Mobile Advertising

Today, Google announced their beta Adsense for Mobile Applications. This allows developers to embed advertisements within Android and iPhone applications. In order to be accepted for the beta you will need to be able to provide a minimum of 100K daily page views, have a free application, able to implement now with a view to going live in 4 weeks and be able to participate for at least 3 months.

Incidentally, a Reuters interview with Microsoft published today states that Microsoft expect “Mobile phone advertising will account for 5-10 percent of global media ad spending within five years”.

So what kind of advertising might this be?  mobile advertising forecast today. They expect mobile advertising to be worth in excess of €950 million in Western Europe by 2013. First Partner expect that the most dominant revenue stream will continue to be mobile internet search with applications making up less than 10% of the mobile advertising total revenue by 2013.

http://mobilephonedevelopment.com/archives/858

Driving Offline Sales With Your Mobile Application

Many retailers are investing in mobile apps, not primarily to drive transactions directly from this new channel, but to drive offline sales. Their focus is not to get customers to buy via their mobile phone but to extend the phone to become an essential part of their offline shopping experience. This post will explore 9 features that all retailers with physical stores should consider including in their apps to drive offline sales.

1. Store Locator

Store locators allow the mobile customer to easily locate the nearest physical store to them. A phone’s native GPS and map capabilities provide an efficient and fast way for the customer to locate and get directions to the nearest stores and find store information such as opening times, events, phone numbers and store features.

Barnes and Noble allows customers to find a store using GPS, see the distance to the store, view the store features and locate the store using Google maps. Though it’s great functionality, B&N could have embedded the maps into the App so the user doesn’t need to exit the application to view the map.

2. In-Store Availability

In-store availability allows the mobile customer to check in real time if a product is in stock in a physical store. This is very useful when one store is out of stock, allowing the shopper to self serve and find out immediately if a nearby store has stock. Additionally adding the ability to reserve the item guarantees it will still be there when the customer picks it up.

Barnes and Noble allows customer to reserve an item and pick it up later.

3. Social Media

Integrating social media into your app allows customers to virally promote your products via their Facebook account.

The Gap allow users of their Style Mixer app to upload their outfit creations to Facebook.

4. Product Finder / Search

Some retailers are providing advanced product finders using the embedded phone camera. Customers can snap pictures of a barcode or the cover of a book / DVD and the app quickly identifyies and displays the product. For online retailers like Amazon, this feature allows customers in a store to do product price comparisons. For retailers with an offline presence, this feature allows the customer to quickly look up additional details on a product (such as ratings and reviews) whilst browsing a product in your store.

Amazon (left) and Barnes and Noble (right) both provide camera based product identifiers.

More Information: http://www.getelastic.com/offline-sales-mobile-apps/

Mobile Application Development using JavaScript

JavaScript is not only for webpages and web applications. Among other things, You can create realtime applications, serverside solutions, desktop and mobile applications. There are two types of moble applications: running in browser and native ones. These latter are often faster and more powerful. That’s because they have access to filesystem, accelometer, camera and et ceatera. Native applications are usually written in phone-specific language like Objective-C or Java, hence stanalone programmers generally choose HTML+CSS+JavaScript solutions. Happily, thanks to lastest technology, we are able to easily transform browser application into truly native one.

More Information: http://blog.frontendforce.com/2010/05/mobile-application-development-using-javascript/

Marketing Your Mobile Application

So you’ve invested in building an iPhone, Android or Blackberry app. Now it’s time for your marketing team to drive adoption of the app, so you can justify the investment to your execs. Try following these top 7 marketing tips to get your customers to download, install and use your app.

On Your Web Store

Market your app on the homepage (or any content slot) on your Web store. Use your merchandising engine to present the app download banner if your users search or browse for items related to the app platform. For example, show your iPhone app banner when customers search or browse for anything related to an iPhone. If your customers are searching for iPhone related goods, chances are they own an iPhone and would use your app.

Barnes and Noble promoting their iPhone App



1-800 flowers promoting their iPhone App



Amazon.com promoting their new Android App



On Your Mobile Web Store

If you already have a mobile web store, promote your mobile app to customers who browse your mobile store using the same platform.

Amazon.com promoting iPhone App to an iPhone user on their Mobile Web site



More Information : http://www.getelastic.com/marketing-mobile-app/

Display Recent Posts Outside Your WordPress Blog Installation

Using WordPress for your site’s blog, but want to display the most recent post from it on your home page? You may have already discovered that doing this is harder than it should be. Fortunately, it’s far from impossible; this article shows you how.

