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By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

Video SEO is an underutilized search engine marketing strategy. Even as videos continue to gain significant traction in the search engines’ natural listings, most companies either ignore them, or remain completely unaware of their potency. That oversight represents a valuable edge your company can use to leapfrog your competitors in the organic rankings.

The strategy blends traditional search optimization tactics with a relatively new platform. With the rise of YouTube, Revver, Blip, and similar video sites, consumption patterns have driven the search engines to provide these sites with greater ranking authority. As long as your primary objective is clearly established, a video SEO campaign can have a dramatic effect on your exposure in Bing, Google and Yahoo.

In this article, we’ll explain why you should integrate video SEO into your current search marketing strategy. We will also provide a few ingredients that will help you avoid potential pitfalls along the way. Last, you will learn what to look out for when choosing a video SEO company that can drive traffic and conversions.

How Video SEO Improves Your Search Exposure

Before Google released their Universal Search platform in May 2007, their natural listings were dominated by text-based pages. Videos were rare in the top positions. Universal Search changed the way Google displayed their primary index. Google, Yahoo, and Bing now include entries from their respective video search platforms. What’s more, popular video-sharing sites have been given higher ranking authority and increased link weight (we’ll describe this latter point in a moment).

Video SEO gives you greater exposure in the search engines through two levers. First, it caters to the algorithm used for Universal Search. By syndicating your videos to authoritative video-sharing sites, you’ll enjoy more exposure through their increased ranking authority. In effect, those sites will rank higher, drawing more people to your videos.

Second, videos that are placed on your site (as opposed to syndicating them) attract links – both directly and indirectly. As your videos gain popularity, direct links will naturally build, pointing to the pages on your site that host the videos. Indirect links will point from other sites whose owners have embedded your videos. As a result, your inbound link profile will continue to grow and strengthen, lifting your site higher within the search engines’ organic listings.

3 SEO Video Tips To Capture Higher Search Positions

Your video SEO campaign can only be effective if you recognize the limitations of the search engines. First, their algorithms cannot read lips. In order to rank for your target keywords, they must be available to the search engines’ spiders in text form. If you’re placing videos on your site, optimize your titles and surrounding text, and include an edited transcript of the video. If you’re syndicating them, optimize your external titles and tags.

Second, focus on inbound links. An effective video SEO campaign relies on contextually related links pointing from a wide breadth of sites. Videos that spark a groundswell of attention – whether through entertainment, information, or controversy – can achieve this easily.

Third, integrate a social media sharing component. You want viewers to share your videos with their friends on Facebook. You want them to “Tweet” about your videos on Twitter. You want them to bookmark your videos on StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious. These social media sites can form the backbone of your video SEO campaign, driving waves of inbound links to your site.

Key Factors In Choosing A Video SEO Company

Traditional search optimization is a mature strategy. SEO specialists have honed their craft for more than a decade. By contrast, video SEO is still an evolving science. Even though it leverages the core tenets of a traditional SEO campaign, the rise of social media and video-sharing sites have infused video SEO with enormous complexity. Hiring a video SEO company removes the need to keep up with the roiling landscape. The key is using the right criteria to identify a proficient firm.

A professional video SEO company should have an established track record that shows a keen grasp of the search engines’ organic algorithms. That track record should also demonstrate an ability to evolve as the algorithms change. Many search optimization experts were completely unprepared for the debut of Universal Search. By extension, so too, were their clients.

Leveraging Video SEO For More Traffic And Higher Conversions

A carefully executed video SEO campaign can sharply increase your exposure within the search engine’s natural listings. When implemented as a key component of a multi-pronged search marketing campaign, it can drive more targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic translates into higher conversions. If you are not yet utilizing video SEO for your site, your current organic rankings may be more vulnerable than you realize.

With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith is on the cutting edge. Combining Social Media Optimization with more traditional SEO and SEM methods, RRS is a consulting firm specializing in enhancing clients’ online presence and managing their public relations online. SEO, SEM and ORM, Online Reputation Management, are combined in this successful formula. http://www.RostinReagorSmith.com

By Paul Marshall in Featured

So, you’ve embarked on a search engine advertising program, maybe even SEO. Whether you’re doing this on your own or using an online marketing consulting firm, there are key points to become aware of.

