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What’s New with Caffeine

Based on testing done by some other people, rumor has it you can expect Google Caffeine to be:

• Faster - Google nearly doubled the speed in which its search results are generated
• More Accurate – The new search seems to put more emphasis on keywords
• Timely – Search results seem to change faster with new articles
• Bigger – Larger index, turning up more results for each search

So what does this mean for your site?

From an SEO stand point there may be a few things you can do to make sure Caffeine doesn’t take off with out you.

• Keywords – Since more emphasis seems to be placed on keywords, get your title tags, description tags and copy chop full of them and make sure you’re using the right ones to accurately describe your products of services.
• Load Time – Reduce your site’s and pages’ load times. People get frustrated when they have to wait for a page to load with will often click back or close out of the search all together. It is believed that the new “faster” Google will rank faster loading pages higher than ones with long load times.
• Content – Update you site regularly with new, original content. Google wants to be accurate and up to date so sites with fresh and relevant content are likely to be ranked higher than sites that haven’t been updated in a long time.
• Quality Links – Link building will still be important, but the emphasis will be on high quality links that are also relevant to your site. Any old high quality link will no longer do. This goes for both inbound and outbound links.

All these changes are really just to improve search results. And isn’t that what everyone really wants – faster, more accurate and relevant results? So don’t be afraid - grab a cup o’ joe and get ready for some Caffeine!

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RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is generally used by websites who have content that is updated frequently.  A feed is a document that contains a part or all of the updated content along with the date and author. Using a feed reader (you can download them from Google or Yahoo! for free) You will be able to add the feeds of all your favorite sites with the click of a button and then have the latest content from your favorite websites all located in one place.

Increase Your Website Traffic With An RSS Feed

If you own a website, at first glance providing a feed doesn’t seem like a good idea if they don’t even have to visit your site to see it! Generally this is not the case, when supplying a feed most sites will supply a partial feed so that if the story is of interest, readers will need to visit your site for the full story. You are also able to display the feeds of other websites on yours – instantly generating content for your website.

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Ingredients:

2 or 3 keyword phrases per page of SEO. For best results use keywords that have a high search volume and little competition. Google has a free and easy to use keyword tool that may help you pick your keywords.

Directions:

1. Add keyword phrases, separated by vertical line or dash, as your page title
2. Place keyword phrases into description tag. Try to keep total word count for your description tag under 30.
3. Stir in keyword phrases to keyword tag, being sure to mix up the word order well.
4. Add your keywords to the image descriptions (alt tags) for all images on the page.
5. Use H1 tags for all headers and mix in your keywords.
6. Sprinkle your keywords lightly throughout the content of the page, using each keyword phrase at least one or two times, more depending on the amount of copy.
7. For added seasoning, bold the keywords in the copy and / or use them as links to other pages in your site.
8. Upload your SEO and let bake for 2 to 4 weeks or until Google re-indexes your site.

Nutritional Information:

Per Serving - Increased web visibility and traffic through organic search results.

Have a great holiday everyone!

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These days, there is no question that social media marketing is a major buzzword in promoting your company. Whether it be Facebook, blogging, Twitter, or Digg, people are investing a lot of time and money into making these sites work for them. In fact, according to a poll by e-Tailing Group in September of 2009, by the end of next year 96% of brands and retailers will be using Facebook fan pages as a community and social networking tool for their business. So the question is how can you use these sites to help you too?

Great question! All of the sites mentioned above can be fantastic sources (and to find out more about how Twitter can help you, watch our Twitter for Business video blog series about it in posts below!!) but we will explore some options with Facebook in this post.

The first thing to do is to set up a Facebook fan page for your business. Just follow the set-up instructions or if you want a more branded or interactive fan page, we can help by developing a custom Facebook fan page for you. Either way, with a fan page, you will have a venue to get whatever message you want to whoever “fans” your business.

