This video, tips on participating in social networking,  was very interesting.

Maybe it’s the celebrity culture… but if we wanted to, we could hold auditions every day this week and get dozens of new faces each day (and may I add a good few ex-big brother housemates); but finding someone who can actually present is a real challenge.

Not only that; they need to look good to. It’s a visual business we work in and looks are essential to sell this product.

Getting a perfect mix of presenting and looks is the key, and everyone on the Addpeople website made it online because I feel they deliver on both. There are a lot of web presenter sites out there now and most overload you with endless pictures and 5 second demos of average people trying to sell your product.

There is true skill needed to present a product and unfortunately there’s a lot of people out there that haven’t got the experience or natural skill to work the camera.

You should be confident the presenter you choose has the enthusiasm needed to make people say ‘wow’.

So if you’re interested in getting a web presenter – be careful who you choose to sell the product – it’ll make all the difference.

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

So, how can you become one of the cool kids?  As in life, you do it by being interesting. Sites that generate great content that others want to link to (sometimes referred to as “link bait”) have it easy. It’s part of what we at ItsColdOutside are trying to do with our articles – including the post that you are presently reading. Content needs to be fresh, informative and relevant. It’s not an easy thing to do at all, especially for small sites that may only have a couple of people who are capable of writing content. You may not consider yourself to be much of a writer (I certainly don’t today, as I am struggling with this post!), but if you have an online business you’re an expert in something. If you aren’t, that may point out other problems in your business. Write about what you know. If you’re excited about it, I guarantee you that others will get excited about it as well. Writing about your business, or your products, provides extra information for your customers – and the subject will be relevant to your business, and to the search terms that you’re trying to rank for.

Another trait popular people, or popular sites have is the ability to network. Make the “friends” that you would like to have – approach those sites that you admire and ask for a link. Like the guy who asks a hundred women out on the off-chance that one will say yes, what do you have to lose?  You will learn as much from your rejections as you will from your acceptances. Does your site not relate well enough to the focus of their site? Is your content not worth linking to? That is a fixable problem. You can ask for reviews of one of your products, or offer a trusted site the opportunity to showcase a special deal for their readers only.

Like anything, it takes work. As I said, with the launch of our new site, and our first ever articles, we’re doing the same thing here. It takes time, and patience, and networking…and a lot of hard work.

How big is the clip going to be? How quickly will it stream on a low connection? Will that background music make me pull my hair out after 300 plays… but one question I answered quickly enough is whether or not we needed HD.

HD, or to put it more simply, at least 720p, is bascially a definition for how many pixels you can squeeze on your screen, or monitor,  in any clip. You’ll notice websites like YouTube offering HD uploading quite commonly now.

Internet browsing is changing for the masses; people are expecting a more IPTV service from their browsing now; sound and video as well as blogs and posts. That’s one of the principal selling points of Addpeople – adding a web presenter to your site gives it an instant Wow Factor.

But its the quality that seals the deal; which is why we film in no lower than 1024i – guaranteeing our clips will be crisp, high quality and blurless  (If blurless is even a word). Don’t even get me started on Tape over solid state, methods of chromakey and flash embedding…actually maybe I’ll just start that in another post.

My next trick is what to do with your 1080 pixels – compress them. That’s right; squash it down into a smaller space – the footage we film is still high quality, just within a smaller aspect ratio. So you are getting HD, just on a smaller scale.

So for the best quality online – film high and compress into the size you need. We film in HD and resize to 400 pixels, giving the viewer high quality on low bandwidth. Don’t get me wrong – size matters – but try telling that to the guy on a 0.5mb connection in south wales, who’s still waiting to watch your fullscreen masterpiece!

D

There are many advantages to the new interface such as being able to tab along ad groups, keywords etc and more however there are some things that lead to question how ‘new’ the ‘new’ interface is. E.g. click on tools and them more tools and nothing has changed. Some of it seems strangely the same showing not much has really changed.

If you use Adwords editor I suppose not much will change either as you can still make most changes through the editor. It also shows google is always trying new things and pushing forward.

This recent article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8195739.stm

shows that Google is responding to the developments at Yahoo, always making sure it stays ahead.

Although I have seen the new interface and analytics crash a lot more in recent times I am sure once the bugs are sorted out managing accounts will become much easier and better.

The article is a very good, very simple and understandable blueprint of optimising a page. If you’re an ItsColdOutside customer, you’ve probably received a site analysis that follows these exact same points. These are the things that I look at (not in this particular order):

1. Site code. Are there any problems which will affect optimisation or indexing? Easy code fixes? Big problems such as frames or an all-Flash site? No-nos such as hidden text? Tons of css formatting or javascipt that can be moved out into stylesheets and includes?

2. Age of Domain. This lets us know what we might be dealing with – new domains will take some time to see the hoped-for results.