In search engine optimization it is now becoming more important to have a user- friendly blog. Unlike the old days of SEO, when websites were mostly optimized for search engine bots, nowadays Google encourages webmasters to build user-friendly websites.

One of the most SEO-friendly blogging software packages is WordPress. It is not only a user-friendly blog offering, but allows for endless possibilities to customize the blog if you know its supported server side programming languages, such as PHP.

This article aims to solve one of the most common problems in websites using WordPress as a blog. You might have seen a lot of business establishments are using WordPress as their blogging platform, and they installed it as a folder in their root domain.

So for example, if your domain is http://www.integralfusion.co.za/ , WordPress is installed as a folder named “blog” with respect to the root directory, so it will be:

http://www.integralfusion.co.za/blog/

Of course, your most important page on your business website is the home page, which search engines expect to be user-friendly, content-rich and search engine friendly as well.

However, if you are using WordPress as a blog, you won’t be able to show or display the recent post directly on your business website’s home page, because it is now outside the WordPress blog installation.

Displaying the most recent WordPress post on your business website’s home page offers a lot of advantages. Take a look at the list:

1. It shows your latest content to your users, which increase audience engagement with your website’s content. For example, they will be reading the blog posts, commenting on your content, and understanding your services better, which then leads to them becoming your customer.
2. It provides easy ways for search engines to discover new content for your website, which helps with crawling and indexing, and contributes to long tail traffic.
3. The value and importance of your WordPress blog increases because it will earn some decent internal links coming directly from the home page.
4. Your old content will likely be crawled at a much faster rate than it would have been without internal links pointing to it.

Getting started is easy, Get in touch now!

YouTube Video Search Ranking Factors: A Closer Look

You might be wondering what factors affect a video’s ranking in YouTube search. This is very important, because first page videos in the YouTube search results will get higher click through rates than the rest of the search result pages. This article will examine the factors and try to quantify which ones are most important. At the end you’ll find some recommendations to help you achieve the best possible ranking for your YouTube videos.

In the above screen shot, the search query is SEO Tips, and the video that occupies the top spot is “Google On Page SEO Tips and Strategies.”

This video can get a high click through rate, which results in high video exposure. This exposure will increase the number of video views and possibly the earnings (if you have ads in those videos or a referral link to your business website for customers to purchase products).

This article attempts to examine different factors that affect the video ranking in YouTube search and recommends the best course of action that could significantly help the marketing of the video in YouTube.

Formulation of Possible Factors to be Examined

Before we gather actual measurable data in YouTube to confirm the significant factors, it is important to list the possible factors that can affect the ranking of a YouTube video. These can be separated into three categories.

First, there is the video’s relevance. This is a measurement of how relevant the video is to the search query. In YouTube, since the content is video, the best measurement of relevance is the video title.

A good way to measure the relevance is to count the number of words in the actual video title that match the actual query. For example, say the search query is “Online tutorial on Coffee brewing.” Some example video titles can be rated as follows:

1. Coffee Brewing Online = 3 words match the query. So it is 3/5 = 60% relevant. The query contains five words.
2. How to create delicious Italian Coffee = Only one word matches the query. So it is 1/5= 20% relevant
3. Coffee Brewing – an Online Tutorial = 4 words match the search query, which means it is 4/5 or 80% relevant.

The second factor that may affect a video’s search position is User Engagement. This is the measurement of users’ engagement and their interaction and perception of the video.

Measurable factors include the following:

1. Favorites – the number of times the video has been added as “favorite” by the YouTube viewers.
2. Number of comments – the total number of user comments on the video.
3. Number of likes – the number of viewers that “like” the video. This replaces the old YouTube five-star rating system.

The third factor is Trust and Authority of the Video Owner. Similar to the way  websites are ranked in Google, the trust and authority of the video owner might also affect the video ranking in YouTube. Of course, YouTube, in the effort to avoid spam, will most likely check the background of the YouTube video owner, and could use that information to assess the trustworthiness of the video.

Measurable factors under this category include the following:

1. Membership age – the number of years that the video publisher has been active in YouTube. The older the membership, the more trusted is the video owner. This concept is similar to the age of domain in Google search engine ranking factors.
2. Total Channel Views – the total number of viewers that visit the video publisher/owner channel.
3. Total number of subscribers – this is important; the higher this figure, the more authoritative is the video owner.

