This is my last blog post on the ineedhits search engine marketing blog.

I’m moving back into the offline world to work for a company selling physical security devices for ICT assets, and I’m leaving the marketing manager role at ineedhits in the capable hands of Rene LeMerle, who you already know as a knowledgeable and frequent search marketing blogger.

I must say that I am quite sad to leave ineedhits after over three and a half years. It’s been a very exciting time for the search marketing industry, I’ve worked in a great team here at ineedhits, learnt a lot and have enjoyed the speed of innovation and change immensely. But I’m also very much looking forward to tackling a whole new set of marketing challenges in my new role.

So thank you, everybody, for your readership and feedback, and all the best for your ongoing search marketing efforts!

2006 was definitely the year in which videos took off online – just think about YouTube and the sheer amount of videos circulating on the web. As our case study on Blendtec demonstrated, you don’t have to be a huge corporation to harness the viral power of videos online.

With the technology that’s available today, it’s fairly easy even for small and medium sized companies to produce and upload video content. But producing and uploading videos is only the start – you should take your video efforts one step further and make sure your videos can be found in search engines, too. Here are our top 8 tips on how to optimize your video content for search:

1. Save Your Videos with Search-Friendly File Names

For video files, the same rule applies that is used for URL names: Make it meaningful and keyword rich. For example, don’t name your video file “1342sdafsa.mov”, but call it something like “product-name-in-action.mov”. The file name should describe the content of the video and include a product name or your brand if possible.

2. Add Keyword-Rich Description and Title Tags to Your Video

Do the same kind of keyword research you’d do for a web page and use this information in all tags you can, especially in the title and description tags.

3. Create A Keyword-Rich Synopsis and/or Transcript

Creating text content associated with a video helps search engine spiders, which are looking for text information, to assess and categorize your video.

4. Optimize The Page on Which Your Video Is Available

Don’t just plunk your video on any page, but make sure the page on which your video is available is optimized using standard search engine optimization techniques. Above all, make sure the page contains text referring to the video, explaining its content and containing keyword relevant to the video.

5. Ensure High Encoding Quality

The theory at the moment states that higher encoding quality should provide better search engine visibility. In addition, higher encoding quality should make it easier for search engines to transcribe audio content – I’d still err on the safe side and recommend that you provide transcripts yourself if possible.

You should also offer different video format and bandwidth options for each video – for those Internet users who are still on dial-up, high bandwidth videos take simply too long to download, and they won’t bother.

6. Watermark Your Content

Your goal is to get the largest possible audience for your video. If you can tap into viral sharing and forwarding, this is one of the most effective and fastest ways of spreading your video content. At the same time, you’re giving up control over its distribution and placement, and you should make sure that your brand is recognizable in the video no matter in what context the video might be viewed. So make sure your company logo is included in your video as a watermark!

7. Create a Video Sitemap

To make it easier for search engines to find your video content, create a video directory for all the videos on your site and also create a video sitemap that’s easy to spider – same principles apply as to standard sitemaps.

8. Submit Your Video to Search Engines

Last but not least, don’t wait for search engines to come and find your video, go out and submit it to search engines, especially video search engines. For example, you can upload videos to Google Video Search and submit your video to Yahoo! Video Search, but there are also plenty of other video search engines you should submit to. To name just a few, submit your video to singingfish, searchforvideo and blinkx and start monitoring referrals from those search engines!

Did you take some time out over New Year to ponder what the year 2007 might bring? The start of a new year is always a good time for predictions, and a few notable names have published their thoughts on where the search marketing industry might be heading.

Here are John Batelle’s search-related predictions:

1. Microsoft will buy their way into online media dominance since they can’t beat Google at the search game fast enough.
2. AOL will be bought (with Microsoft and Yahoo as potential purchasers) or go public.
3. Google Video ads won’t take off until the last quarter of 2007.
4. Yahoo! will slowly start to recover from the bad run they had in 2006.
5. Google will face some bad PR in connection with the company and its founders losing touch with their users and their struggle to continue to live up to the “Don’t be evil” motto.
6. Mobile Internet usage will go mainstream, with search at its core.

You can read John’s full predictions about the search industry and other Internet trends on his SearchBlog.

