The Internet is the major source for attracting businesses and providing millions of users with unlimited amounts of useful information through multiple media channels. The skyrocketing growth statistics for specific social media and blogging sites have become a valuable resource for the already millions logged in while also being surged with new users daily.

Social media giants such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and  blog sites (WordPress) have captured a large percentage of these Internet users while allowing them to dictate the direction of the user provided content. Today, Internet users are dedicating much of their day finding, befriending, fanning and following once they discover how easy it is to use these sites. The online social media and blogging communities continue to thrive while each user is exposed to more and more information through friends, colleagues and business web pages.

As Internet users continually post an increasing amount of information on blogs and websites, it seems as though it has become diluted in an endless sea of content. This is why businesses are constantly driven to find new, witty tactics and visually stimulating marketing solutions to gain greater exposure for their products and services.

Businesses are turning to video marketing on YouTube to quickly capture users that watch videos from their home and business computers, as well as the ubiquitous mobile devices that can now support video streaming.

YouTube users select videos that are characterized to them as educational, entertaining or informational, but not commercially-driven. Think of this interactive channel as an alternative and effective source in providing useful, and in some cases humorous, information to capture your audience’s attention. The benefit of displaying these videos provides businesses with another valuable capability of directing and driving qualified users to their website.

This traffic driven to websites ultimately offers valuable leads and potential sales! The advantage of submitting these videos through YouTube (since YouTube is owned by Google) is that once they are uploaded, they automatically go into Google’s search engine and can result in rising awareness for your company throughout the Web.

Keep in mind that many of the same policies and guidelines apply to videos as they would with your website’s content on Google’s search network. Finally, remember it is important to include your company name, web address and a good combination of relevant keywords to attract the right consumers to your offerings.

Interested in joining the latest YouTube craze?

To do this, you simply click the YouTube upload button on the homepage and sign in. Immediately upload, tag, and share your videos with the YouTube community. For the best results, embed your uploaded video from YouTube onto your website in order to spare your own website’s bandwidth while providing maximum brand exposure. Who knows, you may enjoy benefits that you were only dreaming of! Remember to speak to the point and always keep it clean, clear, and concise!

Extensive keyword research is the first step to any search marketing campaign. Keyword research is the framework on which your entire campaign is built, whether you’re using search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, or both. If you don’t get your keywords right, your efforts will be wasted.

If you’ve started on the wrong foot, there’s still time. Good keyword research is an evolution. The world of search is constantly changing, and your keywords should, too. The terms that people are using today may not be the most successful six months from now.

Whether you’re putting together your first keyword list or adapting your current list, here are some tips to get you started.

Don’t use the same keyword list for your SEO and PPC campaigns.

SEO and PPC are complete different, and they require different keyword lists. In fact, most of the keywords you use for SEO probably won’t even end up on your PPC list. PPC keyword lists are highly targeted — you’re looking for keywords that will target a very specific audience to ensure you’re not spending money on clicks from tire-kickers. For SEO, your keywords should be relevant, but much broader to reach a larger search audience.

Never build a keyword list based on assumptions.

No matter how well you know your target audience, the truth is that as a business owner you think differently than your consumers. Many marketers and business owners create keyword lists based on their knowledge of the business instead of search volume. They’re surprised to discover that consumers are searching for a completely different list of terms. Your technical knowledge may be preventing you from finding the laymen’s terms for which your customers are searching. While a good knowledge of the terminology in your business is a great place to start your research, you need metrics to back you up. Use a keyword research program like Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool to ensure that the keywords are the right ones.

Break long keyword phrases into pieces.

For SEO, try breaking your keyword phrases into smaller pieces to maximize your reach. For example, while “new houses for sale” may have a decent search volume, you might have better results with something like “new home listings,” because it works as a stand-alone keyword phrase, two separate shorter phrases (new home and home listings), and home has a higher search volume than houses. Create power phrases by ensuring that each and every word in your keyword phrase packs a punch.

Choose your keywords wisely.

Once you’ve built a long list of potential keywords, it’s decision time. For PPC, you can test a long list of keywords to find the most successful. For SEO, you need to be a little more selective. The most successful optimizations use a very short list of keywords — no more than 3 for each page. Don’t just choose the keywords with the highest search volume. Look deeper to create longer keyword phrases that will garner search volume without being too competitive. Find a balance between search volume, competition, and relevance.

Constantly update your keywords based on analytics, conversions, and traffic.

Good keyword research can create a pretty powerful initial list, but you’re not finished. You need to make constant adjustments. With PPC, the changes will most likely be daily, especially in the beginning. Watch your click-through rates and conversions to ensure that your keywords are driving relevant traffic without costing too much, and keep an eye on your analytics to find negative keywords.

SEO is a long-term process, so you’ll want to give your site some time to collect data before making changes. Monitor your analytics constantly to determine which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site. If you’re not getting the results you wanted after a month or two, it may be time to make some changes, shift your focus, or find new keywords.

Usability is one of the most important (and often overlooked) elements of search engine optimization. If your website is designed for the end user, you’ll reap the benefits in your search engine rankings and your customers will be more likely to interact with your website in the way that you desire.