It is a great idea to send messages to all your Facebook friends suggesting they follow your fan page and hopefully you gain more followers from that. Through your fan page, you can post exciting things happening with your business and upcoming events that are going to happen. Specifically, you can post messages about upcoming deals you may be having at your company.

For example, if you are giving a special offer to customers because your company is celebrating its five-year anniversary, why not tell all your fans on Facebook in hopes of a potential sale?

Messaging your fans could also be used if you want to host an event that you want people to attend. You can send them an invite to attend your event. All their Facebook friends will see the event as well and could greatly increase the awareness and attendance of your event than if you chose to stay away from Facebook. With how competitive businesses are now, you should do whatever you can to get noticed by the public.

The potential doesn’t end there! On your fan page, you can link back to your website and have your company telephone number listed. This not only gives people another way to reach your site, it can also help bump up where your website is ranked in Google searches and other search engines. It could be the difference that sends your company to the top of the charts!

The fun never ends when you join Facebook! Adding Facebook to your company’s marketing repertoire makes you more relatable. Your customer will see you as someone who is social and in tune with recent trends. This means you are using a venue that they feel comfortable using. They can see what your company is all about through Facebook before giving you a sale later.

Once you have tackled Facebook, you can take the basic principles you have learned to then further market yourself in other online social tools. From fan pages to messaging, higher rankings to higher customer usability, Facebook does it all. It’s time you start using it for your company and see your sales grow!

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Unfortunately, a lot of the single word domains are already in use or purchased by someone looking to make a hefty profit. So unless you have an established brand or business name that will be easy to market online and easy for your consumers to remember, you may want to consider a domain name that has your keywords in it instead.

Keyword Rich Domain Names

Not only do search engines, like Google and Yahoo, give preference to domains with keywords, but so do people when their choosing which link in the results to click on. Both search engines and people searching tend to assume that if the keywords are in the domain name, it must be relevant.

It can also help with off-site search engine optimization. One of the most important factors search engines use in determining which sites rank high for which keywords is incoming links. If your keywords are your domain name, then whether people link to you with anchor text or just your web address, your keywords are still showing up in the link, giving you a nice rankings boost.

If you decide to use a keyword rich domain name, here are a few tips for picking a good one that search engines will like and people will remember.

• Try not to pick anything that’s too long
• It’s best if it’s all one word (no hyphens or dashes)

But if you do separate out your keywords…

• Use only one hyphen at most! Any more than one and you run the risk of being flagged as spam by search engines. It’s also a lot harder to remember and verbally pass on to other people.
• Also, don’t use underscores; they are hard to see and don’t always show_up_if_you_underline_words (which is common practice for links).

Before you get your heart set on a particular domain name or keyword phrase, check out a site like Whois,  Web Hosting Search or even Go Daddy and make sure it’s available. These will also let you lookup registration data for them, search by keyword and through previously registered domains that are now available. So good luck and hopefully you’ll find a good one!

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Hard Drive

The hard drives you throw into your system and their configuration can have quite an impact on performance. The hard drive affects how long it takes to load your software and affects how fast your computer reads and writes those large video files. Since there are so many variables here, I’ll spend the most time discussing this topic.

First, let’s talk about the drives themselves.

Currently, hard drives are incredibly inexpensive. It’s common to find 1TB 7200-rpm 32MB cache drives for under $100. If you have some extra cash to spend, Western Digital has the Velociraptor 10,000-rpm drives. The latest technology is the solid state drives (SSD), but they’re extremely expensive and I wouldn’t recommend them…yet.

Now let’s talk about configuring your drives.

The configuration of your hard drives and manner in which they work with your system can be just as important, if not more important than the drives themselves. The first rule of thumb is to use more than one hard drive. You want to have one hard drive for your operating system and software with your data (i.e. video files) on separate drives. The reasoning for this is simple. If your computer gets a virus, your data is not affected and it’s easy to wipe the drive and reinstall your software. It also increases performance because your computer isn’t reading and writing to the same hard drive simultaneously.

