According to the analytics firm, 94 percent of 15- to 17-year-old Australians watch shows, movies, or both at least once a month on a desktop or laptop computer.  Mobile devices are playing key roles in streaming online video content with two-thirds of smartphone users watching on average short clips at least once a month. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets has led to higher multitasking levels across different devices and platforms with social media as an enabler.

Frost & Sullivan’s latest report of The Online Video Market of the land down under, written in association with TVN, draws from its first Australian Online Video Usage Trends Survey in May of this year. The study analyzed the online video consumption behavior of 1,000 Australians aged 15-65 years.

“The online video advertising market grew by 58 per cent in the 12 months to June 2012 to reach $86 million, faster than any previous year,” said Phil Harpur, Senior Research Manager, Australia & New Zealand ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan. “A growing number of ‘light’ TV watchers are now watching online video across a range of devices while 40 percent of tablet owners are accessing their tablet as they watch traditional TV, always or most of the time.”

Pete Ostick, TVN Managing Director, said the growth of watching online video content on smartphones and tablets opened challenges and opportunities in advertising.  He said, “Brands need to find new ways to reach their audiences as more of us turn to our mobile devices during TV ad breaks or choose to watch more long form content online.”

Now mainstream activities, TV shows and movies now cater almost half of tablet users nationwide at least once a month, says the latest report.  Short video clips remain the most popular with 39 per cent of tablet owners viewing these on most days.

“Tablets are significantly changing entrenched TV user behaviour patterns. Around half (51 per cent) of tablet owners indicated that using a tablet has to some degree reduced the amount of time they spend watching TV shows or movies. As tablet penetration rises and behaviour patterns become more established, the impact that tablet usage is expected to have on general consumer behaviour is expected to increase.

“Developing engaging and targeted online video advertising campaigns is a key strategy for a growing number of brands as they seek to offset the fall in TV ad engagement and leverage the rise of online video,” Ostick added.

The market, according to Frost & Sullivan’s forecast, will continue to thrive in the next five years and grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39 per cent from 2012 to 2017, an increase from $86 million in 2012 to $442 million in 2017. The company’s prediction says it will outperform all other major online general advertising segments such as banner ads, advertorials, sponsorships and e-newsletters.

“Attracted by the greater targetability, engagement and interactivity that online ad serving platform solutions offer, agencies and large brands are increasingly seeing online video as an important and crucial part of the overall advertising mix while an acute shortage of inventory remains. In addition, the adoption of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) and Digital Video Player Ad Interface Definition (VPAID) standards have made it more efficient and effective for publishers to monetise their online assets,” said Harpur.

Frost & Sullivan says the online video market will mature and witness three dominant players: TVN (a media and technology company dedicated to Internet TV), Smartclip (Adconion’s video offering) and Tube Mogul.

Source: Frost & Sullivan

Image: CeBIT Australia, via Flickr (CC)

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The National Institute of Economic and Industry Research released a report this week to reveal that 20,000 Australian workers every year lose their jobs to China, India, and other offshore centres, and predicted that one million service sector jobs will travel abroad by 2042.

BusinessesForSale.com, arguably the world’s biggest resource for buying and selling businesses, thinks Asia’s growing economy could open up opportunities for many entrepreneurs – and those dreaming of becoming one – with promising prospects to draw customers and cut expenses.

The growing size and wealth of Asian middle classes represent a potential bonanza in various sectors: education, food, professional services, and tourism.

Increasing sophistication of offshore services entails cost reduction for businesses throughout a wider range of fucntions.

Moreover, the rise of the Philippines as a rival offshore centre to China and India is cutting costs.

“The unstoppable rise of China and other Asian powerhouses presents an opportunity as well as posing a threat to the Australian economy,” said Andrew Markou, co-founder and technical director of BusinessesForSale.com.

“The flight of jobs to offshore centres is regrettable, but, armed with a redundancy payoff, many of the newly unemployed will seize the chance to follow their dream and buy their own business. Offshoring might have cost them their job, but as business owners the rise of Asia will also help them cut costs, access new markets and get their business growing.”

BusinessesForSale.com is the world’s largest website for buying and selling businesses online with more than 56,000 business listings and more than one million unique visitors every month.

Image: Hai Linh Truong, via Flickr (CC)

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I’m not going to go on and on about what not to do, instead the objective of this SEO tutorial is to allow you to completely set up your site for optimal on-page SEO using WordPress.

Out of the box WordPress is great for search engine optimisation and you will have an advantage over most other publishing platforms such as Weebly, Blogger, Joomla ect.

