Google Honors Pac Man 30th Anniversary

Google Search Engine /

It’s Pac Man’s 30th Anniversary and Google is celebrating by putting a free version of the  console classic on their homepage. Instead of search, hit the “Insert Coin” button and drive everyone in the office nuts, with the clanging bells of 1980’s synth yore. Pac Man was originally built by Japanese firm Namco and spawned the unauthorized spin off, Ms. Pac Man, a licensed television show and countless items of branded paraphernalia. Pac Man was the start of everything and I was 12 when it came out and I still like it! Im glad Google honored it.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-25

Twitter /

Finally upgraded my legal search marketing blog from Typepad to WordPress! Typepad sucked! WordPress is GOLD! # Setup Twitter account on mobile phone. So I can tweet on the road, super cool!! # Created new epilepsy civil rights site for Chicago lawfirm. http://www.epilepsycivilrights.com # Listen to my audio tweet. http://tmic.fm/rgrxr6hwrj8 # Make sure your law firm is listed in the google local business directory. Claim and verify your listing. # Created new legal website for law firm consulting firm of Rjh Consulting – http://www.rjhconsulting.com #

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5 Tips for Using Online Video to Market Your Law Firm

Law Firm Marketing, Video Marketing /

Statistics show that video improves online visibility and drives more action online than plain images and text. For example, according to the BIA Kelsey Group, viewers engage more after watching a video, with clicks for more information increasing by 30-40% and phone inquiries by 16-20%. Whether you choose to do-it-yourself or hire a pro, marketing your business with online video doesn’t end with the production. Remember, videos need to be seen. Here are a few tips to help you make the most out of your video marketing: 1. Aim for Authentic, Actionable Content Don’t worry about stock photography, templates, or videographers who will make you look like all their other clients. Be authentic. Be personal. After all, this is your big chance to highlight your strengths and show what really makes you different. Keep the video short and the less scripted, the better — since customers are jaded by typical sales pitches and marketing buzzwords. Creating authentic video that captures the human element behind any business allows customers to connect on a personal level. This is TRUE and creating a video that is personal and shows who you are and what you do can be a big factor when a new client chooses your law firm.  Also creating a video of client testimonials can be another powerful tool. And don’t forget to incorporate a call to action. While your authentic video builds trust and drives action, viewers must be given a reason and a way to call you, visit your website, or stop by your store. Be sure to include some action path — for example, a trackable URL, a coupon, discount code, or unique phone number to call. This not only encourages viewers to engage with you, but also provides a tangible way to measure the results of your video. 2. Optimize Video for Google Search The advent of blended or universal search has changed the search game. Search engines now display more and more videos, images, blogs, maps, and books in their results. These new search algorithms weigh video heavily, giving you a great opportunity to increase your relevance in search results (and even achieve that coveted first page ranking on Google). In fact, Forrester Research ran an experiment on the top-searched keywords and discovered that videos have an 11,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of Google’s results, while text has a 500,000-to-1 chance of making it on the first page — in short, video has a 50 times better chance than plain text for getting to the top of search rankings. Even with this incredible opportunity, many marketers don’t yet think about making their video Google-friendly. There are several simple steps you can take to optimize your online video content. 3. Add Video to Your Facebook Page Most likely, your Facebook fans are already customers — the social network gives you the chance to strengthen existing relationships, build your brand, present special offers, as well as find some new customers as you reach into the extended networks of your current fan base. On Facebook, use video to show the human side of your company. Think fun and creative. Show a ‘behind the scenes’ peak at your office or shop. Use video to announce a new contest or special. Post video highlights of past events, customer testimonials, etc. 4. Put Video on YouTube and Other Video Sites YouTube has quickly grown from a network of user-generated content to become an invaluable repository of content. Next to Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine, with more than 3.5 billion queries a month according to comScore. YouTube and other video sites are great vehicles to reach an audience who might not find you otherwise. Best of all, you can create a branded YouTube channel and host your videos without incurring any bandwidth costs. And don’t worry — you don’t necessarily have to create the next viral sensation to find success on YouTube. Small businesses can create valuable new relationships and build sales without generating a million views. 5. Add Video to Your Google Local Business Listing By adding video to your business listing on Google Local, you’ll be able to tell your story and connect with those people who are looking for your products or services, at the very point in time when they’re actively researching or ready to buy. This ultra-targeted form of marketing is highly effective for driving clicks and calls. And amid a list of company names, addresses, and phone numbers, an engaging video brings your listing to life and sets you apart from the crowd. Most Importantly – Get Started There’s no time like the present to get started with video. While spare time is always in short supply for the small business owner, online video can be less time intensive and is relatively low cost compared with other marketing initiatives. Most importantly, video will reap dividends in both the short and long term. This is all great video advise.  Putting a video on your lawyer website is a great move for many reasons, just do it! Read full post at Reel SEO