The next common configuration that many people will recommend is to RAID your drives. There are many configurations of RAID, but the one that most people refer to (in terms of video performance) is what’s called striping, or RAID 0. With RAID 0, two hard drives are used together to create one logical drive.

For example, two 500GB drives would be striped together to create one 1TB drive. This increases the performance substantially, allowing data to be read and written faster, since the drives are working together. In the case of an editing workstation, if RAID 0 were to be used, a minimum of four drives would be required – two drives for the operating system and two drives for video storage.

Some users would go as far as using six drives in the RAID, using two drives for the operating system/software, two drives for captured video, and two drives for rendered video. Now while there is a substantial performance increase in running a RAID 0 configuration, there are also a couple of disadvantages.

The first and most obvious downside is that more drives are required - twice as many to be exact.  The second and biggest disadvantage to running a RAID 0 configuration is the risk involved. With RAID 0, if one of the two drives fails, the data is lost from both drives. This means that if one of the two 500GB drives goes bad, you lose your entire 1TB of data, regardless of if the other drive was in perfect working order. For this reason alone, many users choose to not use RAID 0.

For myself, I use three separate drives in my system. One drive contains my operating system and software. Another drive is used only for captured video and pre-rendered items. This is my “read” drive. The last drive is used only for rending projects. This is my “write” drive. This works quite well with only one drive being read from while another drive is only used to write files to. Although this configuration isn’t quite as fast as a RAID 0, I don’t have to worry about as many drives failing and losing more data.

Conclusion

I’m going to end this here since these are the most crucial components for any workstation. Although this blog is probably already outdated, I do think many of the concepts here still (and will continue to) hold true. I tried to keep this as objective as possible and for that reason I didn’t give too many specifics. With that in mind, feel free to use this as merely a guideline when building your next video editing workstation. Good luck and happy rendering!

P.S. For those of you wondering, these are the specs of my latest workstation.

Processor:     Intel Core i7 920
Memory:        6GB DDR3 1600mhz
Video:            Radeon HD 4830
Hard Drives:  1.5TB WD Black 7200rpm 32mb cache
Seagate 1TB 7200rpm 32Mb cache (x2)
O/S:               Windows 7 RC

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Memory

This is the one area that you can splurge on without spending a whole lot. I’d recommend throwing at least 4GB of memory into your workstation. By today’s standards 4-8GB is a good place to be, especially if you’ve got a quad-core setup.

In video editing, memory is most often used while previewing video. If you use Adobe After Effects, you know what I’m talking about.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you’re using an Intel setup, you may want to shoot for 6GB since many Intel motherboards support triple channel memory. Currently, as I’m writing this, AMD motherboards don’t appear to offer support for triple channel memory, but that’ll probably change soon.

The key here is that you really can’t have too much memory when it comes to video.

Video Card

Ironically, the video card isn’t very crucial here. Well, let me correct myself – it isn’t AS crucial here.

Unless you do a fair amount of 3D modeling and animation, you really don’t need to concern yourself with spending too much on a graphics card. I recommend getting something middle of the road, spending somewhere around $70-$150.

Keep in mind that you’ll want to find something that has at least dual monitor support. The video card I use has two monitor ports as well as an HDMI out. This way I can use both of my monitors, while also outputting the preview to my 32” LCD TV. Features like these can sometimes be more important than the processing power of the card alone.

Now, I should make mention that the new version of Adobe After Effects does take advantage of some OpenGL graphics cards. You can see a list of the supported cards on their website. The list is quite large and many of the cards fall into the midrange I just spoke of. I’m not sure how much of a performance leap you’re really going to see by spending a boatload on one of the more expensive cards supported. Chances are you’d be better off putting that extra cash into more memory and/or a better processor.

And that will do it for Part 2. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of Building an Editing Workstation later this week when I cover the hard drive. And hopefully that will leave you a nice guideline when building your next workstation.

