Lessons from the Radio

Posted by Edan Shertzer on Dec 16, 2008

It’s no secret that terrestrial radio has been watching its numbers decline for quite a while. The iPod, satellite radio, and a growing array of alternative entertainment consoles have been jamming the radio waves, drawing current and potential fans away from an already depleted pool of users. But as Valerie Block’s recent article in Crain’s New York Business demonstrates, radio stations need not fear an impending crash; on the contrary, perched atop the globe-spanning wings of the Internet, well-managed radio stations can expect to reach more ears than they’ve ever reached before. CBS Radio is a good case in point: while its terrestrial branch continues to wallow, CBS Radio on the Internet reached 2.2 million people in September, and it expects to add an additional 1 million listeners in February when its Internet player is embedded in some of Yahoo’s high-traffic channels.

Strong programming still counts toward success, online or off, as does revenue from radio ads, which at this point does not stack up in Internet radio’s favor — in the first nine months of the year, Internet radio brought in only a fraction of terrestrial’s $12.6 billion. But the world’s changing, and Ms. Block rightly points out that by the time Internet players are inserted into cars, terrestrial radio might not even be around to sulk about it.

Businesses both small and large can learn from the example of radio stations that are gradually moving their operations online. The Internet can offer almost limitless space to grow. Optimizing a personal or business website is an important first step toward harvesting the potential of the web, though how you do your optimizing counts, too.

The 2 Minute Blockbuster

Posted by Edan Shertzer on Dec 9, 2008

According to Wikipedia, at $300,000,000, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is the most expensive movie ever made. (Interestingly, when adjusted for inflation, 1963′s Cleopatra gives Pirates a run for its money at a gargantuan $290,000,000.) The swashbuckling adventure tale clocks in at 168 minutes, meaning each minute of film is worth approximately $1.8 million. Now that’s a whole lot of booty, even for a gang of rum-chugging pirates.

For comparison purposes, consider the now infamous “I Got a Crush on Obama” video, which cost about $2,000 to produce, but continues to draw millions of views on Youtube. (More than 12,309,880 views, last we checked.) And though its catchy song and peppy mise-en-scene will soon be the stuff of obscure pop culture history, one cannot help but marvel at how this relatively simple video managed to attract so many eyeballs in such a brief period.

The lesson: you don’t have to spend $300,000,000 on a video to make it successful. Really, you don’t even have to spend $2,000. All you need is a good idea, a reliable digital camera, some editing software, and a little bit of knowledge of how to optimize your video for various vendors and search engines.

Antezeta does a good job of summarizing a few useful optimization methods. (See especially their 8 Top Tips for Video Search Engine Optimization.) Film it, edit it, optimize it — you never know, maybe you’ll have the next Internet blockbuster on your hands.

Don’t Forget the Third Leg of SEO — User Behavior

Posted by Edan Shertzer on Dec 3, 2008

Speak to a typical SEO specialist, one who spends a good portion of his or her day trying to make sense of the topsy-turvy world of search engine ranking algorithms, and you’re bound at one point or another to hear him or her sermonize at great length about two things: the enormous and undeniable importance of links and the enormous and undeniable importance of content. Understanding these two elements is crucial to moving up the search engine rankings; think of them as, if you will, the Fantastic Duo of SEO.

Now, the specialist would be 100% right in emphasizing these two elements. Search engines do consider the number and importance of links between pages, the age of those links, how frequently those links are gained or lost, how many of those links are broken, and where those links are originally found. It’s also true that search engines examine the content that appears on web pages, how a website’s words are formatted through HTML, whether these words are spelled correctly and placed into grammatically correct sentences, and whether these words and the sentences they form are ever changed and updated. No argument there.

But as you can expect, content and links are only part of a much bigger and more complicated picture. In a recent interview with Search Marketing Standard Magazine, Bill Slawski, Director of Internet Marketing for Key Relevance, Inc., and author of the search-related patent blog, seobythesea.com, points out that there’s a third aspect SEO enthusiasts must pay close attention to — user-behavior-based signals. Really, “USB signals” (our own affectionate acronym) is just a slick way of saying user-website interaction, or even less fancily, user experience and use of a website. This covers the bookmarking and tagging of pages, the amount of time users spend on respective pages, how far down they scroll, user rate of subscription to RSS feeds, and of course, assigned rankings and ratings of pages that offer goods and services.

The point here is that SEO goes beyond careful selection of keywords and endless purchasing of links. A truly optimized site does indeed have substantial content and links, but it is also presentable and user-friendly, encouraging repeated and extended use. So when the SEO specialist finally wraps up his or her spiel and urges you to spend all your time and money maximizing content and links, remember that you’ve been told only about 2/3 of the story.

Google’s new Knol service

Posted by raphi.salem on Aug 11, 2008

This one is big news – Google has released a Beta of Knol, its new Wikipedia-like service.

As I understand it, this service is based on the idea of making the author responsible for the content. (Wikipedia’s model is that the community edits the content, with a group of moderators responsible for enforcing the rules. Other people can contribute, but it is the author who decides.

I think this is a great idea and has a lot of potential. We will be advising our clients to get involved. Bonus – initial analysis seems to indicate that Knol results get a Google Search Engine Results boost.