A new targeting tool is set for release from ValueClick. The tool is a predictive behavioral targeting tool which provides marketers with anonymous consumer behavior and then predicts future behaviors based on the past information. The Precision BT suite combines Precision Retargeting and Precision Profiles, giving marketers unique insight into consumer behavior.

“What makes Precision Profiles unique is our access to a critical mass of anonymous consumer online experiences and the way our technology dynamically categorizes and transforms them into hundreds of interest segments,” said Matthew Boyd, senior vice president, ValueClick Media. “Combined with the ability for our optimization technology to identify the best possible context in which to serve an ad, we have assembled the most scalable, data-driven audience targeting platform for marketers to achieve their brand and direct response objectives.”

By using predictive algorithms, marketers are given insight into the segments and times that consumers’ visit certain websites, publishers or content sites. This is very valuable information because by knowing when and where consumers will “stop by” they can determine where and how they will advertise, thereby increasing campaign ROI.

The anonymous information provided to marketers includes web browsing, interaction with ads and search and shopping behaviors.

Most smaller businesses know by now that search engine optimization is an effective way to get their sites noticed by the almighty search engines. But a recent survey indicates that SEO is the best way to generate online leads. Is your site optimized for search? Paul Bruemmer writes on SearchEngineLand about a recent study done in the UK by eConsultancy on online marketing.

The study demonstrates that “natural search is the best tactic for generating online leads, concluding it is greatly underused despite the fact that it outperforms nearly all other types of online marketing.”

The stats:

Natural search (79%) is the most frequently used online marketing tactic for lead generation, followed by email marketing in-house lists (75%) and paid search (71%). Over half (52%) of company respondents said natural search was “very effective.” Just under half (48%) said paid search was very effective.

Bruemmer writes: ” While online lead generation is becoming more important for many businesses, only a little over half of the company respondents in this survey felt their company wasn’t exploiting this type of marketing as effectively as it could be, illustrating that online lead generation delivers results but could be utilized better.”

Bruemmer notes that according to the report, a larger proportion of online lead generation budgets go to paid search advertising even though “natural search is perceived as providing the best value for the money. Companies haven’t invested in natural search over and above other internet marketing tactics because it requires more effort, but don’t make that mistake in your search marketing efforts.”

Bruemmer addresses in-house search marketing managers in his emphasis on “taking advantage of all search marketing tactics,” but for many smaller businesses, their marketing managers are wearing many hats or in some cases don’t exist. SEO is crucial to a Web site’s success and eConsultancy’s survey validates the point but is it worth hiring an SEO consultant for?

In the course of profiling many small and mid size businesses, it is clear that SEO is becoming increasingly recognized as a necessary part of an online strategy. But it seems that there is no universal approach to how to implement an effective SEO strategy: Some smaller businesses are outsourcing to their Web site developers, some to SEO consultants, and some are trying to learn the art of SEO on their own. Which practice is best of course depends upon the nature of the business, it’s size, and the ability of those involved to implement effective SEO strategies.

RSS and Atom are formats for publishing syndication “feeds,” which are simple lists of news headlines, blog postings or other online content. Today, large and growing audiences of web users are using RSS and Atom-enabled newsreaders to quickly scan and read dozens of their favorite sites at a glance. The syndication craze has caught on big time, as evidenced by the fact that almost everybody - from The New York Times to the blogger next door - has started publishing a syndication feed.

Everybody likes it when webpages download quickly. That’s why size optimization matters so much for commercial websites — smaller sites (in terms of kilobyte-size) make for faster downloads, and happier users.

Speed is rarely an issue with RSS and Atom feeds. They’re mostly free from fancy HTML layout and modem-clogging graphics, and usually download so quickly that users can’t tell which feeds are fatter than others. In fact, serious RSS surfers usually prefer the feeds that carry a few extra kilobytes of text, in the form of unabridged articles or lengthy abstracts. Scanning a skimpy set of headlines in a news aggregator isn’t as satisfying as getting the full story.

GZip shrinks the source code of your file before sending it out over the wires. So, while newsreaders will still be banging on your site, they’ll be pulling smaller files. Most full-featured newsreaders accept GZipped files and understand how to decompress them.

If your web server isn’t serving pages with HTTP 1.1 and compression turned on, check with your sysadmin. It’s possible they’re compressing files with the .html extension, but forgot to add the .rss, .xml or .rdf extensions. It’s also possible that they’re just really behind the times, and still running an older HTTP 1.0 server.