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Today you can get a 1TB 7200-rpm hard drive for under a hundred bucks. Ten years ago, that might’ve gotten you a 10GB hard drive. The same goes for memory. Today you can get 6GB of DDR3 RAM for about what 32MB of EDO RAM went for about 15 years ago. It’s incredible.

So what does this mean in terms of video production? In simple terms, video editing has not only gotten far more powerful, but it’s also become much more affordable.

So you’ve got some money to spend on a workstation. Let’s take a look at what’s out there. For the sake of things, I’m going to assume that you’re not a stockbroker or looking to break the bank. We’ll say you’re looking to spend $800-$1200. Obviously, if you’re a MAC person, this blog isn’t for you.

Motherboard/Processor

The first thing you need to do is decide if you want to build an Intel or AMD system. Generally, Intel systems cost a bit more to build. Decent AMD motherboards start around $70-$80, whereas decent Intel motherboards can start around $200.  Similarly, Intel processors tend to be a bit more than AMD processors. On the other side of things, it’s important to note that when it comes to multimedia, Intel systems have a track record of performing better than AMD systems.

Most benchmarks clearly show Intel systems outperforming AMD systems by a substantial margin. Whether or not this performance gain is worth the price difference is up to you, the buyer. You’ll definitely want to do some research before making your decision, and remember that this blog should only be used as a guideline.

Not much has changed in terms of building a solid editing workstation. You still want to put as much money into the processor and memory as possible, since that’s what editing software harnesses the most. Now when it comes to processors, quad-cores are where it’s at.

Most of the major NLEs (non-linear editors) take advance of multi-core processors, allowing for much faster render times and faster, higher quality previewing. With prices as affordable as they are, quad-core processors are really the way to go and that’s where the future is headed. You really don’t want to cut any corners here as the processor is really the heart of the workstation.

For example, the processor will directly affect render times, as well as the speed of encoding and decoding video. If you do any amount of compositing along using multiple effects, you’ll definitely see a difference here.

I recommend taking the fastest processor that’s at the top of the line, and buying the one that’s a couple steps below it. Usually that’s where the best price point is at. If you’re going for AMD, check out the Phenom II processors. For Intel, the Core i7 processors are fantastic.

That’s it for Part 1. If you can hold out for a week or so, in my next few posts I’ll cover memory, video cards and hard drives. By then end, you’ll have an overview of most crucial components for any editing workstation. So until next time…

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Developing a seasonal marketing strategy for this time of year can be extremely effective. Even though we are currently in an economic downturn, we all know that people will still increase their spending around the holidays. You should make sure to grab some of that market, so here are some helpful tips on what can be effective.

Since people are already determined to buy products, you may have an easier time convincing them that they should be buying your products. One way to appeal to your customer is through their emotions. Seasons are linked heavily with memories of holidays past and loved ones, so don’t be afraid to use these in your advertisements.

During this time, people want to buy because they are in a festive mood, and often, they don’t even think of it as making a purchase at all but more as an act of making others happy. So another idea might be to donate a portion of their purchase’s profits to charity.

With most consumers shopping on a budget this year, be prepared for more comparison shopping as they try to scope out the best deals before making a purchase. And an increased focus on practical gifts is also likely.

Lastly, keep in mind that seasonal marketing is applicable for more than just the holiday season. Halloween is actually another big purchasing time, although it might be a little late to scrape together a seasonal marketing strategy for it now!

Using advertisements that fit in with the time of year can be very effective no matter what it is. For example, a car repair shop could advertise a “Back to School Special” in August by emphasizing the importance of being able to pick up your kids from school. This could inspire parents to get their car in for a tune up before the hectic fall season starts.

Although snow is unexpected this early in the season, it offers a perfect opportunity to reflect on how seasonal marketing can help you! There is an urgency to buy up through New Year’s, so don’t hesitate to make a marketing plan that appeals to your customer, making it your product that they are buying!

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