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Getting to the top of web search results on Google can pay off big for your business. One way to boost your business  is to attract online searchers seeking a service you don’t even offer.

Begin by researching which keywords potential customers use in online searches. Suppose your company only replaces parts  for products rather than doing repairs, but most of the people are searching for the keyword “repair” of those products. There maybe a potential to turn people searching for “repair” into customers. Prospects will find your website only if it uses the same terminology as they do and  testing hundreds of propositions about what will land a site a top Google ranking for a given search term.

As a example, take two important keywords “auto shop” and auto repair shop” as well as “muffler repair”. The tactics to use include building more links with sites run by “friendlies”, such as suppliers and distributors with whom you do business; adding relevant content to the home page, and improving linking structure among pages on the site.

Customer’s Lingo: It’s highly likely your prospects use at least some search terms you don’t use internally. To discover the terms your potential clients use,  brainstorm possibilities in-house and phone clients to ask how they search for what you sell. Then select “Get keyword ideas” at Google.com/adwords and enter a search string. You will see plenty of variations, with the latest monthly search totals for each one.

A Page for Each Popular Keyword: After identifying commonly used keywords, pick the most widely used ones relevant to what you sell, look for ones with commercial intent. If someone searches for “oil” ,it is too generic. But if they search for “oil removal” , there is commercial intent behind it. Create a landing page with rich content about the most popular keyword; then the second-most popular and so on.

Google’s Trust: search engine ranks pages more highly if it trusts them to deliver content relevant to users’ searches. It trusts a given page more as the page ages, provided it has links with other sites that Google’s algorithms suggest have relevant related content. By altering a page’s URL or even just changing the suffix  from ‘html’ to ‘php’, that becomes a new page, which has no age, no links and no trust. Setup a “301 redirect” for every renamed page.

Google’s Trust for the Home Page: Google trusts home pages more than other pages because they tend to have most links. How do you maximize your home page advantage by featuring lots of relevant content without compromising speed. You should run only the first few lines of each article on your home page with a “Read more”  button and the rest of the article on another page. Google indexes the entite content as if it was on the home page.

Location: Customers for a wide array of goods and services prefer to buy from a company with a nearby location. For any category in which Google figures searches are likely to care about where a seller is, it first uses the searcher’s URL to determine his location. Then a Google map is displayed on the top right of the first page of the search results showing the closest businesses matching his keywords even if he omits a location. Businesses should claim their Google Places listing.

Power of Google Places: Buy  a small Yellow Pages display ad, Google uses Yellow Pages listings as the basis  for Places and trusts them to confirm that you run  a real business. You will rank well only if you format your firm’s contact information identically in  Places and in the Yellow Pages. Also use all five categories for listing your offerings. You can also ask a few non-competing nearby businesses to add a page to their sites recommending your firm, in return for reciprocating. Google sees such “local citations”  as confirmation that a company has  a good local reputation.

Google Places and Organic Searches: Google now combines the ranking points from both so that each type of search affects the other. For any company where geography matters, it’s now essential to optimize your ranking for both.

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A PDF is a Portable Document File created by Adobe Systems. It’s simply a file that you can create in one application that contains text, images, drawings, and more.

Most people like to upload documents (especially important content-rich documents like press releases, articles, interviews, transcripts, and similar) in PDF format to their website for its universal access, ability to maintain document
integrity either viewed onscreen or printed, and security features (files can be protected by making them read-only, so readers can’t add to, change, or cut, copy, or paste material from them).

There’s a misconception out there that search engines don’t read (index) PDFs. They do. Of course, HTML pages are faster to index than a PDF, but PDFs can be indexed. The trick is to know how to set up the PDF to make sure you get maximum pick-up by the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for PDF Files

(1)If you have a large PDF file, consider breaking it into smaller relevant groups, sections, chapters, and so on. Tag these sections accordingly with accurate, relevant keywords. This works not only for human readers, but also for search engines, it takes longer to spider a PDF than HTML.

(2)Make sure each PDF file is text based and has the correct document properties set up. When the search engines index (or spider) a PDF, they extrapolate the text from the information fields within the PDF. That means the metadata and keywords you choose for these fields are critical. The important fields are the author, document title, description,
file size, and modification date.

(3) Remember to tag the PDF and use anchor text and links within the file. The same SEO best practices for websites apply to PDFs. In addition, make sure your links aren’t buried deep within the PDF file. Have them at the root level, easy for search engines to find.