If you miss these, you won’t increase conversions.

What good is a Number 1 organic search engine ranking or AdWords ad listing, if you don’t have increased sales or if you don’t generate more sales leads?

Too often, we get all focused about the Internet marketing — the ads, the offer — that we don’t think the whole process through step-by-step and consider the experience our website visitors will be having.

If we did, we’d be thinking “big picture” and we would head off some of these potential problems before they occur.

Overcoming Your Website Visitors Anxiety

When people come to our website it’s natural for them to feel anxiety. After all, look at all the cr*p on the Internet today, all the too-good-to-be-true products and services.

But when you and I offer REAL products or services, we have to overcome that concern, even if we’re treating our site visitors fairly and not making outrageous claims.

So, how can you overcome these anxieties?

1. Offer more than a 1-page website. Credible companies have multi-page websites, including Privacy Policy, Terms of Use | Service and About Us pages.

They also have more than 1 page about their products or services.

I’m surprised by the number of 1-page websites I see from companies using infomercials to advertise their products. Often, they have the purchase form right on their home page, their only page (and often their page isn’t secured for credit card ordering).

Websites that are only 1-page don’t seem credible. And having the purchase form right on the home page comes across as very pushy!

Doesn’t this type of site seem all about the company and NOT about their customers? Why would we want to buy from that type of company?

What kind of online marketing consulting firm did these companies use…or did they use any??

2. Next to any sign up or contact form buttons clearly state that you don’t sell your customers’ private information and link to your Privacy Policy page.

3. Effectively communicate what your Value Proposition is, also called your Unique Selling Proposition. If you don’t know why someone should buy your product or service versus your competitors’, now is the time to figure it out. (And by the way, based on my experience, if you don’t know this, you’re not alone, by any means.)

But our websites have to be about more than just us. They have to be about our visitors. What’s in it for THEM, to do business with us? What unique voids in the marketplace can we fill?

As a Small Business Owner, Personally Relate to Your Site Visitors and Communicate Directly with Them

People don’t buy from websites, they buy from people! So, how can you apply this to your own website?

1. For many small businesses and solo proprietorships, their website text should speak to your visitors directly in first person.

This should be written from the voice of the Owner or President. They shouldn’t use third person, institutional-sounding language, getting rid of “we” and “our”, using “I” instead, speaking first person, in an actual conversation. Don’t try to sound like you’re Microsoft!

And while your at it, be careful about overuse of words about you…whether “I”, or those words, “we”, “our” or “us”.

Check out the WeWe calculator (Google: wewe calculator). Make sure to focus on customer-focused words and NOT on words about you or your company.

2. Include your picture on your Web pages.

For a larger small business trying to make that personal connection with their website visitors, try the idea used by the nutritional supplement company Lumina. (Google: Lumina Health Contact Us)

In this execution, notice how Lumina gets you to relate to their customer service department. I still remember it was John I spoke with and that’s been over 1 year ago that I called them!

Again, people buy from other people, not from websites.

For us as small businesses, why should we sound large, pretending to be something we aren’t? And why should we run from our advantage of being small: low overhead, friendly, personal service and accountability, among other advantages.

Make Each Step in Your Marketing a Smooth Handoff from One Step to Another

Whether you’re using AdWords, SEO, or both, make sure your title and description matches the experience your website visitor will have when they come to your landing page.

Quite often when I’m Coaching my small business owner clients or performing online marketing consulting, I find the wording for their organic listing or AdWords ad says one thing and their landing page says something that doesn’t sound the same.

This causes confusion is the best case scenario. In the worst case, it causes a lack of trust. Dangerous!

We should understand our products or services. And we know what we want our visitors to do on our site.

Our potential customers may not understand either. We need to think like them, when we explain what we have to offer them and how to use our website to take advantage of what we have to offer.

And when “shifting” from one page to another, we need to hand-off from one page to another naturally and smoothly, like a car with a smooth automatic transmission.

Don’t advertise one offer in AdWords or organic search, only to have your landing page sound like it was written for another advertising offer. I see this problem a lot!

Often times, having an affordable online marketing consulting firm reviewing what you’re doing can offer easy, inexpensive fixes that can yield big improvements in your search engine advertising and SEO conversions.

