By participating in forums you’ll have the opportunity to place your link in the signature line and get traffic from forum members. You can find a forum related to your topic by going to a search engine and typing your keyword + forum. Make sure the signatures you post in forums are catchy to attract readers and make them click on your link and come to your site.

These are simple, cheap and very effective ways of getting visitors to your website. Implementing the above would guarantee a stream of traffic not only for the short term but also for the long haul.