(4) Check the PDF file format version number, and make sure search engines can read it. Typically, you want to use Acrobat 5/Adobe XMP (PDF V. 1.4 or 1.5).

(5) Finally, make sure the reading order in your PDF is logical and flows. Again, this is user-friendly for humans and search engines. However, from a search engine perspective, your reading order gives you an idea of what will be displayed in organic search results. To do this, first open your PDF and select Advanced, Accessibility, Add Tags to Document. Then select Advanced, Accessibility, Touch Up Reading Order. This displays the reading order of the PDF.

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Stores use 2-D bar codes on goods, it can transform a small store into a big showroom. The ability of consumers to comparison shop and get more information while in stores is making 2D bar codes popular.

Now smartphones that can access web based content by scanning 2-D bar codes. While there are several 2-D bar code formats, the most commonly used are Quick Response Codes (QR) and Microsoft Tag.  Users are most likely to scan QR codes found in newspapers and magazines and on product packaging, and they scan while at home or in a store. Smartphones with built-in cameras that makes it a snap for the consumer to access web-based content from a poster,
product package, even the side of a building: Just click to open a free scanning app, point the phone at the code, and the web content appears on the phone’s screen.

Codes in magazine ads this year that leads to additional  product information and videos on  m-commerce site, where
readers could click to buy products. Store signs and banners with 2-D bar codes lead to videos promoting select products.

There is no cost to consumers to scan 2-D bar codes; several free scanning apps are available in all the major app stores. But the challenge is to educate shoppers about how and why they should use those apps to scan 2-D codes. Contests create a lot of buzz and engagement. Scan the Tag at the entry for a chance to win a $100 shopping card. That builds
awareness immediately and then when they see the Tags throughout the store they’ll have the reader and they will be able to engage.

Some stores place QR codes on its micro-irrigation product packages, leading consumers in stores to mobile-optimized pages of videos, instruction manuals, tips and ways to contact the company. It doesn’t take any chances when it comes to store shoppers and 2-D codes. Accompanying its codes is a patch of text that informs them on what to do and how to do it.

Those with no stores can also reap QR code rewards. Instead,  place QR codes on signs and other materials at various events to promote its mobile app, which has the RedLaser scanner built in. The codes lead to mobile web content
about the events, GPS-based maps for the events, and links to download the app if they’re not already using it. The app serves as a guide for each event, giving consumers extensive information.

How to Generate a QR Code: Generating a QR code might just be the easiest thing to do in e-commerce or m-commerce.

Step 1: Google “QR code generators.”

Step 2: Pick one.

Step 3: Enter a URL into the appropriate window on the site.

Step 4: Hit generate.

Step 5: Download the image of the QR code to your computer.

Many QR code generators are run by companies that provide free basic analytics. These companies often also offer paid services to help merchants and brands run campaigns and receive deeper analytics. And there are mobile marketing firms that don’t offer code generators but do offer 2-D bar code marketing services.

Reader apps scan a code by reading the contrast between light and dark within the square.  It is ideal to print codes between two inches and three inches square. Some codes can be read at 3/8 inch, but decreasing or increasing the size too much can lead to increased scanning error rates. However, 2-D bar codes will work at just about any size—even
projected on the side of a building.

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Inbound Links from Other Sites can help a website move up in natural search rankings. But if the search engines conclude that your website is  stockpiling links solely to move up in search results, your website may be penalized and see the  site virtually disappear from search engine pages.

Links had evidently been purchased solely to enhance search engine rankings, in violation of Google’s rule against buying links in order to manipulate search results. Google typically gives more credit to links from educational sites with .edu domains because they are deemed to be more objective than commercial sites.

Only Google’s own Webspam team knows exactly what search engine optimization tactics raise red flags, but certain SEO practices are known to be risky.

Manipulated anchor text in inbound links: Search engines can easily identify inbound links that contain manipulated anchor text, the highlighted word or phrase in web content that someone clicks to get more information. A
classic example of this violation occurs after you identify a specific keyword phrase or group of phrases that command high search volume, and then you attempt to own these phrases by purchasing many identical links that use the exact words in the targeted phrases.

When search engines see unnatural repetition of precise keywords within the text of these links, originating from hundreds or thousands of sites, they may deem this to be an indicator of manipulated anchor text.