Your Action Plan

Let’s review what we’ve talked about.

First, overcome visitors anxieties by offering a multi-page website which answers questions about your company and your services or products, while inspiring confidence in your company. Effectively communicate your Value Proposition.

Second, personally relate to your site visitors. Avoid using the wrong words that may put off your site visitors. Use your picture on your Web pages.

Third, hand-off from one page on your website and one step in your selling process to another smoothly and naturally. We should understand what we want our site visitors to do, but they won’t unless we make the process really clear.

Whether your using an online marketing consulting firm or doing the work yourself, if you take these steps, your search engine optimization | advertising plan will convert at a MUCH higher rate, when you take these steps.

Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consulting expert offering marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). You can learn more about Paul on his Internet Marketing LinkedIn profile and at Strategic Web Marketing.net.

By admin in Featured

SE-TacticsBefore you even think of building a Membership site there is one key question you must ask yourself and that is why you want to do it.

If you are to be successful, whichever medium or delivery method you chose, there are some key considerations. They are:

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Google has introduced a new feature in AdWords this week: Ad Sitelinks.

Sitelinks have long been available in Google’s search results pages and now they have been extended to AdWords text ads for selected advertisers whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold (whatever that means).

Ad Sitelinks extend the interactivity of existing AdWords ads by providing links to additional content on your site rather than sending all users to the same landing page.

For lucky advertisers that can access Ad Sitelinks, their ads on the Google Search Network will display up to 4 additional destination URLs on their text ads for users to choose from (see below).

Have you used Ad Sitelinks yet? Please let us know what you think via the comments below.

By John Sylvester in Featured

Personally, I use Twitter as a business tool and only tweet stories I write associated with the web. It seems to make little difference commercially, but I continue regardless. So why does a highly intelligent and talented man like Stephen Fry, who recently and publicly declared he was quitting Twitter due to a lame remark that he was “boring”, leaving his near-million followers bewildered and angry, tweet as he does?

The phenomenon of this perpetual, asinine running commentary about mundane events in one’s daily life is baffling, to say the least; and it is not confined to the purview of everyday journeymen and women of the social media circuit, but extends to celebrities such as Stephen Fry which, in turn when controversial, makes social news in heavyweights such as the BBC and the New York Times.

Let me give you a real-life example of the social futility syndrome: the wife of  a friend of mine actually wrote on Facebook today: “Why is it Benson the dog gets to have his nails done, but I am not allowed?” Isn’t it sort of curious why someone would put such a trifling domestic issue out there in social space rather than discuss it with her husband and the dog? Moreover, who really cares?

But let’s then move on to one of Stephen Fry’s entries on Twitter: “A spoonful of paté de campagne Ardéchois à l’ancienne is not really that far distant from a spoonful of catfood. Just notably more expensive.” Odd, isn’t it, when Stephen Fry, a highly respected British actor, writer, comedian, author, television presenter and film director, writes that? Why does he do it? I just don’t get it.

Last Saturday, a follower of Mr Fry from Birmingham, England, sent him a tweet that said although he “admires” Mr Fry, he finds his tweets rather “boring”. Emotionally flattened by this comment, Fry then threatened to quit Twitter. This provoked a vitriolic attack against The Man From Birmingham by Fry’s followers, who reacted in intense derisory unison like a cackle of hyenas. Stephen Fry then responded to the supposed furore with: “I am so sorry to hear ppl have been abusing you. You had every right to say what you did. Pls accept my apols. This is so awful.”

@brumplum, in retreat, then replied: “You bet. Thank you for being so understanding. I feel more sheepish than a sheep and more twattish than a twat.” Spat over? No, not at all. What resulted from it were news reports from the Guardian newspaper, the BBC and the New York Times. Doesn’t this simply confirm that not only has trivia become the main focus of interest among social media conscriptees, but personal snipes by the unknown against celebrities are now being carried into traditional media space.

The take on it by tech.blorge.com was that it should be buried and forgotten: “[Social media] seems to be being used by adults to play some spectacularly childish games, with memories of the school playground flooding back as I read the latest tweets. Stephen Fry ended up not quitting Twitter and is back to normal. But the controversy surrounding comments made by one of his followers and the backlash immediately afterwards is rumbling on.”

