Online videos are one of the most “sticky” and viral forms of media on the Internet. They give us the power to create our own TV show that we can broadcast from anywhere and distribute through free platforms.

Because of this, video optimization is becoming more important to search engine optimization. A good way to optimize your video content is to think about the user and who you want to engage with your video. Be strategic about it and consider your audience, demographics, their language and their needs.

I’ve compiled some tips to help make your videos successful.

1. Be relevant and informative — Videos that demonstrate step-by-step procedures are great, videos that express an opinion about a specific topic can be useful too.
2. Create an interesting title for your video — A good title will grab the attention of users and help sell them on viewing the video. Additionally, the title and description should contain a related key-word-rich phrase that is relevant to your product, service or brand to optimize it for SEO.
3. Use Video as a magnet to lead users back to other content on your site — Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube, Vimeo, or Viddler and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.
4. Optimize your video for Important Key Words and Phrases — You also want to optimize your video for terms users are likely to be searching for. Tag your videos with key phrases that are related to the content, and optimize your video for relevant keywords and include a meta tags and a keyword rich description of your video content.
5. Provide Transcripts of your Videos — Search engines love to index HTML, and by surrounding your videos with key-word rich copy you can improve the search rank of your video.
6. Keep Your Videos to four minutes or less — In today’s fast paced environment, it takes a lot to hold a users attention. If you have video content that is longer than four minutes, consider breaking it up into smaller pieces and tag each accordingly. This will keep the experience succinct and will give you more content to promote to your fans.
7. Create a Video Sitemap — For video that is native to your own website, make sure that users and search engine spiders can find your video content. The easiest way to do this is through the use of a video sitemap on your site. Use important keywords in the anchor text links to your videos featured on your video sitemap.
8. Brand your Video by adding your Logo — Video is an excellent tool for generating brand awareness for your company or service.
9. Remember Inbound Linking Factors — Link to videos using important keywords in anchor text.
10. Offer the Option to Embed Your Video — allow other users access to the coding that will allow them to embed your video on their website or their blog. Think viral marketing
11. Allow Users to Rate your Video — videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favorite and save.
12. Syndicate Your Video — Submit your video to RSS.

Check out this short video of one for the more talented attendees at the Petco Natural Neighborhood Festival Tweetup that was held last Saturday April 10 in Santa Monica.

Other tweeps in attendence: @applelevey @greengirls @chiefwala @greenwala @rickrockhill @Dahlface33 @jlazarchic @Odjur @PETCO

Last week I caught the tail end of the LA Twestival Event.

Twestival is a charity festival whereby 175 cities from around the world come together for events on 1 day- March 25th- raising money for one cause. This year we’re raising money for Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organization transforming the lives of the world’s poorest, most marginalized children through access to education.

It was a great event and we even got to meet someone who is Internet Famous — Tay Zonday. He currently has almost 5o million views of his now famous song “Chocolate Rain” on just one of his YouTube videos — and millions more including other versions of the video and responses.

My question is: How will Tay Zonday follow up a YouTube video that gets 50 million views?

Today I heard from my friend Doug who had a question about Facebook Groups and Fan pages.

Doug’s Question:

“What effect, positive or negative, does it have to belong to, be a fan of, etc of any particular group, company, etc other than just having it on your personal list of favorites?”

My Answer

The positives:

You’ll receive updates and information about the groups or pages your a fan of. Your friends or “social graph” will be able to see what kinds of people, groups and issues you are interested in supporting.

You also gain access to people that share their support for a person, business or issue — which can lead to new business relationships and personal relationships.

Another positive that I think you can gain from joining groups and fan pages is they give you a specific insight into people’s lives and businesses that we never had before social networking gained popularity.

The negatives:

You’ll receive updates and information about the groups or pages your a fan of. Your friends or “social graph” will be able to see what kinds of people, groups and issues you are interested in supporting.

Depending on how many groups and pages you are member or a fan of it can lead to receiving a significant increase in the number of messages that you have to weed throughout to get to the stuff that matters.

Everyone has their own limits to how many messages and interruptions they can handle. This is an issue I grapple with on a daily basis.

Lastly, I don’t fan everyone that asks me. Just those that I’m interested in learning more about or who ask in a compelling way for my support. I also have left groups and un-fanned people that send too many updates that aren’t relevant to me or my interested.

What benefits do you get from joining groups or fan pages?

Last week, I had the good fortune of attending a seminar for business owners about Web site search engine optimization presented by Jason Lavin, founder of Golden State Communications. He gave an excellent demonstration of how Web site optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and measurement (analytics) can ignite growth in almost any kind of business.

Jonathan Good and Jason Lavin after the Excel-Your-Business seminar

“Your Web site should: Save you time, make you money and better serve your clients.” According to Lavin, “For most clients in most industries, SEM has the highest return on investment (ROI) of any advertising dollars spent.”  He also provided compelling live data to demonstrate the income generated from several paid-search programs.

One of the key takeaways from the seminar was the relationship between organic search and paid search advertising. If you do a good job of organic search optimization — you will in turn get better results with your paid ads, and end up paying less for them.

I thought it would be useful to first define SEO and SEM:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines via organic search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.

Search engine marketing (SEM) promotes Web sites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion.

Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Heat Map

Why is search engine marketing so effective?