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More Google Legal Woes: Buzz Lawsuit and EU Regulation

General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine /

POOR GOOGLE….. Google, being the gigantic company that it is, has become the target of legal action and regulatory concern. Just this week, we learned that Italy found Google execs guilty in the case of a controversial video. There's the Google Books lawsuit and in the past Google faced scrutiny for an ad deal with Yahoo! (which they pre-emptively canceled) and its relations with Apple (Eric Schmidt later quit the board). There are a couple of new legal woes on the Google front. First, a class action lawsuit has been brought with regards to Buzz, Google's new social media effort. As you may remember, Gmail users were none too thrilled when Buzz automatically showed up in their email program and automatically updated their network. Google has reversed course on the automation, but it wasn't in time to stop the suit. Meanwhile, the European Commission has received antitrust complaints about Google from three companies: UK price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and – irony of ironies – Microsoft's Ciao by Bing. Oh, and Foundem is partly funded by Microsoft, as well. Google says the complaints from Foundem and ejustice.fr are basically that Google demotes their ranking because they're vertical search engines and competitors to Google. If that's really the the case, that would be like saying Target doesn't give preference to a third party toilet paper company because they want to promote their own toilet paper. Target certainly has the right to promote their own toilet paper over another company's. Last but not least, late breaking today is the EU concern about Google regarding Street View photos. For privacy reasons, Google will blur portions of their Street View photos. But they keep a coy of the unblurred photo. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party of the European Commission has informed Google that keeping unblurred photos for more than a year is not ok. These legal and regulatory issues won't be going away anytime soon. In some areas, the problem is just the lack of a legitimate competitor. In other areas, Google is testing the boundaries of data collection. I'm sure it's quite tempting for a company of Google's size to push the envelope but the market and regulatory agencies will act as de facto checks and balances as long as they do.

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Will Google Buzz Give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money?

Google Search Engine, New Legal Blogs, Social Media Marketing /

Google launched a new social effort today called Google Buzz. If you're immediate reaction is, "Wait, doesn't Yahoo! already have a product named Buzz?" Then you'd be correct. But Google didn't acquire Yahoo! Buzz. Nor has Yahoo! Buzz gone defunct and Google felt ok about picking it up as a name. The two products are alike in name and the fact that they're social. But that's about it. Google Buzz lets you be social from Gmail. You can update your status there and share photos. (Yahoo! Buzz is more akin to social bookmarking and trending topics.) Who do you share Google Buzz with? Gmail contacts, for one, but you can also send your updates to Twitter as well. Your Gmail contacts can respond to your updates, using the @ symbol much like Twitter and now Facebook use. Your Gmail inbox will be used to push notifications to Buzz users. Buzz is rolling out, so it may take a few days before you get access. In the meantime, check out this vid to see how it works:

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178 million Americans watched 33 billion videos in December

Video Marketing, YouTube /

Nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched 33.2 billion online videos during December 2009, according to the latest data from comScore Vedio Metrix. This means Americans watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month. Here are some other related stats from comScore's announcement: 86.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in December. 134.4 million viewers watched more than 13 billion videos on YouTube.com — 97.1 videos per viewer. 44.9 million viewers watched 423.3 million videos on MySpace Sites — 9.4 videos per viewer. The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos, totaling 2.2 hours of videos per viewer. The duration of the average online video was 4.1 minutes. It's no mystery any more, you should create videos for your law firms practice!