However WordPress is far from perfect and needs some input and care on your part to make optimal for the search engines, namely Google. Now if your thinking oh god, here we go onto coding and detailed technical work around’s don’t stress because all this is very simple and can be set up in minutes.

For ease of use I will set this procedure out in 5 simple to follow steps.

Step 1: WordPress SEO Plugins

The great thing about WordPress is its ample range of plugins, though there are many SEO plugins it may be hard to decide. I have used many over the years and there is one that trumps them all – WordPress SEO by Yoast. I use this for almost every site, so go ahead and install this plugin first as I will go through how to best set up the Yoast SEO plugin.

The second plugin you will need is called Nofollow internal links and will no follow all of your unimportant links on your site. The purpose is to direct more link juice to your important pages. There is nothing to setup with this, simply install and it does its thing.

Step 2: WordPress Settings

2.1 General Settings

Site Title – Your site title should be something that stands out to your potienal customers, as this will show up through out your site and on the search engine results page. You could simply fill this out with your business name, for example Seer Marketing. A better solution is to use your business name (for brand awareness) and include a short description of what your business is about.

WordPress general settings

You can preview how Google users will see your site in the search results by using Google’s rich snippet preview tool.

Google’s rich snippet preview tool

2.2 Permalinks:

The very first optimsation you will need to make is your URL structure. This helps not only with SEO, but also looks much better. The default WordPress structure looks something like this http://yoursite.com.au/?p105. We want the URL of the post to include the keyword and be descriptive. It will then look something like this: http://yoursite.com.au/wordpress-seo.

Change your WordPress permalink setting to “Post name” and save changes.

WordPress permalink settings

2.3 Page titles

Whenever you write a new post in WordPress, the permalink will be set using the title. Its important that you include your keyword in your post and page titles as well as your permalinks. The flaw here with WordPress is that it includes default terms in all your titles, for example your Blog will have “Blog” in front of every post, and your achieve will be title “Blog archive”.

There are 2 reasons to fix this problem.

1) Search engines like Google pay more attention to your first 50 words, including your title so having “blog” at the start of every post doesnt help. This can also be seen as duplicate content, which as most of us know Google isnt the biggest fan.

2) When your prospects are searching for your product or service they will first see “Blog” or “Blog archive” in the SERP’s (Search engine results page), where as a optimsed title will get their attention as it’s likely to be the keyword they are looking for.

We will fix the titles using Yoast SEO plugin and also will run through how to properly set up Yoast SEO’s plugin.

Step 3: Yoast WordPress SEO settings:

3,1 Yoast Dashboard:

Enter your Google webmaster META tag, if you are unsure what this is you can leave it or sign up for Google Webmaster tools here.

3.2 Yoast Titles and META:

a) Force rewrite titles: You may need to tick this box if your title settings do not work after we make the changes, most people will leave this box unchecked.

b) Sitewide META settings: Checked

c) Clean up the <HEAD>

Tick the first two boxes here, remove RSD links and hide WLW manifest links

3.3 Yoast Home Settings:

Set your Home title to %%sitename%% %%sitedesc%%.

Setting your META description here will allow you to control what Search engines will display on the SERP and what Facebook will use as your site’s description when people link to your home page.

Yoast SEO home page settings

The Author META data should be set if you have a Google+ profile. I highly recommend you set up your Google+ profile if you have not already. Using the Author REL=”author” will allow Google to show your profile picture in the SERP results.

Yoast REL=”author”

How to setup Google+ Author

1) Log into Google+

Goto edit profile

Scroll down to contributor to and add your website URL

Save settings.

Adding sites which I contribute to in Google+

2) Log into your WordPress site, goto Users >> Admin >> then your profile.

Scroll down until you see Google+ profile ID and enter your Google+ full profile URL, which you can find by viewing your Google+ profile and copying the URL from the address bar.

Adding Google+ profile URL to WordPress profile

Yoast home settings

3.4 Yoast Post Type Settings:

Below are the post settings I use for Yoast. There are many different variables you can use here, however keeping it simple is best for SEO,

Yoast post titles

3.5Yoast Taxonomies

This page is used to avoid Google bot accidently seeing any duplicate content. Make sure you check the “noindex, nofollow” box for Categories, Tags and Format.

3.6 Yoast Other Settings

Under this tab you should see Author and Date based archive settings. We want to set these to No Index and No Follow, this will avoid search engines seeing any duplicate content from these pages, and will give more link juice to the rest of your site. If you have multiple authors you may want to leave this check box unchecked – however if your site is a one author site and you do not “No index, No Follow” author archives Google bot will see this as duplicate content – which in turn will dilute your page rank for important pages.

