Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

SEO Is Not Just About Optimising Your Website For The Search Engines

Most people think that Search Engine Optimization is purely focused on getting YOUR website ranked highly on the search engines. Well, that may have been the case in the past but things have changed and these days you can actually SEO pages on other people's sites to help drive traffic to your site.

Chris Smith over at Natural Search Blog recently did a presentation at Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York on Image Search and he has made these available on his site. They certainly offer some great tips on how you can use sites like Flickr, and even Yahoo! Travel, to drive traffic to your site. In a previous article Chris discusses Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization and shows how he managed to drive traffic, and create buzz, from Flickr to his own site by optimising images using H1 tags, descriptions, tags and keyword links.

In a few of the eMarketing Workshops that I have delivered, those clients involved in tourism, sports and activity businesses have quickly recognised the potential power of using Flickr and similar sites to drive traffic to their sites.

Google Checkout Hits the UK

After some months of waiting, Google Checkout has finally arrived in the UK. And until 2008 Google has some special goodies for both buyers and sellers: buyers get £10 off each order over £30 and sellers benefit from credit and debit card payment processing on all transactions. I think it is quite clear what Google's objective is here!

With the growth of online credit card fraud, Google Checkout is trying to pitch itself as a safe haven for online shoppers. Google has also integrated Google Checkout into their AdWords programme, so that a little icon appears in your search listings.

Here are some of the companies that have already integrated Google Checkout into their online payment systems:

ebuyer
empiredirect.co.uk
3M

New Typepad Tool Allows you to Blog from Word

At the risk of sounding biased (this blog uses their software!), the folks at TypePad are constantly coming up with new widgets and improvements to their software tools which make blogging far easier for users. They always seem to be second-guessing, or should that read interpreting correctly, the needs of their customer base. This time they have come up with a way that you can blog directly from Word (2007) to your Typepad account. Here´s what their Everything TypePad site has to say:

The Word Blogging Tool – included in the new Microsoft Word as part of Microsoft Office 2007 – lets you publish to your blog from inside the familiar Word environment with a single click. TypePad is a default option in Microsoft Word, which makes it simple and straightforward; all you'll need is your username and password. Better yet, the HTML the tool writes to your blog is in a simple, blog-friendly format.

And for those who´ve experienced problems cutting and pasting from Word:

If you’ve ever found yourselves cleaning up complex HTML after copying and pasting from Word, you’ll be sure to appreciate this!

It´s for reasons such as this that Typepad is my preferred blogging tool for my business blogging workshops.

Video's Reach Extends

The other day I was adding some videos to my Amazon DVD Rental List when I came across a YouTube-style video player embedded on the page. The video was a trailer clip for the blockbuster film 300- Amazon was allowing you to pre-order the DVD already. I'm not sure how they have been doing this but it was the first time I had seen it on Amazon's own site.

It got me thinking that embedded video clips will become par for the course for a wide range of businesses in a short period of time. Got a new product launch - create a clip; a new book release - add the book signing clip; watched your team win football - watch the post-match interview; the list is endless. I can honestly see that videocasting will become mainstream within the next year and it will be done by companies from large multinationals down to small businesses operating in the sticks.

Even publishers, like the Wall Street Journal, are now making it easy for bloggers to add content from the newspaper to their blog - in this case you don't even have to log in directly to your blog to post. And companies like Brighcove are allowing you to create your own video channels, where you can embed video clips on your own site or use clips from third party suppliers. There certainly is a video revolution afoot!