Links from irrelevant sites: Relevance is one of the most important aspects of any link portfolio. Just as search engines evaluate each site in terms of its relevance to particular search terms, so, too, do they evaluate sites linking to that website. If the linking sites tend to be relevant to the website and the products it sells, this provides a greater boost than links from irrelevant sites.

However, garnering many links from sites that have little or nothing to do with your site content not only provides little benefit, it can be seen by search engines as an indication of unsavory SEO practices and lead to penalties.

Links from unrelated foreign sites: Links from sites based in countries where a you do not do business can also raise a red flag. If you do not sell in Russia and China, Google may look askance at links from sites using the domains .ru
(Russia) and .cn (China). Though these links can occur naturally, and are not under a retailer’s control, the rapid acquisition of many such links may suggest intentional link manipulation and trigger penalties.

Link Spam: Each inbound link your website can be evaluated for the contextual relevance of the linking source page. But if that source page also links to a number of other unrelated sites—most likely taking payment for that link spam—it can raise a red flag and get labeled by search engines as an undesirable inbound link for your site.

Links from bad neighborhoods: your site can be evaluated for links from sites with low PageRank scores and or questionable incoming link portfolios. Google prefer sites to avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

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Response time for web pages is almost exactly correlated to page weight, and images tend to account for half of the size of typical web pages. Most importantly, images are an easy place to improve performance without removing features. The reduction in size often results from removing metadata, better compression of color or pixel information, or in the case of PNG removing chunks that are not necessary for the Web. If you don’t optimize images, you send extra data over the wire that adds nothing to the user experience.

Image optimization is simpler when it is broken down into two steps,

1. Optimizing images begins with a qualitative decision about the number of colors, resolution, or accuracy required for a given image. These changes are lossy optimizations that result in an overall loss of quality. The image might have fewer
colors, or in the case of the JPEG format, less detailed encoding. Although 60% to 70% quality is the accepted standard for JPEG, some images or contexts may require more or less quality. For instance, glossy images of celebrities may require a larger file size than autogenerated charts or tiny thumbnails. These decisions are creative decisions and should be made by the designer, using tools such as the Save for the Web feature in Photoshop. The designer may also choose to do “spatial” or “zonal” compression—for example, choosing 80% quality for the face and only 30% quality for the night background.

2. Once the quality choice has been made, use nonlossy compression to squeak the last bytes out of the image. Unlike the preceding step, this one begs for an engineering solution. Doing the same work by hand would be much more time-consuming. In fact, fantastic open source tools exist for optimizing images. You can write a script that goes over all of your image files, determines the type of each, and runs a utility to optimize the file.

Image Formats: The first step in producing optimal images is to understand the features of each of the three formats used on the Web today—JPEG, PNG, and GIF—and choosing the right one for each specific case.

Both the image format you use and the ways to optimize it depend on which of the following categories the image falls into:

Graphics: Examples of graphics are logos, diagrams, graphs, most cartoons, and icons. These images usually contain continuous lines or other sharp transitions in color. The number of distinct colors in a graphic is relatively small.

Photos: Photos usually have millions of colors and contain smooth color transitions and gradients. Imagine, for example, a picture of a sunset you take with your camera. An image of a painting  is also closer to a photo than a graphic.

In terms of formats, GIFs are often used for graphics, whereas JPEG is the preferred format for photos. PNG comes in two kinds, of which palette PNG is even better suited for graphics than GIF.

Pixels and RGB: Images consist of pixels, where a pixel is the smallest piece of image information. Different color models can be used to describe a pixel, but the RGB color model is the one usually used for computer graphics. In the RGB color model, a pixel is described based on the amount of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) it contains. R, G, and B are called components (a.k.a. channels), and the intensity of each component has a value from 0 to 255. The hexadecimal representation of the channel values, often used in HTML and CSS, ranges from 00 to FF. Mixing different intensities of the three channels gives you different colors. For example:
• Red is rgb(255, 0, 0) or hex #FF0000.
• Blue is rgb(0, 0, 255) or hex #0000FF                                                                                                                                                                   . • A shade of gray will likely have equal parts of each color; for example, rgb(238,238, 238) or hex #EEEEEE.

Truecolour versus palette image formats: Using the RGB color model, how many distinct colors can you represent in a graphic? The answer is more than 16 million: 255 * 255 * 255 (or 224) gives you 16,777,216 combinations. Image formats that can represent this many colors are called truecolour image formats; examples are JPEG and the truecolour type of PNG. To save space when storing the image information in a file, one technique is to create a list of all the unique colors found in the image. The list of colors is called a palette (also called an index). Having the list of colors, you can represent the image by keeping track of which palette entry corresponds to each pixel.