This story was so far removed from the delicate and benign tweets I’m accustomed to, I turned my attention to rant.com, as that surely would be a site where this type of spat should be centred. The comments on their Twitter account look sensationally libellous, so I daren’t repeat them. Just a thought.

Stephen Fry has lived a colourful life, as extracts from Wiki attest: his maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Slovakia and his mother’s aunt and cousins died in Auschwitz; at seventeen, Fry absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend, was arrested and spent three months in Pucklechurch Prison for fraud; later, he gained a degree in English literature at Queens’ College, Cambridge; he has written many books, appeared in numerous television parts and plays and lives in London with his partner, Daniel Cohen.

In 1995 Fry suffered a nervous breakdown while appearing in a West End play Cell Mates and walked out on the production. He went missing for several days and contemplated suicide. It is well documented that he suffers from depression and last year the BBC ran an interview with him titled, “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive”, where he talked about his experience of having a “bipolar disorder” and recounted his suicide attempt after walking out of Cell Mates and the “continuing severe mood swings he has to endure”.

So I can understand his sudden disinterest and dejection when he was attacked on Twitter. But it’s the social fallout of all this that has gone so badly awry; to me, at least, his “followers”, in an almost Biblical sense, reacted in what can only described as psychotic hysteria, akin in essence to Brian’s disciples in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Also, for mainstream media to run stories about an insignificant remark in the rarified ether of the world’s most glorified and celebrated online chatrooms is a particularly disturbing trend.

Fry suggested he was feeling very low and depressed. Whether that is can be attributed to the rogue remark from The Man From Birmingham or not, we cannot possibly tell. But hasn’t Twitter taken on the mantle of a new social media contract; one where misplaced and often innocuous tweets from unknown individuals provoke personal depressions, resulting in rants from “disciples” that fuel a now-important source of information in mainstream media’s social news?

Twitter is not the problem; it’s a platform. But online human interaction these days is decidedly weird.

John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.

————-

ADDENDUM

We’ve all had these moments; moments in which you have formed your opinion and then, by some coincidence, have them turned around by someone you meet or something you read. And last night I had one of those epiphanic moments: I walked in to my local tapas bar and read last Sunday’s Observer. Inside, I came across an article titled “The power of tweets“.

Up till now I just saw Twitter as risible, meaningless outpourings from the “what I had for breakfast” types and wondered why people like Stephen Fry find it so necessary to be involved.

Well, it goes much deeper than catfood, apparently. In the middle of last month, Scott Pack read an article by Jan Moir of the Daily Mail about the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately which, he said, was “horrifically homophobic”. So Mr Pack tweeted: “Vile piece of ‘journalism’” and described her as an “evil cow”. Well, it is the Daily Mail, Scott.

Anyway, then Ben Locker, a copywriter with a 3,800-strong Twitter following, agreed: “Can we get #janmoir trending?” The term I had vaguely heard of before but the hashtag before a word, called “trending”, means it is on Twitter’s list of the 10 most tweeted-about topics on the site.

Pack’s followers re-tweeted, as did his followers’ followers and “within hours #janmoir was topping Twitter’s trending topics…and a ‘Twitterstorm’ was born”. By the end of the day, “the Mail website had amended its headline, companies including Marks & Spencer had pulled their advertising from the offending webpage; and the Press Complaints Commission had received a record-breaking 1,000 complaints (it would later receive 22,000).”

For us lesser mortals, the chances of creating a “Twitterstorm” through an act of “trending” would be impossible (I speak for myself here), but it does go to show how the “Twitterati” can influence social interaction through the power of their thoughts, words and disciples. And I did have to adjust my thinking as to what Twitter is all about — that little old me has no influence whatsoever in this new so-called “new democracy”; that is, unless I join a rent-a-crowd in support of a main actor, I’m doomed. Richard Dawkins, watch out!

But let’s get back to Stephen Fry, who I used as an example in the piece above. In the Observer article he is quoted as saying: “the age of politics as we knew and loved it is now over. Do the two recent big Twitterstorms mark a fundamental ‘shift in the very focus of democracy’ – has the Twinternet become the new Fifth Estate?”