3.7 Yoast Social Settings:

These setting will depend on if you have Twitter and Facebook accounts and will also depend on what plugins you have.

Yoast XML Sitemap

WordPress out of the box doesn’t come with XML sitemaps so you will need  to ensure you have XML sitemaps enabled on this page. I recommend you ping Yahoo and Ask, it may help in having those search engines index your latest posts at a faster rate – espically true for new sites.

This concludes the setting up for Yoast SEO.

Step 4: Image Optimised Titles and ALT tags

When ever uploading images to your site you should be filling in image title, ALT tag and caption at a minimum. The ALT tag is vital for search engines, as this will describe to them what the image is about as Google bots cant see – but only can read. If possible try to use your target or related keyword when filling in these details – but as always do not force keywords.

A popular plugin that does this job for you is SEO Friendly images, I do use it for some sites but would recommend you manually set your tags.

Image title, ALT tag and caption example

Step 5: Website Speed

The time it takes for your site to load will not only effect how often Google bot crawls your site (and how many pages it crawls) but will effect how your readers navigate your site. I think everyone can relate to how important this is, just think how many times you have left a site because it was slow.

There are some simple and complex steps we can take to speed up our WordPress sites, for now I will cover only the simple steps.

Upload correct size images:

Although we can upload any image size we want and WordPress will resize it, the problem is the file size will always be the same. It’s ideal that you resize your images to the correct size before uploading them – you can do this with Photoshop or the free alternative GIMP.

If your site has a lot of images, I would recommend the use of the plugin WP.Smush it.

Install a Cache plugin

Caching your pages will give your readers faster access to your site once they have viewed one page. Without caching your browser will request and download each item from every page, however with caching setup a lot of items will be stored within the browser so they are recalled from your users computer rather than the internet – reducing page load times.

I recommend W3 Total cache plugin.

Hosting

For most sites a shared hosting at around $10 per month will do the job perfectly fine. However if your site attracts thousands of visitors daily you will need a VPS or dedicated server – which will range anywhere from $50-$500+ per month. For those who have already upgraded to VPS or dedicated server – its highly recommended to also use Litespeed. WordPress and Litespeed go hand in hand.

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Today we’re going to take a look at some of the current issues regarding search engine optimisation, Australia specifically. Are there any current trends relevant to search engine optimisation in Australia? Are there any areas where businesses may have an opportunity to expand? Here’s our take on the situation at a glance.

Search Engine Optimisation Australia Market Status

A quick Google search of “search engine optimisation Australia” suggests that the SEO market in Australia is quite competitive. We’ve certainly found this to be the case in our work and studies. Both nationally and locally, particularly in the major cities, there are a high density of web design companies offering SEO services, and businesses are taking advantage of the opportunity to expand their reach through search engine optimisation in Australia.

At the same time, we know from first hand experience that there are many businesses who feel the need to improve upon or completely refresh their search engine optimisation strategy in Australia. What does this tell us? We can see that the market is saturated, with many design companies and SEO consultants and specialists, as well as businesses in every area who are attempting to take advantage of SEO, but not everyone is really getting the job done the way they’d like. We don’t think this is necessarily an issue that is entirely specific to search engine optimisation in Australia. Anywhere you look, you’ll find SEO consultants who promise a lot and fail to deliver. When we look at the way companies are actually performing in terms of search engine optimisation in Australia, we see a lot of room for improvement.

Search Engine Optimisation Australia Issues

We know that the majority of businesses out there are not multinational conglomerates. No matter where you are or what you do, chances are you’ll be looking at building up a strong base in your local area before expanding further. Search engine optimisation in Australia is no different in this respect. It’s critical that you understand your local market and tailor your SEO approach with its characteristics in mind. In many cases, this means developing content that addresses both the general nature of your business and how you are able to specifically serve your local market.

Search Engine Optimisation Australia Strategies

Too many SEO consultants and web designers employ a one size fits all approach. While it’s true that the internet gives businesses the ability to reach out to consumers all over the world, when it comes to search engine optimisation in Australia, as anywhere, it’s important to focus initially on keywords and content that specifically engages the local market. In fact, we think this is particularly true of search engine optimisation in Australia. At Seer Marketing, we have years of experience dealing specifically with the unique challenges and opportunities that come with doing business in and from Australia, both locally and internationally. We know how to implement a sound strategy that begins with the local market, and we can help you make the most of the power of search engine optimisation in Australia.

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