The palette can contain any RGB value, but the most common palette image formats—GIF and PNG8—limit the number of palette entries to 256. This doesn’t mean you can pick from only 256 predefined colors. On the contrary, any of the 16+ million colours are up for grabs, but you can only have up to 256 of them in a single image.

Transparency and alpha channel (RGBA): RGBA is not a distinct colour model, but more of an extension to RGB. The extra component A represents alpha transparency and also has values from 0 to 255, although different programs and libraries define it as a percentage from 0% to 100% or values from 0 to 127. The alpha channel describes how much you can see through the image pixel.

Let’s say you have a web page that has a background pattern and a blue image on top of it. If a pixel in the image has zero alpha transparency, the background behind the image will not be visible. If the alpha transparency value is the maximum 100%, the pixel will not be visible at all and the background will “shine through.” A medium value of, say, 50% will let you see both the background and the pixel.

Interlacing: When a large image downloads over a slow Internet connection, it is drawn as it arrives, one row at a time from top to bottom, so it grows down slowly. To improve the user experience, some image formats support interlacing, in which successive samples of the image are shown. Interlacing lets the user see a rough version of the image while waiting for the details, giving the psychological effect of eliminating the feeling that the page is delayed.

Let’s see how you can optimize your images.

Crushing PNGs: PNGs store image information in “chunks.” This makes the format extensible because you can add more functionality to it using custom chunks, and programs that do not understand your new extensions can safely ignore them. But most of the chunks are not needed for web display, and you can safely remove them. An additional benefit is that stripping the so-called gamma chunk actually improves the cross-browser visual results, because each browser treats gamma corrections slightly differently.

Pngcrush
Our favorite tool for PNG optimization is pngcrush. You can run it like this:
pngcrush -rem alla -brute -reduce src.png dest.png
Let’s take a look at the options:
-rem alla
Removes all chunks except the one controlling transparency (alpha).
-brute
Tries more than 100 different methods for optimization in addition to the default 10. It’s slower and most of the time doesn’t improve much. But if you’re doing this process offline, you can afford the one or two more seconds this option takes, in case it finds a way to cut the image size further. Remove this option in performance sensitive scenarios.
-reduce
Tries to reduce the number of colors in the palette, if possible.
src.png
The source image.
dest.png
The destination (result) image.

Other Tools:

PNGOUT  Binary-only, Windows, closed source
OptiPNG Cross-platform, open source, command-line interface
PngOptimizer Windows, open source, GUI and command-line interfaces

Stripping JPEG Metadata: JPEG files contain metadata such as the following:
• Comments
• Application-specific (e.g., Photoshop) internal information
• EXIF information such as camera make and model, the date the photo was taken, the geolocation of the photo, thumbnails, or even audio This metadata is not used for image display and can safely be removed. Metadata handling,
luckily, is one of the lossless JPEG operations, so you can remove the unneeded parts of the file without losing visual quality.

A tool called jpegtran does the transformation on the command line:
jpegtran -copy none -optimize src.jpg > dest.jpg
The options in this example are:
-copy none
Instructs that no meta information should be carried over
-optimize
Causes jpegtran to optimize the Huffman tables used for compression
src.jpg
Your image before optimization
dest.jpg
The optimized file

Converting GIF to PNG: The PNG8 format supports everything that GIF does, so converting a GIF to PNG8 should result in no visible changes. You can use ImageMagick to do the conversion from the command line as simply as:
convert source.gif destination.png

You can also force the PNG8 format by using:
convert source.gif PNG8:destination.png

This is probably not necessary, since GIFs are likely to be converted to PNG8 anyway. ImageMagick picks the appropriate format based on the number of colors. Once you’ve converted the GIF to PNG, don’t forget to crush the PNG result.

Optimizing GIF Animations: Now that all your single-image GIFs are PNGs, your PNGs are crushed, and your JPEGs
are optimized, the last things left to optimize are the GIF animations. One tool that can help you is Gifsicle. Since the animations consist of frames and some parts of the image don’t change from one frame to another, Gifsicle optimizes animations by removing the duplicate pixel information from successive frames.

The way to run it is:
gifsicle -O2 src.gif > dest.gif

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There are different ways for you to promote your videos. You could use blogs, email blasts and even word of mouth.  You should begin promotion of videos on YouTube.