The “very focus of democracy”, Stephen? Not perhaps the best dictionary definition in the world but dictionary.com defines it as: “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.” Meaning perhaps “celebrity democracy”?

However, Fry is cautious about its future when he pointed out a potential danger. “Twitter may seem to some to be dominated by bien-pensant, liberal spirits at the moment. Will I be so optimistic about it when those spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism? When the political machines march in and start acquiring millions of followers, giving them the power to close sites?”

Well, of course. He certainly seems to be on-cue here but some are not quite so sanguine: “It’s good for democracy, but it’s not democratic,” says Locker. “Everyone has a say, but not everyone’s say is equal. Don’t kid yourself that people will find your cause more interesting than what Stephen Fry had for lunch.”

Now I did like Spiked Online’s Tim Brown’s take on it when he described it as “a spectacle of feelings, a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence, a carnival of first-person pronouns and expressions of hurt and proxy offence”.

The piece concludes with a leaked internal document from Twitter suggesting: “the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013″ and that “we will be the pulse of the planet”. The writer then asks rhetorically: “Is that scary? Answers in 140 characters please.” So there you go, John, the new democratic order of the “Twitcélèbre”. Now I understand.

By Nelson Tan in Featured

marketingA search engine optimization company can be an invaluable asset in your Internet Marketing campaign. They specialize in knowing how to raise your search engine positions, monitoring those positions on the regular basis, and adjusting their strategies to account for undesirable results in any given month. Since this takes a lot of time, effort, and specialized knowledge, it can be in your best interest to go to an outside source rather than try to maintain high search engine positions on your own.

However, like every business, there are good companies and there are lemons. Knowing the right questions to ask and the criteria to look for will help you in choosing an affordable, effective search engine optimization company.

By Tinu AbayomiPaul in Featured

Many of my local business clients say that they just don’t get social media. They tell me they just don’t understand how using social media is going to get them more business.

And the answer is simple, really. More effective exposure, faster.

To really wrap your head around this, it helps to realize that behind the search rankings, dot coms and email addresses are people. Why are people online? Because they want information, they want to be entertained, and they want to connect.

We advertise in newspapers, magazines, on radio, on television because we want to reach people who want what we’re selling. The same thing goes for the web. Nowadays, that mean using social media.

The biggest deal about social media is so big, we often don’t even see it. Sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Twitter and all the others have one thing in common: they’ve redistributed power that used to remain in the hands of the few to the hands of the many.

When this happened, a lot of the gatekeepers between us and our potential clients and customers fell away, in a way that allows more discourse between people, without leaving sensitive private information exposed.

I can write a blog post about an aspect of what I do without revealing the secret formula that gets people to buy from me or hire me. And you can read it or provide feedback without exposing your private information. For example, if you send a Twitter link about my post, and my blog recognizes it, you can make a short comment without even telling me your email address, as you would need to do if you were to comment on my site.

And blogging and tweeting are just two types of social media you can leverage to benefit your business.

I know, for some people this is really scary.

Socializing online puts you in a weird position as a business person if you start maneuvering without quite “getting” it.

You don’t want to be the guy who thought it was okay to put his link on someone else’s Facebook profile and find it removed the next day, and have potentially powerful allies blocking you because you breached some etiquette or made a mistake.

You don’t want to end up talking business too soon, yet you also don’t want to be the person who had an opportunity to promote themselves, but saw that it was okay only after their competitor beat them to it.

I got an email today from a new friend who told me he couldn’t wrap his way around social media. Like in many new social situations, he didn’t know how to act. If like him, you think you don’t “get” social media, and how it can be used for business, I think that if you’re like most people, you’re wrong.

You already get Web 2.0 and Social Media. You just don’t realize it. The very fact that you don’t want to “be that guy” means that you’ve figured out that there’s a certain etiquette to all these new tools, and that they vary from community to community.

Remember how you figured it out offline? You found someone to help you, someone who had the results you wanted that you could copy, or you worked it out through trial and error.

Luckily, online there are people who are willing to teach you the ropes, so you can skip the trial and error. Now all you need to do is find people who are where you want to be, and do what they do.

Social media isn’t as hard as you think it is.