Andy Beal, the author of the Marketingpilgrim blog, focuses on slightly different areas in his 2007 predictions:

1. Andy is more upbeat about Yahoo and thinks their new Panama advertising technology and interface changes will have some real positive impact for them this year.
2. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the next big thing that will explode in 2007, when it also will become more measurable and accountable.
3. There will be lots of M&A activity in the search marketing industry, with at least one search marketing services firm going public.

Specifically for small and medium sized businesses using search marketing, I see a few other interesting trends unfolding in 2007:

1. Small and medium sized businesses will fully realize how important local search marketing is for them – whether a business has a website or not.
2. The Web2.0 community movement will grow in importance for search. Not only will user-generated content continue to reach more people, communities will also be used to improve search results (see Wikia’s/Wikipedia’s new project of community-generated search, for example).
3. Online advertising bargains will get rarer. With more and more advertisers crowding the marketplace, you will have to work harder to ensure your online advertising budget produces the return you are aiming for.
4. The push against net neutrality will continue – as this may impact the way in which businesses can operate on the Internet, small and medium sized companies should certainly keep abreast of this topic.

Regardless of which predictions will come true, I hope 2007 will be an exciting and successful year for you!

News magazine TIME’s choice of the Person of the Year is one of the hotly anticipated events each December. This year, they’ve chosen maybe the most interesting person of all (to us at least): you. That means every single one of us!

You might have had a successful year in 2006, but what, you may think, did you do to deserve this honor? Well, it’s because of how you embraced the new online tools and communities that form part of the Web2.0 movement. TIME puts into words what everyone who is active online, has felt throughout the year: “In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter” – and every single Internet user contributed to this.

As TIME sees it, “… for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.”

While no one could predict with confidence what exactly the current Web2.0 movement will lead to, it has certainly changed the way people interact with each other online, and it has already had huge ramifications for how customers and other stakeholders interact with companies. for one thing, it has certainly forced companies to pay more attention to what their customers have to say and has proven the force that word of mouth can exert online.

So we all are in great company now – past TIME Persons of the Year have included Bono and Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mikhail Gorbachev, John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. Welcome to the club, everyone!

This is your chance to grab a great search marketing bargain before you head off into your well deserved break for the holiday season!

Until 24 December, you can save 20% on all search marketing services at www.ineedhits.com – that’s right, you’ve got 10 days only to secure your discounted search marketing services.

Why don’t you use this opportunity to get your pay-per-click campaign started with Easy PPC? Instead of paying $2/day for campaign management and $99 set-up fee, you’ll be paying only $1.60/day (first month) and $79.20 set-up fee. A fantastic price for a great pay-per-click service that makes your life so much easier!

Or what about using any budget you might not have spent on our deluxe search engine optimzation and advertising package Mega Business Accelerator? Instead of $324.95, you’ll only be paying $259.96 for this comprehensive combo.

And of course you can also get great savings on our best-selling auto-submission service Easy Submit. Instead of $2.50 per web page, you now only pay $2!

No matter which of our search marketing services is the right one for you, make sure you get it before 24 December – there’s only 10 days to go before the sale ends!

The first annual E-tailer PPC Stress Study has revealed that over 44% of surveyed marketers spend 20% or more of their online advertising budgets on PPC, but still struggle with resourcing and measurement of their pay-per-click campaigns.

The study, carried out by the e-tailing group, inc. and NetElixir, Inc., provides a valuable insight into the state of pay-per-click campaign management:

• 100% of e-commerce executives use Google Adwords, 90% use Yahoo! Search Marketing, 76% use Micorsoft AdCenter and 27% use Ask Sponsored Listings.
• 40% of advertisers manage more than 5000 keywords.
• 59% of respondents manage their campaigns internally, 18% outsource pay-per-click management and 23% use a mix of internal and external PPC campaign management.
• Cost (71%), ease of execution (63%), control (25%) and prior negative outsourcing experiences (33%) are cited as the main reasons for managing PPC campaigns in-house.
• Time spent on managing pay-per-click campaigns ranges from less than 5 hours per week for 32% of respondents to over 21 hours per week for 33% of respondents.
• Almost all respondents (99%) have 3 or less people working on their PPC campaigns.
• 80% of managers use ROI as the benchmark for measuring the success of their PPC campaigns.
• 47% of e-commerce executives say that their average cost-per-click is less than $0.50.