If you use a blogging tool such as Blogger, TypePad or MovableType, you’ll notice the option to “ping” certain sites whenever you add new information to your blog. Pinging informs certain RSS-savvy portal sites and search engines (like Technorati) that your feed has been updated and ready to be added to their database. The advantages for you, of course, are increased visibility and traffic. Traditional search engines, like Google, only glance at your site on a regular, fixed schedule. It can take up to a week for your site changes to register in their search index. In contrast, these RSS-savvy spiders will attempt to visit your site’s feed whenever it is altered, thereby providing something closer to real-time search.

There’s also an excellent site called Ping-O-Matic that will ping over a dozen services on your behalf, and at no cost. The single burden for you is that you are required to manually enter your URL on their home page.

That just about wraps up our advice for juicing up your syndication feeds. However, there is one more very important piece of advice that I feel compelled to pass along. The techniques we discussed in this article should help you nip and tuck your syndication files into very pretty RSS or Atom feeds, but only from a technical standpoint. Don’t forget that in a text-centric medium like syndication, content is still king. File compression and favicons are no substitute for stories, opinions or ideas that deserve an audience.

Nothing trumps good writing! If you take the time to craft a great entry plus a thoughtful title and a clear description, that will impress users more than any 88×31 logo can.

Video is changing the way we use the Internet for entertainment, education, blogging, product promotion and so many other forms of content. Services like YouTube , Metacafe, Google Video,AOL Video and a host of others have created an enormous online viewing audience by making it easy for anyone to upload, search and share videos.

Online video viewings increased by more than 66 percent in just one year, coming to an average of more than 10 billion views per month in 2008, according to comScore estimates. Major entertainment companies, marketing  experts and advertisers are all scratching their heads trying to figure out the best way to turn a profit  on such a huge viewing audience, and many industry leaders are investing heavily in producing content exclusively for the Web. However, the real beauty of the current status is that anyone can create and post a video on the Internet and have a potential viewing audience of millions.

So why is that so important? Like written content, video content has become a powerful form of viral marketing material as well as link bait for search engine optimization.

Videos should first be published on the Web site they were created for. Each video posted on the Web site should have an individual URL (uniform resource locator) that is fully optimized according the key phrase targeted by the video. For example, the page should include targeted keywords in the title tag with a corresponding h1 tag, along with image alt attributes and any other keyword associated on-page optimization. It is also becoming popular to include a transcript of the video on the same page, thus adding a great deal of written content to that page.

Once the page is created, the addition of a video site map will help search engine crawlers to better index and rank the content. Posting the video on the author’s Web site first will also prevent any contest over the origin of the content.

Videos should also be posted on a number of video-hosting and video-sharing Web sites like those mentioned earlier. YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe and AOL Video are the most important sites for submission as they have the most common results in blended search. However, videos from many other submission sites are finding their way into high page ranks as well. Videos should be submitted to each of these by hand with keyword-rich titles and tags, as well as unique and interesting descriptions. By sharing videos on sites like these with friends and colleagues, more views will begin to accumulate, bringing more validity to the content. The higher the number of views a video receives on these sites, the more likely it is to gain a high page rank.

Bookmarking and social networks are now major players in search engine optimization, with major search engines indexing this user-based content. The specific URL of the video should be bookmarked on social media sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Digg and others, and will appear as an actual image icon with a new specific URL on the corresponding site.

Though YouTube is the most likely platform for obtaining a large number of views, creating buzz through social media Web sites will bring more direct traffic and provide deep links to the optimized Web site. Achieving traffic through these methods is optimal because it drives traffic directly to the Web site. For this reason, it is also a reasonable practice to install basic bookmarking buttons on the specific video page so that visitors can easily add it to their favorites and bookmarks.

Utilizing video content in Internet marketing and optimization campaigns is a very young strategy that will continue to evolve along with the continued development of search engine technology. These strategies basically follow a previously established and proven link-building model, already widely used to optimize written content.

By following these basic protocols and constantly seeking new avenues for attracting viewers, video can be an extremely successful form of online marketing. The time is now to begin creating videos for the Web. Because the concepts are so new, the opportunity is ripe for businesses to control the video space of their specific industry. Source: TechNews