Post regularly: It is important to post regulary, especially once you have a subscriber base. Your subscribers are eagerly awaiting your next video. If you fail to post new work, your subscribers will forget about you and move o to more regular contributors. The key is to create videos quickly and staying in touch with the community.

Share Option: Your videos will get good exposure on YouTube for a brief time. When viewers click on a category link they can zero in on videos of interest by clicking on the hyperlinks across the top, which include Featured, Rising Videos, and Most Discussed. If they click the down arrow next to the more link, however, they can display Recent Videos.

The best tools to promote your video on YouTube is the Share link.  Click that, and one of the options you’ll get is to “send this video.” You can fill in an e-mail address in the box, or just highlight All Contacts or Friends, and YouTube will send it to the people on those lists. You become friends with other YouTubers, by the way, when they’ve accepted your invitation to do so. You send those invitations from your Channel page. And contacts consist of the list of people you’ve
added to your address book.

Comments: When you upload your video, you can allow this feature. Viewers can comment on your video, and begin a dialogue and suggests how popular your video is. Comments can work against you as easily as they can work for you. You need to watch the comments posted for your video. Keep a lookout for unacceptable comments such as spam pointing people to another video or site, comments riddled with typos and curse words or something completely off target.

Response Videos: This is a YouTube feature that lets your viewers respond to you video not through textual comments but in video form. Videos that have a lot of response videos are usually popular and provocative. But response videos work the other way, too. Post your own videos as video responses to gain additional exposure. Just be sure to post them where they will be relevant.

Related Videos:  If a thumbnail of your video happens to appear as a related video next to lots of other videos, its getting more views. This happens if your video covers the same territory as other videos. It then appears to the right of those
videos under the headline Related Videos. But YouTube makes it clear that you have no control over when your video appears as a Related Video. Obviously, your video’s topic, title, tags, and description help determine what other videos are related to it.

Subscribers: On YouTube your subscriber base is one big fan club, a club you want to build and cultivate. There are two steps to serving your fan club: building a subscriber list and then communicating with that list. The people who comment on your videos are a great source of potential subscribers. Another way to get subscribers is to just ask for them: encourage people to become subscribers to your channel right on your Channel page. Its the quality of your videos that builds your subscriber base more than anything.

Once you have a subscriber base, reaching out to them through tools like Twitter and addressing them on your MySpace and Facebook pages helps keep them connected.

YouTube Home Page:  If you can make it to there, your video can make it anywhere.  It helps to have lots of subscribers or views. Once your video appears there, you will get a lot of publicity.

YouTube Honours: YouTube automatically tracks statistics for all the videos on the site. If any of yours are standouts, they will receive “honors” in categories such as viewings, ratings, how much they’re discussed, and so on. Your overall channel can also receive honors related to the number of subscribers you have. Any of these honors will show up on your Channel page.

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People are looking for services and content that match the immediacy and personal nature of mobile – online shopping, up-to-date sports news, movie listings, dating sites, to name a few – they are browsing the internet but on a mobile phone. The problem is that many of the most trafficked PC websites don’t work well on leading mobile phones. Brands are not adapting fast enough to match mobile browsing trends and are failing to present mobile-friendly versions of their sites.

One of the reasons for this is that when brands analyse their traffic, they use web analytics tools that aren’t optimized for mobile, meaning that they miss the mobile-originated traffic that comes to their PC sites. Many popular web analytics tools available today, such as Google Analytics, rely on JavaScript tags for data collection. But tracking this way will not work on the majority of mobile devices because only the latest handsets support JavaScript. So, while this method detects smart phones such as BlackBerry, Google Android, iPhone for example, it will miss around 80% of mobile traffic.

Other web analytics tools depend on cookies, but although most modern handsets support cookies, there are still issues with reliability, both on the device and as part of the internet connection, where transcoders and operator gateways can
block their use. This result in a high percentage of the mobile traffic not being identified correctly –especially repeat visits.

As well as the differences in tracking technologies that work, the whole mobile web infrastructure is more complex than the PC web. Mobile has many hundreds of devices, each with multiple versions of firmware, some specified by the operators. Each can have multiple browsers, some of which are totally hosted on the handset, while others use dedicated servers to connect to the internet. Wi-Fi is also a major factor today, as smart phone sales continue to soar and handsets
automatically select Wi-Fi as their preferred connection.