3. XML Sitemap. This helps, especially on sites with javascript/image-based navigation. Unless you have a one-page site, it’s always worth doing a sitemap, and it can help pinpoint problems such as duplicate content.

4. Meta Title. We will have a list of key phrases that we’re working on for your site. The two or three most important keywords will go in the title, followed by the business name. Keyword One | Keyword Two | Business Name.

5. Meta Description. This is a marketing/conversion area, so it will contain a sentence or two that really sells your business.

6. Keywords. It’s debatable how much impact these will have on search, but for me it forms a map of what we’re optimising for on the page. If you don’t mind your competitors seeing your keywords, it’s worth doing.

7. H1 Title. As said in the linked article, it’s debatable how much impact this still has for search, but it’s worth doing. It has semantic value (as long as you only have one), and it reinforces to your customers who have come in on that keyword that they have, indeed, found what they were looking for – decreasing bounce rate and increasing conversion.

8. Page Content. The general rule was always at least 240 words or so of text for optimisation – you may have more. Use of keyword text links in copy is important, linking into relevant areas – but don’t overdo it. It’s very easy to write spammy copy.

9. SEO-Friendly URLs. If you can do it, great – it depends on the limitations of the CMS that you may be using. I always recommend it, but implementation on an established site can be difficult.

10. Lastly, Alt Text on Images. Keyword rich alt text, which should help accessibility as well. Any graphics should relate to the content on the page, which should closely relate to the keywords that you’re optimising for – or it doesn’t belong there!

Bookmark the above article and refer back to it. It will help you understand why optimisation changes are being made on your site, and as you go forward, creating and modifying content, you’ll understand how to make the right choices as you do so.

You know that it will take time to see your site bloom.

Optimising a site is very much like that. After you start, you may have a te

mporary drop in results before things start growing again…the ground looks bare, and what you have planted takes time to grow to visibility.  You watch for the first positive signs, nuturing them and refining your strategy. And you wait.

It takes patience, and trust that you will see the fruits of your labour. To return to our garden analogy, a strategy that combines PPC and search optimisation are a bit like buying vegetables and fruit at the store (pay per click) for immediate consumption while you wait to reap the results of your work (search optimisation). As your organic results improve (gosh, the gardening analogies are endless!), you can spend less on pay per click.

Google AdWorks and other pay per click strategies will have an immediate return on your investment – you get what you pay for, and with expert advice you will get a good result from the money that you spend. Organic search, on the other hand, can take months to see results. I would say a minimum of two months to see any solid changes, and those changes will extend for another two or four months after that. Like gardening, your work is never done; you’ll refine and study your web analytics and change strategy based upon those results.

Here’s wishing you all green thumbs and great organic search results…and plenty of patience.  :)

Below are a list of sites that I think can help anyone who is trying to make a success of an online business. You may not be doing the work yourself, but you should have a basic understanding of what should be done, and why, in order to make educated decisions about your site and your business.

Marketing and Branding

Seth Godin
Intelligent, entertaining blog by the author of a number of well-respected marketing and business books.

Search Optimisation

Essential for the owner of any online business owner.

SEOmoz
Not only great (and readable!) articles on search optimisation, but also free tools for your site, a thriving community, and more.

SEOmoz also runs a very understandable, helpful series of videos every week called Whiteboard Friday. These are worth watching – ten minutes a week can give you a crash course in how to get yourself found on the web.

Small/Home Businesses

IttyBiz
This is one of my favourites. Be warned, however – this is not a blog for people who are offended by bad language. Down to earth advice for real people.

General Web Information

A List Apart
A wealth of information about your website: design, copywriting, development, and much more.

Tech News

Technorati
Latest from the blogosphere.

CNET News

The Register
Biting the hand that feeds IT…

The Google traffic estimator can help you identify potential prices for positions you wish to attain. In general positions 2-5 are the ones to go for. Position 1 often gets clicked on whoever is there as it is the top thing on the screen and so generates a great click through rate but not necessarily the best click quality.

If the camapign is set up perfectly with conversion tracking and analytics then bidding isn’t too difficult.

Start with a blanket bid across all keywords and ad groups unless you want to weight more importance to certain products or services. Remember, in targeted ad groups all keywords should have equal value to begin with as they target the same theme.

Once the account is up and running adjust the bids according to conversions (no or expensive conversions = lower the bids on the keywords, lots of conversions, low cost per conversion = up the bids). Look into analytics – low bounce rate, high time on site, high number of pages vistited – up the bids. If it is the opposite – high bounce rate, not much time on site, low pages per visit – lower the bids.

It is common sense in the main and the statistics are there. You want to generate the best traffic to your site so get better positions on the better performing keywords. Remember not to use a hunch, or I know best approach – use the data in front of you. The one thing to remember with bid changes is always make them for a reason and then track what influence the changes have made – give it a week at least for the changes to show result. Don’t rush into changes on a daily basis or you won’t have given the camapign the time to show the results.