USA Today’s Jefferson Graham recently did a video segment on Google by interviewing Google’s Matt Cutts for their Tech Talk section. The video is great to get a base understanding of Google’s search results and and search engine optimization basics.

The biggest takeaways I found:

+ It’s tough to be found for a term being searched if that text isn’t on your website somehere, listen to Matt’s example for a San Diego Chiropractor.

+ The importance of title tags and meta desciption tags, not only for Google in understanding the page, but for users deciding on what search results to click on.

+ Blogs! Blogs are a great way to acquire inbound links and put out engaging and valuable content. Hello small businesses!?!?!

+ Submit your site map, or have your web person or firm do it for you. It’s an easy way to get Google to crawl your site and index pages.

Make sure you check out the video.

Side note to USA Today Tech Talk: Put your videos into a player that others can embed to better promote you on their blogs and websites. Be a bit more social!

The power of Internet video. It’s already big and continuing to grow. By luck I have two great Internet video examples today.

The first, since it has the mass appeal, is the US Open golf playoff going on right now. Thanks to the US Open website, I can watch streaming LIVE video of the bonus playoff round today between Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate while I sit at my desk.

Without Internet video of this, I would be checking updates every 10 to 15 minutes or taking a long lunch at the bar around the corner (still sounds like a good option). Internet video brings more eyes to the web. I”ll be interested to find the stats on the increase in web visitors and viewers for todays playoff round.

Drumroll please ……
My second example is our new Five Technology company video. We finished up this minute and a half segment last week, added it to our website as well as a few video sharing sites on the net. Internet video is a great way to showcase your company in an overview, offer customer testimonials or feature a specific product or service. Five’s Internet video production can help you plan, script, shoot and edit your own video segment to really enhance your website. Todays’ website visitor needs more than a few lines of text to engage them and video on your website grabs a hold of the user and lets you tell your story. It truly is a powerful and engaging medium.

Here is our web design company video below in a YouTube player, but if you visit our Why Five page you will see we can customize and embed a Flash video player into any website or page with endless customization.

Give Five a holler with your video production needs for your website.

Video, video ,video … it’s a hot topic.  But how can your small business use Internet video?

A company overview video is a great way to bring more to the table on explaining and showing who you are, what you do and how you do it.  Your website visitors are engaged with visual and audio instead of just reading text and viewing photos/graphics.  Here are just a few of the basic items you can cover and include for your own company overview video:

• Show the personality of your company, the faces of the talent inside your walls
• Talk to the levels and capabilities you offer
• Outline the  uniqueness of your company
• Showcase specific skills or past projects
• Outline the process of working with your company

These are just a few ideas.  This video can also be used offline as well for trade shows, exhibits, sales DVD’s and more.  You can also leverage you video and optimize it for the search engines.

Below are some screenshots from our video shoot in our offices last week as we are currently in production of our own company overview video.  We aim to show how we are a fantastic Minnesota web design firm that can bring creativity and function to any business website.  Stay tuned as we hope to launch the finished product in the coming weeks.