Google Search Engine Optimization Tips: SEO Site Review Session

Do you ever wish you could get an SEO checklist from Google on what you should and should not be doing with your website? You’re about to get the next best thing. This three-part series covers the SEO Site Review given at Google I/O 2010, and is filled with tips you can use to improve your site’s rankings, taken straight from Google’s Matt Cutts and other Google representatives.

Google just recently conducted an SEO Site Review in Google I/O 2010 on May 19- 20, 2010 in Moscone Center San Francisco USA.

The SEO Site Review session is a tech talk by experts on the Google Search Quality team, headed by Matt Cutts. You can view an exact video of the talk.

Matt Cutts and his team of experts provides deep insights and tips, illustrating the modern approach to Google search engine optimization by examining real websites on the Internet. Since the video is over an hour long with lots of spontaneous talks, this article presents an overall summary categorized and organized into five important sections:

1. Web Design – Technical/Webmaster related. These tips cover the web design and affect the webmaster who handles technical-related factors that can affect the SEO effectiveness of the website.

2. Onsite SEO issues – This information is useful for both the SEO in charge and the website owners to learn if their SEO strategies and techniques are updated, effective and within search engine guidelines.

3. Keyword Research. This section suggests tips and techniques for researching keywords or niches that will bring the best results to the SEO campaign.

4. Link Building –  This area suggests important tips useful for managing the quality of inbound and external links in the website.

5. Marketing – suggests effective ways for marketing the website without necessarily going overboard by spamming or engaging in practices outside of Google’s search quality guidelines.

It is surprising that Matt Cutts and his team picked up more SEO-related problems pertaining to onsite SEO and web design. These areas comprise 64 percent of the issues:

However, important issues were also discussed relating to link building, marketing and keyword research.

This first part will cover on “Web Design: Technical/Webmaster” SEO issues. The second part gets into keyword research, link building and marketing.

Finally, the third part looks at important onsite SEO issues that were discussed during the SEO Site Review 2010. Since this list of tips is long, a checklist can be prepared and downloaded from the third part if you are interested in implementing these suggestions on your website.

5 Tips for Marketing Through Content

Content has always been “where it’s at”, and that holds true as much as ever these days. Gather CEO Tom Gerace, who is also founder of the Social Media Advertising Consortium (SMAC), a non-profit organization working on the creation of standards for social media engagement campaigns, offered some tips on marketing through content to share with WebProNews readers. These tips are:

1. Start with Search. There are 15.9 billion searches run every month and a small percentage are customers looking for you and your competitors. Figure out your market opportunity by understanding how many searches, keywords and keyword phrases are related to what you do.
2. Think holistically about your budget. What do you spend today per customer? What is your average SEM spend? Content-based programs can help lower cost/customer acquisition because fewer people are doing it and competition, so far, is less intense. Plan to shift some budget dollars from SEM and other acquisition marketing efforts to content marketing – it delivers results with an improved cost structure.
3. Target your content creation.  Content needs to be targeted to areas that align directly with your brand; where sufficient demand for your content will make content marketing worthwhile.
4. Make lots and lots and lots of content at a low cost.  Search engines weigh recency heavily when organizing content.  There is always fresh content at the top of search results pages, so 1,000 posts on a topic will capture more customers than a competitor with 5 – 10 posts.
5. Don’t go it alone. Managing dozens of writers, achieving top search engine placement, and establishing content creation costs to make content marketing make sense requires specialized knowledge and training. Find a partner and make them put their money where their mouth is on the numbers they promise.

Those are Gerace’s tips, but I’ll add that quality makes a difference. Not only does Google continually try to put more emphasis on quality with algorithm updates, but it also goes a long way when you’re talking about reputation, and obviously you don’t want to do something that will hurt your brand.

As far as search, Google’s Matt Cutts has said of the recent Mayday update, for example, that content farms are among the kinds of sites that are hit the hardest by the alrogithm change. That’s another reason why churning out sub-par content is not going to be in your best interest. If you can walk the line of delivering content that people are searching for, and giving them content that stands out, there are lots of benefits to be had.

Source: Webpronews.com

Will Social Media Improve Life In the Future?

The social benefits of Internet use will outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University.

While most respondents reported the Internet has both positive and negative effects, 85 percent said it has improved their own social relations and will continue to do so through 2020.

Some 85% agreed with the statement:

“In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the Internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future. ”

The majority of the people surveyed said the Internet allows people to create and grow bigger social networks than they had been able to have in pre-Internet days. They said they like the advantages offered by the easy sharing of personal details in a one-to-many form that they can control. They said that over the next decade people will continue to invest themselves in building communities via these personal broadcasts.