It is crucial to use a mobile specific analytics tool to accurately analyse mobile traffic. If you are planning to integrate mobile as part of your overall marketing strategy, implementing mobile analytics right from the start is key.

By implementing mobile analytics during the design of your mobile site or mobile campaign development, you will have a clear picture of how your customers interact with your mobile site or ad campaign.

Up until recently mobile analytics provided general data to marketers, such as tracking the number of people who visited a mobile site, clicked on a text ad (CPC) or sponsored link (CPM), but this legacy metrics only offered marketers a general view about the performance of a mobile site or campaign. Nowadays, good customer engagement is the real key indicator of the success of a mobile marketing strategy and this is why it’s becoming even more essential for marketers to know what happens after the “click”. Here is some of the key information you can measure with a mobile specific analytics tool:

Traditional data

-Monitor your visitors in real-time, by the hour.
-Track the most popular pages.                                                                                                                                                                                -Track engagement levels – entry/exit points, bounce rates & number of pages viewed.
-Understand visitor paths & behaviour
- Optimise your mobile site

Mobile Data

-Mobile device
-Operator
-Country / location

In mobile analytics terms customer engagement is measured by the number of conversions that happen, for example as a result of an ad campaign – how many customers or prospects take an action, buy something, or sign up to a service on the site. In all cases it is vital that marketers identify and record the visiting customer or prospect – not only across the current single visit but across the entire lifetime of the relationship.

To be able to do this, it is crucial that marketers use mobile-specific analytics, which provide a unique user ID for each visitor, rather than simply counting page views or ad clicks. One which clearly shows unique visitor count in real-time,
rather than pre-cached information. This will allow them to identify new and repeat visitors, and see what the decision points are across the site or ad campaign so that they can better understand their customers’ behaviour. Only this way can they fine tune their mobile proposition, mobile ad placement and the complete visitor experience, but more
importantly build customer engagement and maximize ROI.

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Location-based services all have one thing in common: They create semantic information around the concept of a place. Semantic information means that the way the data is expressed is via a set of common attributes. A place contains a name, address, description, category, and phone number. Some of that data — such as the category — is even standardized, which means that you have only a finite number of values to choose from.

Categorizing Location-Based Services:

Mobile: Mobile location-based services give you the ability to reach just about anybody with a mobile phone in the place that they are at the time that they need the information. You may assume that all location based services are mobile because of the strong association of location and global positioning systems and the fact that all mobile phones have
GPS. Companies build applications to run on smartphones— such as Apple’s iPhone, the HTC Incredible that runs Google’s popular Android operating system, and many others.

Mobile applications can also be accessed via the (mobile) web. While many companies favor building applications that are delivered via stores like iTunes, Android Market, Blackberry’s App World, and many more, developers can also deliver applications via the mobile web and SMS (text messaging) so that feature phones can also get some of the benefits.

Check-in: One of the most common application types is the check-in. A check-in is the ability to announce “I am here.” The idea is simple, but the barriers to entry are high, though, as checking in to a location isn’t very useful on its own. The check-in can deliver a lot of highly standard data for you to analyze: the person, place, and time.

Knowing that a person checked in to a place allows you to begin to build profiles of users who check in to your business. Those profiles can tell a story about who checks in and why they check in.

Social: What good is a check-in if nobody knows? Social applications allow users to maintain a list of trusted friends that they can share the information with. Location-based applications allow users to share check-ins with a wide range of entities, including friends, colleagues, business associates, and even strangers. Some services allow a user to share this information through other social applications, too. In other words, a location-based application — such as foursquare — might plug into a larger network like Twitter or Facebook.

Discovery: When you talk about location, you have to talk about discovery. Accidental discovery, which is one of the driving forces behind the popularity of location-based services. Location-based services can document the secrets of your business through content attached to places in the form of pictures, recommendations, and even video.

Helping others discover businesses, places, products, and services that they might enjoy — isn’t limited to the application users. You can add tips in places to help customers unlock the secrets of your business. Some platforms offer users the ability to declare that they saw your tip and tried your recommendation.

Engagement: Some location-based services allow you to have a conversation. Engagement is a one-to-one, more personal sort of conversation. If you can carry on a dialogue or group conversation, this is engagement. Think of Twitter and Facebook as the ultimate platforms for engagement.

