I’m giving away some of my secrets here, but I’m of the old school that believes if you help enough other people succeed, you will succeed. So here goes….take a watch of this great video about some very basic things to help your site.

*** If you like this video, please leave a comment ***

There are some great take aways from this video.

1. This is great news if you are trying to break into a very competitive market.

By focusing some of your marketing efforts on building good content (targeted towards the long tail)  you have a chance to grab some of the 75% of the search volume that the “big boys” are ignoring.  As a side benefit, you eventually start to rank for those ultra competitive keywords as a side effect.

Your challenge :  Determine what those long tale phrases might be and get content on your site for those.

2.  Don’t base all your marketing decisions on existing high traffic keywords.

3. As search engines continue to integrate other multimedia sources in their organic search results, don’t forget about video.

Google recently released a tool that exposes some of the search data for YouTube.  This was part of the new YouTube paid advertising program, similar to their traditional AdWords program.  Since a lot of businesses are still very slow to adopt video marketing as a integral part of their marketing efforts, this could be an opportunity to rank (within YouTube) for long tail keywords.

Your Challenge : Make video marketing a strategic piece of your game plan and pay close attention to the video title/description (they are vitally important).

In order to take advantage of this long tail strategy, you need someone on your team or working for your team that understands how to address these challenges.   If you have questions about this strategy and how it applies to your business, contact me and let’s talk.

SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.   There are two types of search results that are returned, Organic (Free) and Paid.  SEO is primarily concerned with organic search results.  The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.  SEO is the combination of research, art, creative writing and detailed analysis.  When done properly, it places your website at a place where you can expect your business to improve.

A professional SEO consultant should first take the time to understand your business and help you define the most important keywords for your website.  Keywords are simply those words or phrases that you type into Google, or other search engines to find results.  For example, if you owned a dental practice in a town named Flowery Branch and SEO consultant should help you optimize your site for keywords such as “Flowery Branch Dentist” and NOT keywords such as “Dentist”.  The keyword “Dentist” is not the phrase that a potential client to this business would be typing in when they are looking for a new dentist to visit.  This is a very simple example, but hopefully it helps you to understand the importance of having a seasoned SEO consultant that knows how to do keyword research.

Search engines operate with algorithms and specialized software,  sometimes called “crawlers” or “spiders”–that read the source code and page content of websites to determine what they’re about.  Search engine spiders like websites that are easy to get around , contain relevant content and are linked to by other good sites, so it would seem like  a fairly simple equation.   In reality SEO can be quite complex and the search engines are constantly changing and new competition for your keywords can appear overnight.

I break down SEO into two categories, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.  On-Page SEO relates to the actual website content.  Off-Page SEO consists of building links back to your website and using other types of Internet Marketing to point the search engines back to your site and increase the authority of your site in the eyes of the search engines.

In summary, SEO is important because most people on the Internet find what they are looking for using search, whether it is a search portal like Google or Yahoo or the onsite search within YouTube or MySpace.  This means that making content findable by search is important to the success of that content.  SEO is important because if your web pages are not targeting the right keywords to draw the attention of the top search engines the likelihood of potential traffic to your site will never grow.  When your pages are SEO friendly some of the obvious advantages to expect can be, increased traffic, and more traffic means more sales and publicity.

We at Marketing Hunters are committed to providing the best SEO solutions to small businesses.  By doing this we help improve sales and profits and reduce advertising expenses.

Another good source of user data is eMarketer, and they also recently reported that U.S. online video viewers will grow to 188 million by the end of 2013 and more than half of the U.S. population will view videos online in the same year.

Now get this, in the month of July 2009, there were a total of over 21 Billion (Yes, the billion with a B) videos viewed around the world.  Wow !

They broke the videos down by categorizing them as either coming from Google, Viacom Digital or Microsoft sites.  Of those 3 sites, guess who took the TOP DOG share of the views?  Yep, you probably guessed it…. Google.  Google accounted for 42 percent of all videos viewed online and within that group, YouTube captured over 99% of that traffic.  As a whole, Google accounted for almost 9 Billion viewed
videos.

So if you think that video isn’t important, you might want to think again…. Before your competition decides to try it and starts grabbing customers away from your biz.

The good news is, YOU ARE NOT TOO LATE ! Now is the perfect time to jump on this bandwagon.  Other studies confirm the continued growth of online videos, including video’s viewed on mobile devices.  That is a whole other subject for later.  I’ll follow up with a post later where I’ll show you that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get a video posted that will help turn internet visitors into walk-in customers.