Don’t quite get social media and how it can get you more customers? Go to http://www.freetraffictip.com/09/ssms/up.php and get some free answers today.

By admin in Featured

Video has immediate impact and you don’t need to be an expert to create your own mini-movies. It is a very simple way to connect with, and market to, your customers and prospects.

There are a number of factors that affect how you are going to encode your video so you can publish it on the web. These include the efficiency of the encoder and, ultimately, how it looks to the end user. Two key factors play a significant role in the encoding process: source quality and frame motion, so let’s take a closer look at them.

1 Source Quality

Once you have pressed record on your camera, you have determined the source quality of your video. What you want to achieve is the best quality video possible so here are some basic guidelines to help you get great source video quality and achieve maximum quality in your final compressed video. Use a tripod to reduce camera movement.

You must get this right, because any camera movement means that the picture moves as well. This means that a high percentage of pixels in the video are changing from frame to frame. This results in worse quality at lower compression rates and although camcorders are fitted with an anti-shake device, the more you can do to keep your camera steady the better will be the result.

2 Use good lighting techniques.

Even with a tripod and a high-end camera you can still produce a low-quality image if there is not enough light. Low-light or light-gain filters produce video noise on the image; this is different for each frame of video and so it is more difficult for the codec (compressor/decompressor) to compress the file and give a good quality result.

Use the best camera possible. If you have a secure, steady, camera – and the lighting is right – you will get a reasonable result from even an inexpensive camera. BUT, it is best to have one that can capture your footage in digital format, and personally my business partner Neil Travers and I prefer using miniDV to capture our footage.

3 Starting out

When you start out you don’t always have access to professional equipment, like high end consumer camcorders, a tripod, and excellent lighting conditions. Do the best you can with what’s available and always remember: the higher the quality of your video source, and the less noise in that source, the lower the data rate required to render a good playback file. Whenever possible, always encode a file from its uncompressed form.

If you convert a pre-compressed digital video format into the FLV format, the previous encoder can introduce video noise. This can occur because the first compressor has already performed its encoding algorithm on the video and has already reduced its quality, frame size, and rate. Digital “effects” or noise can be added. This additional noise affects the FLV encoding process and may require a higher data rate to play back a good quality file.

4 Frame Motion

This is another important factor to consider in your encoding formula and refers to the percentage of the pixels that change from one frame to another. There are a variety of things that can affect this, from people or objects moving, camera effects or even post-production effects.

So watch out for the following points as they can all have an impact on frame motion:

  • Moving objects includs people and things you may not consider like traffic or the wind moving he leaves of a tree.
  • You can get nearly 100% pixel change from frame to frame from camera effects like panning, zooming, and having a hand-held result in almost There is also a high percentage of pixel changes from frame to frame when you use postproduction effects like dissolves, fades, wipes, or complex video effects. Clips with a lot of motion in them mean the encoder has more information to compress than with static clips like one person talking to camera.
  • An interview or conversation with two people works best if it is fairly static, like our own ‘kitchencasts’ where we are seated at a table while talking.
  • Encoding works by the video codec using a method of dropping frames and then encoding a series of fully uncompressed frames. These are called key frames and are used to calculate and “rebuild” the missing frames during playback.

So I hope you can see that video is a great tool to use in your marketing, and it can be simple and cost effective. Just take your time, experiment, and enjoy yourself.

Neil Stafford – The Internet Marketing Reviewi s is the UK’s longest running PRINTED Internet Marketing Newsletter. ‘Test drive’ it for FREE – Visit this special web page for more information: Internet Marketing Review Newsletter

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Website-TrafficImproved search engine rankings can give you higher website traffic if the improvement enables your web page to progress beyond a critical point.

That critical point is reaching Page #2 on Google: particularly Google because that is the widest used search engine, and Page #2 because very few go beyond that page in their search, end even then only if they can’t find what they want on Page #1. So Page #1 is best, but that goes without saying.

The question is, how can you achieve that? There are ways, and most use most of them. Without focusing too much on inbound links, though these are very important, there are things you can do on-site to improve your listing position. The listing of each of your pages is a function of many different aspects of your website, some page specific, some relating to your website as a whole and others to links from other websites.