Ambient: Ambient networks use the device’s environment to do interesting things like building a social graph without the input of the user. These networks use attributes like place, time, and even the noise in the room to see who is together and then decide who the user’s friends are. To use this technology, encourage loyal customers to take pictures that represent your brand. Those customers are then lumped into the social graph of early adopters, and they can then interact with other early adopters and encourage others to join the fun.

Color is an ambient social network. Other ambient networks allow users to interact with each other based on proximity. They use chat rooms and text messaging to form temporary networks of people in a particular place.

Intent: Sometimes you know what you’re going to do and you want to let people know. Whether it’s going to an event or having a coffee, you might want to let people know so that you can connect with them or solicit their opinions about what you should do. People like recommendations and advice from people they trust. They also like to know who’s going to be at an event so that they can decide not only how they’ll spend their time, but with whom.

Platforms: Platforms allow you to take a set of functionality and build something else. Location-based platforms provide places databases, check-in functionality, tips and recommendations, authentication, and much more. You can use these platforms to build your own application to cater to your specific purposes.

Content network: Some location-based systems have copious amounts of user-generated and publisher/professional content. User-generated content is created voluntarily by someone who isn’t paid. Reviews on Amazon and Yelp, videos on YouTube, tweets on Twitter, plurks on Plurk, and highlights on Gowalla are all examples of user-generated content.

Analysis: A series of tools allow you to build campaigns and measure their impact. Some of them are location-specific and provide a look at what’s happening in check-in spaces. Others require you to have the data, but provide strong tools for visualizing the impact.

Offers: Many platforms let you offer specials and deals to people who check in at your place. The idea is that location adds contextual relevance. Sending the ideal offer exactly when someone needs it is the idea that marketers really latch onto.

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It might be helpful to explore using aging factors to help determine the value of a web page’s links. Because age plays a role in the amount of trust Google gives a website, we know that the age of a website relates to the value a link from that site gives. You should always use the  whois lookup to check the age of each website you are considering approaching about a link.

Although it might seem that the most valuable sites are the oldest ones according to the whois database, keep in mind that it is not the age of the domain that confers TrustRank, but the age of the website that sits on top of the domain. So if you see that a domain was registered in 1994, don’t drop everything to gain a link on that site because it is possible that the domain was parked for 10 years before a website was built. Even if a website was built right from the start, if the website was later taken down and the domain was parked for any substantial period of time, Google will have perceived that the domain was transferred to a new owner and reset whatever TrustRank it earned in the past. So before giving a site credit for being well aged, you should ask, “Has a website been continuously running on this domain since it was registered?” And note that if a website has in fact been running, uninterrupted, for many years, it retains its TrustRank no matter how many redesigns of the site occurred; Google expects that. Google resets the TrustRank of a website only if the domain has been parked.

Let’s suppose a site has been online continuously for a few years. Does this make it instantly link-worthy?  A site with links is eons more trusted than a site without links, no matter how old it is. So for a site to be truly valuable as a linker to your site, it must also have a bunch of links that have been pointing to it for a long time.

If you really want to be thorough, you can attempt to determine the age of a website’s links before requesting a link to your site. There are various clues you can search for that will each increase the chances that the link is from a certain date.

(A) First, you need to identify pages containing links you want to investigate.
Second, look for clues on those pages as to the age of the relevant
links.

(B) The following are the two best ways to find links to the page you are
investigating:

-Googling its URL—Googling the URL of the web page enables you to see what other pages reference it. Assume you are interested in the age of the links to http://www.pets.com/puppies/. Googling this URL brings up the page http://42explore.com/pets.htm. This page features pets.com and contains a link to http://www.pets.com/pupies/. At the bottom it states, “Updated, 06/01.” So we can assume this link is 10 years old. Are we certain this link was not added later? Of course not. But based on the statement at the bottom of the page and the lack of any evidence to the contrary, it would be a reasonable guess. If other pages that reference http://www.pets.com/puppies/   display similar  circumstances, we could guess that at least some of those links really are quite old.

-Using Yahoo’s linkdomain operator—You can use the linkdomain operator to locate other pages that link to the page in which you are interested. Assume we are interested in investigating the home page of http://www.studios.com. Typing linkdomain:www.studios.com into Yahoo’s search bar shows many pages that link to http://www.studios.com. One of those pages is http://www.pets.com/Jobs/CommercialTrainersWanted.htm. This page contains paragraphs that each begin with a date. The paragraph discussing http://www.studios.com is clearly labeled July 10, 2004. Therefore, it can reasonably be assumed that this link is at least seven years old. As with Googling a URL, there is no guarantee that this date was not inserted later, but taken along with other similar pages, it is good evidence that this site has well-aged links.