Some survey participants pointed out that geography is no longer an obstacle and the Internet is also eliminating some or all of the constraints of time and cost when it comes to human connection and sharing.

In addition, some participants said technology will continue to change how we live our lives at home and at work, and that “virtual friends” in more developed social networks will become more common in the future. They said the definitions of “privacy” and “friendship” are changing.

Some 14 percent pointed out the negatives of the connections people are generating online. These included observations that people lose time online that could be spent in face-to-face relationships; social networks can be a distraction; online relationships are not deep and meaningful; the Internet allows people to silo themselves and incite more intolerance.

Here are some responses by those surveyed by Pew:

“The internet has actually helped with human interaction by providing a wider range of ways to communicate such as Twitter and Facebook. These allow some interactions that are better not done face-to-face. And the internet frees up more time for social interaction by making things like shopping faster.” William Webb, head of research and development, Ofcom

“Both answers are true. Spending more time online and being more wired to each other via various devices comes at the expense of real-time, deep, meaningful human interaction. But, when you’re really busy and don’t have enough time to see, call or visit with friends it’s nice to use the social networking tools to be better able to keep tabs on or ‘give tabs to’ people in your social network.” -Joshua Freeman, director of interactive services, Columbia University Information Technology.

Source:Webmasterpronews.com

SEO Marketing Tips: Optimize E-mail Campaigns

Campaigner, an e-mail marketing solutions provider, launched a series called 101 Tips for Getting Started with E-mail Marketing to help small business owners implement successful e-mail marketing campaigns. One of the topics covered by Campaigner includes using SEO (search engine optimization) best practices to enhance your campaign performance.

To take advantage of SEO, you need to archive your e-mail campaigns online—on your own Web site or blog. On your Web site, you should offer links to your past newsletters right from the main page navigation. Not only will this provide new content for your site visitors to read, but you will also get more mileage out of relevant content when you repurpose your e-mail campaigns.

Wendy Lowe, Campaigner’s director of product marketing says that SEO and e-mail are a great compliment to one another. She continued, “Using SEO best practices can really help you hone in on what customers are searching for.”

Five Tips for working SEO into your E-mail Marketing

If you want to optimize your e-mail content for search engines, Lowe offers these five tips that can help small businesses get started quickly.

1. Start SEO and E-mail Campaign Planning with Keyword Research
The best way to have your e-mail content optimized for search engines is to research relevant keywords that not only reflect your product or service but that also signal buyer intent. Keyword research is not a difficult task. Lowe recommends the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool to get you started. Using the tool you can search existing Web sites and topics to see top keywords for the site. This will also let you check your main competitors’ sites to see their best keywords.
2. Coordinate SEO and E-mail Marketing for Best Results
You don’t have to choose between SEO efforts and e-mail marketing. Most people look at SEO as a way to optimize their Web site, but you should combine the two and incorporate SEO elements into all aspects of your online marketing efforts. When preparing your e-mails, Lowe suggests that you actually “think in keywords” when you write—just as you would for Web site content. Any SEO changes made to your site or special sub-pages on your site should always carry over to your e-mail marketing campaigns.

3. Surround Text Links with Relevant Keywords
Once you have completed your keyword research and are ready to optimize your e-mail campaigns, Lowe recommends that you surround hyperlinks with those important keywords. Wherever you use a keyword it should be hyperlinked back to your main Web site or a landing page for best results. You should also include relevant and descriptive words around the hyperlink, as search engines do look at the words which are near hyperlinks on pages.

4. Bolster e-mail Marketing Results with Specific Landing Pages
Landing pages—unique Web pages that contains information that would interest your targeted readers—are extremely important for e-mail campaigns. In the e-mail you would direct your subscribers to a special landing page that would explain the product or promotion details. It’s really about providing your best-of-the-best sales copy to encourage the visitor to make the desired action, such as download an eBook, purchase the product or sign-up for a special offer list. When you create the landing page, it is important to incorporate SEO by using your targeted keywords on all landing pages.

5. Repurpose E-mail Content into a Blog for an SEO Visibility Boost
Rather than “orphan” your e-mail content, Lowe recommends that businesses get a blog and repurpose their e-mail campaigns to it. If you currently do not have a business blog, then you use a free blogging service, such as WordPress or Blogger to repurpose your search engine optimized e-mail content. In addition to putting the content on your blog and linking to it from your Web site, Lowe says that the content can also be used in other marketing tasks, such as including portions of the content with the keywords in any press releases you send out.