The Heat Map graphic to the left shows user clicks on a Google Search Results page. The red and orange areas of the heat map overlay show that the paid advertisements and the first couple of organic search results are being clicked on the most.

If you want to increase your click through rate and generate more leads from your Web site, it’s critical to 1) optimize word choices for organic searching, and 2) purchase specific keywords for paid search advertising.

The next step to optimizing your Web site: Creating landing pages

A landing page is the page that appears when a user clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. A good landing page will display content that is relevant to the advertisement or link. The page should also be optimized with specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

For pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page can also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements.

Additionally, there are several more terms that will help you to understand search engine marketing and measurement. These include:  conversions, conversion rate, cost-per-conversion, page rank, and one-way links (also known as inbound links).

Lavin also shared ten key tactics that you can use right now that will help you start dramatically improving your Web presence:

1. Add keywords to title tags.
2. Use those same words in the URL.
3. Also include those keywords in the page content.
4. Utilize Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
5. Use Meta Tags sparingly.
6. Don’t ever use link farms and other SEO spam.
7. Use the same keywords in your image names and alt tags.
8. Submit your Web site to search engines and directories by hand.
9. Update your page daily.
10. Integrate a blog into your Web site if you don’t already have one.

The last and most important piece is to make sure you are tracking and measuring your progress, always looking for creative ways to improve your Web site’s performance. Lavin recommended using Google Analytics for most businesses — a free service I love and use on all of my Web sites.

I have attended several search engine marketing seminars in the past, and I feel that Jason Lavin presents this topic in a practical and easy to understand format. If you want to learn more about improving your Web site, I highly recommend you register for one of Jason’s upcoming seminars.

Customers who come to a business site typically know exactly what they are looking for. They want to find the quickest answer to a question or solutions to a problem. A person visiting a business site has a need or a problem to address.

When it comes to podcasting for business, the customer is a business, not an individual consumer. The following tips will help you to launch a successful business podcast that grabs your customers’ attention.

1. Stick to the point — Keep messaging short and to the point. Also, provide enough information to educate and inform the audience.
2. Avoid fluff — Podcasts should be entertaining enough to keep audience attention, but not to the extent that it digresses from the topic at hand. Use a variety of formats for each podcast — interview, panel discussion, news anchor — to keep them from becoming stale.
3. Be entertaining, energetic and informative — If the content has merit, then the podcast will not need flashy elements such as background music or sound effects to get the message across. That said, even compelling content, if delivered expressionless, in a monotonous voice can turn audiences off. Use musical intros and outros (exits) to create a natural segue to the narrative.
4. Be Authentic — use your real voice and discuss the topics openly like you would with a close business associate.
5. Don’t advertise or sell — Nobody wants to subscribe to or download a commercial. You can brand your product, service or company by being the provider of useful information.
6. Build community and integrate into the blogosphere — Just as the other social network media create communities and build bridges, so can a podcast. Invite communities to participate in a dialog on an issue or topic of interest. Take advantage of social network’s tendency to rally voices (in favor and opposed to) around a particular interest.
7. Be considerate of listeners’ time — Podcasts shouldn’t exceed 30 minutes. If you’ve got more material, consider breaking it into smaller sections and you’ll end up with more content to promote. With a business podcast, you’re asking your customers to give their attention to your organization’s content. Make sure you fill the time with something useful enough to make the exchange worthwhile.

Podcasts are a great tool for promoting a business and elevating it to a position of authority within an industry. With that in mind, it’s important that the recording be authoritative, purposeful and professional. Below are some tips & tricks to keep in mind when recording a podcast.

Remember to:

1. Use a land line if recording on the phone.
2. Keep the handset close or mic to your mouth
3. Maintain a consistent distance from mic or phone for the duration of the recording session.
4. Don’t use speakerphone.
5. Speak clearly and succinctly in your normal speaking voice.
6. Don’t mumble.
7. Record in a quite room with a door.
8. Hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door.
9. Turn off ALL electronics and equipment that might make noise.
10. Don’t worry about mistakes they can be removed during editing.

What makes a good podcast?
Have a reason for podcasting. Make sure your message is clear and concise. Rehearse the important points before you record to ensure the information is received correctly by the audience.

Where should you record?
The best recordings are made in a quiet room with carpet and/or furniture to absorb echoes and dampen the sound. Make sure the room has a door to reduce unexpected interruptions. Consider hanging a note on the door that says, “do not disturb, recording in progress.” Remember to turn off all electronics (computers, cell phones, etc.), fans and any equipment that might make noise during recording.

What should you do if you make a mistake?
Pause for 2-3 seconds then restate the sentence. The mistake can be removed during the editing process.

I love this video. It illustrates how fast social media has come to the forefront, and how its changing the way we do everything from shopping, finding employment, working in teams, communicating with friends, and so much more.

So my question for today is:
How has social media affected your your work life? and your friendships?

Today I thought I’d share this video of Robert Sapolsky from Ted.

He makes some interesting observations about the similarities of humans and other primates. At one point in the lecture, Sapolsky dicusses the golden rule,  or “tit for tat”.

The similarity to Twitter’s to “I follow you, you follow me” is unmistakable. I find it amazing how we will use and understand generally accepted rules in almost any environment (including social media).

So a couple of questions for today:

What other ways do you think humans are unique in the animal kingdom?

How do you think our use of social media illustrates those differences?

I hope you enjoy the video.