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

E-Readers which are also called digital or electronic readers, lets users wirelessly download books and read them on hand-held devices resembling a glorified etch-a-sketch. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but these handy little digital readers have become extremely popular; according to a recent Time article, Amazon has already sold 1.7 million of the Kindle E-Reader since it was introduced in 2007.

And according to the same article, the Association of American Publishers states total revenue from digital-book downloads has risen 149% this year, while they estimate e-book readers sales to top 3 million by Dec. 31. Plus, according to Forrester Research around 1 million of these gadgets could be sold this holiday season, and sales in 2010 are projected to double, to 6 million.

“The year 2009 is a breakout year for e-readers,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. “But we’re still in the early stages.”

Those make for very impressive numbers and it could point to E-Readers as “the” hot Christmas gift this Holiday Season; at least where tech gadgets are concerned. Given its well received features and programs, an E-Reader could make for an excellent corporate business gift, especially if you could brand them with your company logos and stream them with your company’s newsletters and RSS feeds.

Then we also have the recent launch of the NOOK from Barnes & Noble which will give the Amazon Kindle some competition. The Nook has a 6-inch paper-like display which uses a 16-level grayscale that can support up to five fonts. You can use it to read PDFs, in addition to over 1 million books, newspapers and magazines available in Barnes & Noble’s eBook store. The Nook is currently priced at around $260.

How is it different from the Kindle: besides the flashy color icons, designer cases and color customizable back panel; the Nook does have some nice features such as a virtual bookmark called Reading Now that lets you pick up where you left off reading on the Nook, and it has Wi-Fi radio which customers can use at 700 Barnes & Noble’s locations and at 600 college stores in 50 states. There’s enough memory for holding 1,500 books (2 GB) and there’s a microSD slot which could give you another 16 GB more.

But this holiday season, gift buyers (corporate or otherwise) will have many more E-Readers to choose from other than the Kindle and the Nook. Where there’s a profit to be made, other companies will follow. Just like when Asustek invented the category of Netbook with its ASUS Eee-PC in 2007, other laptop makers and sellers quickly jumped on the bandwagon and the marketplace was flooded with netbooks or mini-laptops.

This recent trend towards E-Readers will prove no different; take for example Sony, who introduced the first electronic reader way back in 2004, will be introducing three new devices according to the Time’s article. The Sony Reader will have a Pocket Edition ($199), sporting a 5-inch-diagonal screen, Touch Edition ($299) which will be touchscreen-equipped and the Daily Edition ($399), which will feature wireless capability.

Asus is also entering the E-Reader market with a product called the Eee-reader which should be on the market for Christmas. Then there is the Fujitsu FLEPia which is the only commercially available E-Reader which has a color display. It’s only available in Japan and costs around $1,100. Ouch!

For the more modest consumer, the Irex Digital Reader will be hitting U.S. stores this month, October 2009. The DR800 will have an 8.1-in. touchscreen with wireless connectivity and will sell for $90 less than the similarly sized Kindle DX, which will set you back around $489. This is the price at the time of writing, expect those prices to drop as competition heats up.

On the horizon, there are many different versions of the e-reader that will hit the market. There is even a fold up model which will open like a book and another one called the Polymer Vision Readius which is also a phone but it has a flexible screen that folds up around the phone to make it extra portable.

Then we have the looming debut of Apple’s fabled iTablet which could be a game changer in the whole E-Reader arena. It could also be a Kindle or Nook Killer given Apple’s enormous popularity with tech savvy consumers who only want the latest gadget on the market.

One really has to question why all this popularity for the E-Reader, especially since we already have the small portable netbook on the market, which can be easily used for reading books. More specifically, we already have Tablet PCs which could easily fulfill this reading function. Granted they may be slightly larger, but they also offer all the features of a laptop, so why not just convert/use this device as an E-Reader?

Regardless, the E-Reader seems to be gearing up to be a top tech gift this holiday season. The perfect gift for family members, friends and employees alike… especially for the book-reading fanatics in your family or company. E-Readers are also the ideal gifts for those who simply must have the latest and newest tech gadget on the market.

For the latest corporate gift ideas and a handy Amazon gift-organizer try here: Corporate Business Gifts For Timely Special Savings/Deals/Coupons on Corporate Gifts…click here:
Executive Business Gifts Copyright 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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