Keep these usability best practices in mind as you design your website to ensure a good user experience and better search engine results:

Navigation

• Include a clear navigation bar that links to every page on your website and appears consistently on each page.
• Link to pages on your website internally throughout the copy using relevant, keyword-rich anchor text.
• Use breadcrumbs to show users where they are and where they came from.

Accessibility

• File sizes for your pages should ideally be smaller than 200KB to optimize loading time and search engine crawling.
• Place copy in the first 100KB to ensure that your keyword-rich content is being crawled and indexed.
• Keep pages as close to the root as possible. Users and search engines should be able to reach each page on your site from the homepage in two clicks or less.
• Utilize permanent 301 redirects for known deleted pages to land users on a similar page and maintain links.
• Use a custom 404 page to redirect users and search engines that have reached a page that no longer exists on your site back to the most useful content on your site.

Readability

• Don’t use fancy fonts for your body copy. Simple fonts, preferably sans serif, are easiest on the eyes and most likely to display properly on all browsers.
• Write clear, concise content for each page. Web users get overwhelmed with huge blocks of text, so limit the amount of text on each page.
• Break up large blocks of text into bite-sized pieces with headers.

Simplicity

• Keep your on-page code as clean as possible by moving JavaScript and style sheets into external files.
• Use animation and Flash sparingly. Too much animation can be distracting for users, and while search engines are getting better at indexing Flash, it’s not perfect yet.

Optimization

• Focus on one page at a time in your optimization, and optimize it for no more than three highly relevant keywords. This will tell users and search engines what the page is about quickly and easily.

Finally, be sure to test run usability tests with several user types likely to visit your site to catch problems that normal users may encounter. Be sure to run tests on all of the major browsers (Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Firefox, and Safari). What works on one browser may not work on another.

A recent study by the Google User Experience Research team (featured here at WebProNews) determined that searches have become so routine that users tend to make decisions about where to look and what to click unconsciously. But Google is clever. They’re using eye-tracking technology to gather valuable information about how users scan search results:

“Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.”

According to Google, adding images to a search results page does not affect the order in which users view results. Even if images appear below text links, users’ eyes are drawn to the top results first.

These results aren’t surprising. They prove what any SEO-savvy marketer already knows — one of the most effective ways of getting noticed on the Web is appearing in the top organic results for your strongest keywords. What does surprise me is how quickly users lose interest in a results page — many users don’t even look beyond the second result.

If you’re not at the top or close to it, now might be the time to revamp your search engine optimization strategy to make sure you’re capitalizing on the power of organic search.

You probably use Google Analytics or another search tracking tool on your website (and if you don’t, you should). What makes these applications so powerful for SEO is their ability to show exactly how potential customers are finding your site — especially when it comes to keywords.

If you regularly monitor your analytics, you’re able to see exactly what keywords users are typing into search engines to find your website. This information is extremely useful from an SEO perspective, because it tells you whether you’re optimizing for the right keywords. It also helps measure the success of an optimization by showing whether the keywords you’ve used to optimize your site are actually drawing in traffic.

Google recently began testing a new search interface powered by AJAX. What you need to know is that this could wreak havoc on the ability to track keyword searches with an analytics tracking tool.

You already may have started noticing referral traffic from “Google.com.” This is caused by the way the AJAX interface handles searches. In the past, the URL in your navigation bar after a search looked like this:

Analytics tools are able to fish the keywords out of that search to show you what keywords your visitors are searching for in order to find your site.

If your search is being affected by the AJAX testing, your URL after searching will look like this:

The difference is in the “#” symbol after the word “search.” It’s called a hashtag, and analytics tools are unable to read search terms after the hashtag. Instead of specifying which keywords were used in the search, they list the referral from “Google.com,” which means you lose valuable data about the keywords.

According to a statement from Google, this is only a test, and they “have no intention to disrupt referrer tracking.” This isn’t a permanent switch — yet. However, if you regularly monitor your site’s analytics and keywords, your referrer tracking may already be disrupted by these tests.

Whether you’re new to search engine optimization or looking to update your SEO with a fresh approach, these tips will ensure that your site is search engine friendly, user friendly, and up to date.

Add quality, text-based content.

Graphics may look pretty, but search engines prefer good, keyword-rich copy. Make sure your site has at least 250 words of text on each page.

Break text up with headers.

HTML headers (denoted with an H1, H2, H3, etc.) make pages easier to read. They also carry extra keyword weight for search engines. Use keywords in your headers to let search engines and users know the most important themes of each page.

Use keywords for anchor text in links.

Anchor text is the actual text users see on your links. Instead of using words like “click here,” use keywords that are relevant to what users will see when they click the link.

Blog.

Blogging adds a constant stream of fresh content to your site, which makes both users and search engines happy. It also offers a personal voice and an interactive element to your website.

Put your customers before the search engines.

The bottom line is quality, user-friendly content drives traffic. Keep search engine optimization tactics in mind, but never sacrifice content quality for SEO.