(C)Look for clues on a linking page as to the age of its links. There is no single silver bullet here. The better a detective you are, the more evidence you will discover about the age of the links on a page.

–Is the link contained within the text of an article that has a date somewhere on the page.

–Is the link contained on a blog page that is categorized by date, either on the page or in the URL of the page itself.

–Is the link contained on a page that allows comments with dates on them.

–Does the page have a PageRank of 3 or higher?

–Is there a date in the URL of the page itself.

–Are there any dates on the page at all that could lead to useful assumptions

–Is there any reference on the page to any current events that can be traced back to a certain point in time?

If none of those methods work for you, it is also possible, although tedious, to use archive.org to determine when a site added the link in question. There you can look through archives of a webpage to pinpoint exactly when the new link appeared.

If you’re just looking for the quickest way to determine whether a site has a good number of old links but you don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, use Google’s “link” command. Just go to Google.com and type link:example.com into the search box. If you see web pages from at least, say, 10 different domains listed, the site has a substantial link history. If you are buying a multi-thousand-dollar site, you’ll want to see approximately 40 or more distinct domains linking to the site.

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YouTube also looks within your video’s title for keywords that match viewers’ queries, so optimizing title, description in YouTube search is a requirement.  It’s more difficult to fit keywords into a title, however, because you’re limited as to the title’s length. Specifically, a title can include no more than 100 characters, so writing a title that is both descriptive and includes a number of keywords is challenging.

Optimizing your Title: Learning how to incorporate your most important keywords into various text elements, while maintaining the usefulness and integrity of those text elements is a part of SEO. The best titles describe the video’s content in a way that appeals to the target audience. They also include a handful of the most important keywords, those words that target viewers are most likely to be searching for. Ideally, these keywords are also the best descriptors of your video’s content.

What you don’t want to do is randomly insert keywords into the video’s title. One, that makes the title less descriptive, and thus less useful for prospective viewers. Two, it reeks of keyword stuffing, and YouTube won’t reward that. Instead, work the keywords into your title in an organic fashion; if you can’t do so, then don’t include them.

Optimizing your Description: Adding keywords to your video’s description is much like performing SEO on your website’s body copy. You have lots of space to work with, so you’re not as limited as you are with the video’s title. Yet you still need to incorporate keywords in an organic fashion; they have to feel natural, not artificial.

Fortunately, it’s easier to work keywords into descriptive copy than it is into short titles. The extra length works wonders. Again, make sure that the keywords aren’t just inserted randomly, or in a list at the end of the description; that’s keyword stuffing, and that’s a no-no. Instead, write your copy to include as many keywords as genuinely fit. If your keywords are indeed descriptive of your video’s content, and not just chosen to attract a certain audience, then this shouldn’t be a problem.

Optimizing Embeds and Links: In traditional website SEO, the number of inbound links to page will increase that page’s ranking. The same thing goes for YouTube videos. The more web pages that link to your video, the more likely it is that your video will appear higher in YouTube’s search results. Likewise, you can increase your search ranking by getting your video embedded in more external web pages.

The links to and embeds of your video will affect its YouTube search rank. The challenge is, you have little control over how many sites link to or embed your video.

First, the more unique and authoritative the content in your video, the more likely it will be linked to or embedded. It all comes down to quality content; you need to make your video as “linkworthy” as possible.

In addition, you will want to encourage viewers to link to your video. The more you spread word of your video, the more people who will be exposed to it. Have your PR department push your video to influential bloggers, encouraging links or
embeds. Email related websites and encourage them to embed or link to the video. Encourage recipients of your email mailing list, readers of your company blog, fans of your Facebook page, and followers of your Twitter feed to do the same.

Optimizing Views: Here’s another important factor in determining YouTube’s search rank—the number of times your video has been viewed. Fair or not, YouTube will rank a popular video higher than a less popular one. This is just another good reason to try to push more people to view your video.

Optimizing Comments and Ratings: The final factor in YouTube’s search rank are the comments and ratings your video receives. A video with more comments and ratings (assuming it’s a net positive rating) will rank higher than one with fewer comments and ratings. For this reason, you need to activate comments and ratings for your videos, and then encourage viewers to voice their opinions.