The bottom line? Pay-per-click advertising has well and truly become an integral part of online advertising, but those involved in the day to day management of pay-per-click campaigns are still struggling with the execution. With more and more smaller companies starting to use pay-per-click advertising, the need for simple PPC solutions should continue to grow.

Different search engines use meta data in different ways. While it’s well accepted that unique, keyword-rich and well written title tags are an absolute must for your search engine optimization efforts, some SEO experts have discounted the value of meta description and meta keyword tags in the past.

Vanessa Fox, product manager for the Google webmaster tools, has confirmed that unique meta description tags for each web page help Google determine the uniqueness of a web page. The meta description tags are used to create the text snippets that are displayed in Google search results underneath the page heading.

Google would normally create this snippet by looking at the content surrounding the query term on the web page. However, for more generic searches, where appropriate content is not found on the web page, Google will simply grab some text from the top of a page, which is often part of the site navigation, and highly unsuitable to be displayed as text snippets for a search result.

Here is what Vanessa posted on Google Groups: “Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page – in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.”

If there are unique meta description tags available, Google will use these instead as a text snippet. So keep the following rules in mind for all your web pages:

• Make sure every single page has a unique, meaningful and keyword-rich meta description tag (and of course a meta title and keyword tag too)
• The description tag might be one of the first things your potential customers see. When you write the description tag, write it in a way that gives the searcher a good idea of what he or she will find on your page, and makes the searcher want to click through to your web page.
• Review your meta description tags regularly – as a minimum, whenever you change the content of you web page.

Not sure how to write good meta tags? The ineedhits optimization packages Optimizer Kit PLUS and Business Essentials both include detailed keyword research and professional optimization of your title, description and keyword meta tags.

According to research conducted by credit card firm American Express, 2006 looks likely to be the first year in which gift cards take the top spot as the most popular holiday season gift, nudging ahead of clothing for the first time.

According to a survey of just over a thousand shoppers conducted by American Express:

• 66 per cent plan to give gift cards (up from 57 per cent in 2005);
• 68 per cent plan to buy clothing as gifts (steady compared to 2005);
• 64 per cent plan to buy toys or games;
• 63 per cent plan to give music, CDs or DVDs;
• 46 per cent will opt for cash gifts;
• 43 per cent will buy perfume, cologne or cosmetics;
• 43 per cent willpurchase books or magazines.

Due to the survey’s inherent margin of error of plus/minus over 3 per cent, gift cards are likely to supplant clothing as the most popular final choice of gifts. According to the National Retail Federation, gift cards are expected to account for $24.8 billion in sales this holiday season (up from $18.5 billion in 2005). On average, shoppers are expected to spend more than $116 on gift cards this year.

While gift cards have been popular for many years, they are increasingly accepted as a thoughtful gift and have become presentable gifts in their own right with many gift cards featuring more and more creative designs and their own imaginative gift wrapping or gift boxes.

So is the trend towards gift cards visible online? While Google Trends doesn’t display any metrics for the current holiday season, the spikes in search traffic for the term “gift card” in the past years are unmistakable.

How are you promoting your gift cards?

Considering the huge popularity of gift cards, are you doing enough to promote this gift idea to your shoppers? Gift cards often tend to be treated as an “also ran” option on retail websites. If you are doing this, you might be making it unnecessarily hard for your customers to find their gift of choice! Here are a few last minute ideas to promote your gift card options:

• Highlight your gift cards in a prominent position on your homepage and department pages;
• Provide a link to the gift cards on all product search results pages;
• Include gift cards in your recommendation engine;
• Highlight gift cards on your shopping cart page;
• Promote gift cards in any targeted email promotions;
• Send out last minute emails promoting gift cards as an easy gift option;
• Make sure you tell you customers about any special features of your gift cards, eg. customizable design or special gift wrapping options ;
• Enable customers to buy email-based gift cards for those people who left their holiday shopping to the very, very, very last minute;
• If you have a company blog, blog about your gift cards!

And if you currently don’t offer gift cards at all, it’s certainly time to make sure you have them ready for next year’s holiday season!