Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

The new TheWB.com relaunched today with the goal of being yet another online video destination. So what is my immediate reaction? It is no Hulu and the user-interface gives me a headache. The good news is that TheWB.com will combine full episodes of established content like Friends, Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars with original web programing. That level of content, especially when talking about a cult show like Friends, will drive significant traffic to the website. However, I feel when looking around the website, that they are confused at what they really want to be. The user-experience is a jumbled mess and seems to purposely go against the clean / ease of Hulu.

I would love to give a more in-depth review of the website, including their video search and embeddable player functionality - both areas Hulu excels in. However, they aren’t rolling out all features just yet and the site seems to be crawling at a snails pace at the moment. I will do a follow-up post once they fix their site issues and all of their planned functionality are up and running.

Google Ad Manager, a hosted ad serving and managed solution for website owners, was released in beta last March. Today however Google has taken it out of Beta and made it available without an invitation to the general public. Ad Manager was created to help website owners “increase revenue, cut ad serving costs and save time managing campaigns” - how can you argue with that? All you need to start utilizing Ad Manager is an active Ad Sense account.

So what exactly is the benefit of using Google Ad Manager? Bottom line is that Ad Manager enables website owners, who don’t have a huge sales team, to more effectively monetize their website, optimize ad inventory and maximize ROI. “Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.”

Some features of Google Ad Manager:

• Supports 32 languages and currencies
• Ad Network Management
• Automatic macro insertion
• Creative preview on live site
• Day and time targeting.

I highly recommend any website owner at least give Ad Manager a try - if you own a medium sized website Ad Manager is a going to be a god-send. Those larger websites with a sales team can continue to use DoubleClick Revenue Center and its suite of publishers solutions.

Over the past few months I have been asked more times then I can count for a basic, easy to understand and comprehensive SEO Checklist. Each time I usually listed the top SEO checklist items from memory or pointed them to a website that I felt covered it very well. Well, I thought it was about time I posted my own SEO Checklist so that I can just link to my own blog. About time right?

Below is a comprehensive SEO Checklist of core components any new or current website should take into consideration when thinking about organic search engine rankings. My SEO Checklist covers all the core elements and gives a few high-level guidelines / hints.

The SEO Checklist is meant as a starting point, a truly comprehensive SEO strategy involves a great deal more detail and involvement

SEO Checklist

• On-Page Content: More content on a page the better but use at least 300 words, content should contain relevant keywords, but do not overdue it.
• Search Friendly URL’s: Avoid dynamic URL’s, URL’s should contain keywords when relevant and have a consistent flow, use hyphens instead of underscores. For example: example.com/music/artist/artist-name.php
• Robots.txt: A robots.txt file should be used to tell search engine crawlers what content you do not want crawled.
• Title Tag Optimization: Avoid continuous repetition, limit yourself to no more than 120 characters, order keywords by importance.
• Meta Keywords: Don’t use more than a dozen keywords, keywords should revolve around page content, avoid continuous repetition.
• Header Tags: Use keywords in header tags (<h1>, <h2>) to show importance and theme of a page - <h1> is the most relevant keyword, <h2> is the next…etc.
• Meta Description: Don’t use more than 225 characters, avoid continuous repetition of keywords, describe content on page.
• HTML Sitemap: Link to from footer, add links for primary and secondary content pages.
• XML Sitemap: submit directly to search engines.
• Images: Image file name should describe what image is (e.g. cape-cod-beach.jpg), use image ALT tags for relevant keywords.
• Redirects: use 301 redirect on old / unused domains.
• Code: Avoid heavy use of JavaScript, I-Frames, AJAX and other non-SEO friendly code.
• Domain: When possible use a domain that has a search engine presence and contains relevant keywords.
• Linking: Linking, both internal and inbound, are core to SEO success. Develop a comprehensive linking strategy that focuses on cross-linking within a website, within a network of websites and from external relevant websites. Link using keywords related to the page within the anchor text. In regards to inbound links it is quality over quantity.

Yahoo announced a couple days ago that they are working with Intel on a new initiative, called Yahoo Connected TV, that aims to make TV more interactive. Connected TV will allow users to use their TV remote to personalize and manage TV Widgets. So what exactly are TV Widgets? According to Yahoo “TV Widgets are small Web applications that make it easy to surf your favorites sites with your remote control. Watch Web videos, track your favorite teams or stocks, interact with friends and family, and stay current on news and information by clicking on the compact, interactive apps that sit on top of your normal TV picture.”

Yahoo will be  offering developers the opportunity to build their own TV Widgets through their Widget Development Kit (WDK). Yahoo TV Widgets are powered by the Yahoo’s Widget Engine that uses standard web tools like JavaScript, XML, HTML and Flash - therefore making creation fairly easy. Yahoo will only be making the WDK available to a limited amount of developers and companies but I expect them to slowly roll this out to the general audience fairly quickly once they get a handle on the service.

Personally I am surprised we haven’t seen better Internet / TV integration. I don’t want to connect my PC  or MAC to my TV or use a Web TV type service. I want components of the Internet easily accessible using my existing Digital Cable box and existing TV remote - Yahoo Connected TV seems to have the promise of delivering what could possibly be the next big innovation in Interactive Television. However, Yahoo will have to be careful to not make this too commercial or intrusive into the TV watchers experience. Adding widgets of components of the Internet I am interested in is one thing, allowing for company to intrude on the experience with advertisements is another thing.

Yahoo will be launching sometime soon (my guess is early 2009) with  6 available TV Widgets, which include:

• Sports
  
• Flickr Photos
  
• News
  
• Weather
  
• Finance
  

Here are a couple of screenshots of what the TV Widgets could / will look like:

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For any webmaster / website owner avoiding having visitors come across a “404 page not found” error is an everyday struggle. 404’s happen for a variety of reasons - deleted content, mistyped URL, broken link, etc - none of them good. Google announced yesterday that they are helping webmasters with this dreaded page by adding “Enhance 404 pages” to their Webmaster Tools with the goal of making 404 pages more useful.

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can create a custom 404 page and embed the new 404 widget that, when a visitors arrives on the error page, attempts to direct the visitor to the correct / relevant content. The 404 widget populates the page with a suggested URL, shows links to the sub directory & sitemap and adds a site search query suggestion and search box. The 404 error widget is a JavaScript snippet generated through Webmaster Tools and is easily copied / pasted into a custom 404 page.