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Video Marketing and the Law – What you Should Know

Video Marketing /

Good article from Reel SEO about legal issues related to video marketing. Mark Rosenberg was recently published in Affiliate Summit’s FeedFront magazine with his article titled “Video Marketing and the Law.” We have the article for you to read here and Mark shares with us the basic proactive measures that all video marketers should be aware to to avoid common legal pitfalls, including: right of publicity issues, copyrights, licensing, contracts, and receiving proper consent. Videos can be a very effective Internet marketing tool. Yet, this tool comes with several hidden legal issues. These pitfalls can be avoided if the video marketer is aware of them and takes proactive measures. Right of Publicity issues with online video The most overlooked issue in video marketing is the right of publicity. This right relates to a person’s ability to control whether and how his or her name, likeness and voice are used. In order to avoid right of publicity disputes, affiliate marketers should have all persons appearing in their videos sign a release granting the marketer the right to use that person’s name, likeness, image, etc. in connection with the recording, display and distribution of the video. Get consents in writing These consents must be in writing. That is because some states do not recognize oral consents even if the consent is recorded on video. Everyone appearing in the video should sign a release, regardless of whether the person is an employee, family or a friend. That way, if an actor has a change of heart after the video is taped or after it begins to be displayed, the marketer is protected. Otherwise, the actor could potentially bring a lawsuit for a monetary award and an injunction prohibiting the use of the video. Copyright issues with online video Copyright law also plays a major role in video marketing. Preliminarily, in almost all cases, using video images copied from YouTube or from a television network’s or a show’s Web site without consent is a copyright violation. While the basics of copyright infringement are usually obvious, the concept of copyright ownership is not. As a result, affiliate marketers are often not aware that just because they pay someone to create a video, they do not necessarily own the copyright in that work. In many cases, the person who actually creates the video is considered the work’s author and the owner of its copyright. In fact, everyone involved in the creation of the video, including the script writer, the director and the production crew may own a portion of the copyright in the finished video and possess the legal right to determine whether and how the video can be used. This issue can be avoided by having all persons involved in the creation of the video sign a work-for-hire agreement before production commences. These agreements are written contracts which specify that entity which commissions the video owns the entire copyright in it. Background music is an additional copyright issue in video marketing. This issue is often overlooked. Unless the video uses only original music created by the affiliate marketer, the marketer must obtain consent to use the music. Otherwise, there is a potential infringement issue. By employing these basic measures, you can avoid many of the legal issues raised by video marketing. Read More

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Video Search Marketing Tips

Video Marketing /

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos. 1. Optimize with keywords. Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in: File name Title Tags URL Link text Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll improve the user experience and your search rankings. 2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites. In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links. Remember these few points to maximize results: Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites 3. Implement a linking strategy. Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include: Cross-linking to other videos Linking to videos from relevant web pages Linking to videos in blog posts Tweeting the video Linking to videos from social media pages Bookmarking the video 4. Encourage viewers to share your videos. First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting, relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it, let alone view it. From there: Allow and encourage users to comment on the video Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed 5. Re-purpose your videos. As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web: Embed videos in blog posts Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your website source All of these are good tips to get your video more exposure in the video search engines.

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Google Basics

Google Search Engine /

For those wondering about the basics of Google, here is some good information From the Google Webmaster help section. When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you're almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results? In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned ("served") to you. The three key processes in delivering search results to you are: Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it? Learn more… Indexing: Can Google index your site? Learn more… Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search? Learn more… Crawling back to top Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index. Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service. Indexing back to top Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages. Serving results back to top When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking. Google's Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it's because we've algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user's query.

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