SEO – Design – Flash – Development for the Web

entrepreneur.com

A well written piece on using Adwords and succeeding.

I saw thesse in a forum…thought they would be useful elsewhere. Thanks – Hiccup

To increase your clicks on adwords follow these rules:

• Never buy and ebook that tells you how, it’s a rip off
• Increase your Max CPC, and check it using the ad diagnostic tool. If your ad is not appearing, increase the max cpc until it does. (On the tool, there is link that says, “view ad in google” or something to that effect. Use it.)
• Make your daily budget at least double what they recommend. They really like $1,000 daily budgets for some reason…($30k per month maybe). BUT never increase it to more then you can blow in a day.
• Take crappy keywords and either delete them or put them in their own campaign so they don’t affect the CTR of your good keywords.
• Always write multiple ads, (two to start), and dispose of the lower perfomer after awhile. If you use two ads, adwords will rotate them automatically. Always try to beat the ctr with the new ad copy. Changes can be as simple as changing the word “easy” to “fast”.
• Look for related industry keywords, misspellings, competition keywords and urls of competition or anything that the surfer would type in to locate your subject. Overtures keyword tool is great for this. googles keyword tool is ok for this.
• You can have the number one spot at ANY TIME. But you’ll pay dearly for it. (just increase your max cpc substantially and you’ll see)
• google’s “Traffic guesstimator” is wrong 99% of the time, don’t use it.
• Always use broad match, phrase match AND exact match, you’ll be surprised at which ones work best.
• Always display the keyword in the title using {keyword:default phrase}
• Don’t put thousands of keywords auto generated by services like word tracker into the account all at once, your ads will never be shown because your daily budget cannot handle large amounts of keywords.
• Once you find your best producing keywords, increase the bid on them slightly to get more profits and protect their positions.
• Make your copy stand out and be relevant.
• Once your CTR is above 10% you will pay less per click for the same or better position. ( they reward you for relevant, high click through ads.)
• The best way to learn all this is by tinkering with the system, finding what works and what doesn’t.

Thanks to Steve at “steveblom’s blog” “marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org” for this little tidbit.

“Basically what they do is query Google a half a million times a day on all kinds of different keywords, and they grab the different advertisors that appear under those keywords and stick them all in a database. If you are in the top 8 they grab your ad as well, although their data isn’t that complete. It will take them longer to do enough queries to grab ALL the data (there are at least 200,000 advertisors on millions of keywords) but for only being active for a few days the volume of intelligence already gathered is enormous.

You can also search a keyword, and find the top 25 advertisors who also advertising on that term, then you can click on one of them to also see what other keywords that competitor is are advertising on.

-Steve”
http://marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org/node/19

Another great project for the portfolio. It’s an interactive brochure that I worked on last summer. It’s finally launched and is being done for a few clients. Enjoy.

www.2imi.com – IM:Brochure

Cool features:

• Build a Brochure: Allows you to make specific brochures from the brochure your looking at. It also allows you to send it to a friend. (Thanks Rebecca)
• Zoom: Allowing the user to zoom into smaller text pages or get better views for ease of legibility.
• Table of Contents: The ability to set up sections or a table of contents based on any number of criteria.
• Jump To: Allows the user to Jump To a specific page.
• PDF Link: As always a link to a downloadable version of the brochure is always a welcome addition to any online collateral.
• Order a Brochure: If they really like what they see, they can order it delivered to their front door.

Hey all, well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote anything….sorry…been swamped. I have a few new projects going on…which I’ll update here shorty.

AirportandHotels.com is one of those great SEO projects that makes you go….”so, that’s interesting” but then at the same time go….”what the F*ck!”

as stated before we are showing up amazingly high in yahoo…within the top 10 on most sites, but then…bam. Google can’t seem to fined us. Doubtful right. Probably.

I have been redoing a few things on the site and if they work, I’ll post my results. Keep it SEOing!

SEO is Decadent!

I’ ve been getting aggravated with the whole…Shoot, Look at it, Mark it, Digitize it, and Edit it function for creating multimedia presentations.

I could probably live with Shoot, Digitize, Edit!

Well, it’s starting to become a reality.

FireStore FS-3

Has anyone ever use one? Do they work well?

Another article from DV magazines January 2004 edition.

“Adding Value to DVD”

Here they are talking about the numerous enhancements that firms are making in adding value to the DVD market. Some of these added values are listed below and are now becoming more and more expected from the consumers when they purchase a DVD.

* Behind the Scenes Footage
* Deleted Scenes
* Information on particular topics brought up within the movie

These are the most common but are not the only things being done. Some firms are in the process of creating Games and other fantastic new takes on DVD production…Stay tuned…I think this is just the beginning of the Digital Disk revolution.

Who knows, we’ll probably be traveling to museums and taking college courses with built in exams that talk through our internal home network directly to the board of education and get graded as fast as you can take the class. What a future….

Notes from an article on Enterprise Encoding.

The Process of encoding digital video for enterprise solutions has 5 basic steps:

1. Capture
2. Encode
3. Assemble
4. QA – back to encode..if there is a problem.
5. Deliver

In this article the write talks about encoding 150 hours of digital footage in MPEG-4(Quicktime) format, instead of Sorenson 3 for quickness.

They used Cleaner 6 to encode the content into 2 streaming bit rates. 100kbps for low-end broadband and 300kbps for mid-broadband. 1 bit rate for DVD-ROM, at close to 9o0kbps.

Equipment used:
1 Tape Deck
Dual 1.3 Ghz Xserve
1/2 a 2.5 Terabyte Xserve RAID system for storage
5 workstations running Cleaner 6 for encoding over gigabit ethernet.

You should look for the article because the stats were staggering on how they figured out the amount of stations vs. whether to invest in SAN and how long it would take to digitize all the footage. Basically, it comes down to precise planning and testing…which I plan on trying to get more into. NOTE: Using a database to track each asset as it moved through the different stages.

http://www.clickz.com/experts/media/media_buy/article.php/3365411

This was an interesting article about the new Pay-Per-Call method being invoked by some internet portals. The search engine highlighted in this artice was http://www.ingenio.com.

My understanding of the article is to enable companies to get leads over the phone, without the need to have an online presence. This looks to be an interesting premise for the small and medium sized businesses finding it difficult to track and trace leads from online inquiries.

Design Rules

This is a great article by Fast Company

Fast Company interviewed some of best designers in many industries and this is what they had to say. What is great is that they use relational metaphors to explain how they feel about design.