With approximately 1.73 billion videos, YouTube is basically a one-stop PR and marketing paradise. With that many videos, though, how do you make your video stand out against the hordes of sneezing pandas and babies dancing to Beyonce?

Luckily, your website performance isn’t based on video hits, but it can be improved by even the tiniest bit of link juice from YouTube’s massive audience base. The first step to upping your web presence and generating positive brand awareness is to create excellent, pertinent videos. Either that, or hold contests to have your audience make videos.

Second, create and customize a channel for your videos and link to your channel on your main website. Like everything else related to your company website’s marketing strategy, use optimized key phrases. Put every related video in this channel, and promote this channel on your main site through your blog, banner announcements, e-mail campaigns and strong social media strategy.

Like every content aggregator, your YouTube audience will grow with a regular stream of content. This doesn’t mean you need to update it everyday, but having some kind of a well-advertised schedule would be an excellent optimization strategy. As you develop YouTube as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, pay attention to how this impacts your website analytics.

Even if your company doesn’t have a physical product it markets on a local level, most search engines have an algorithm for showing results based on previous searches. So if someone lives in Austin, TX and is looking for something your company does; you want to be the first result, right? Unless your product or business is so unique it would show up no matter where the specific key phrase is entered, your best bet is to try and tailor your website for your local audience first.

An example of a local search would be something like, “Berlin hotels” or “Houston car rentals.” One of the first things Google does is pull up local listings. In order to rank as highly as possible, make sure part of your search engine marketing strategy includes the following:

1)      List your company’s full address, city, state and country.

2)      Claim your Google Place Page, local listing—EVERYTHING!

3)      List yourself for free on Yellow Pages (online and in print).

4)      Associate pictures and local phone numbers with Google Place Page.

5)      List relevant (and optimized) key phrases relating to your product and business in your Google Place Page description.

6)      Put a location keyword in Google Place Page business title.

7)      List your website wherever possible.

Although we haven’t gone into Yelp or Yahoo’s business listing process, at the very minimum, having your Yellow Pages listing will show results on those search engines as well.

You’ve seen them before, handing out flyers, wearing costumes and dancing on the side of the street. While you may throw away the flyer or laugh at the guy wearing the costume, you do remember them. And the next time you need something that company sells, you will remember their company first. It’s search engine optimization done in real time.

If your company doesn’t have a physical product, you can still create a street team online. These search engine marketing people do the online equivalent of going out in the streets and handing out flyers.

One strategy to improve your website ranking is to create a fun area that does not necessarily deal with what your company offers, but relates to your brand. Offer things like free wallpapers and backgrounds, screen savers, pretty copy and paste HTML links for Facebook and MySpace banners, and other promotional tools that link back to your website. These online banners and screensavers can boost your website performance by doing the Internet marketing for you by giving you free publicity. You could back this up with an offer code for some kind of discount or promotion for users that visit your website through this page, and spread the link juice around.

An example would be, if you are an acupuncture clinic, and you had a “games” section on your website that had, say, a game of, “pin the tail on the donkey” (with acupuncture needles). If you let people take the code for this game to post on their website (with your site being credited and linked to). Even if you only offered soothing pictures to use as screen savers, people would come back to get more, and keep visiting your page. You can then use excellent website content and traditional website marketing strategy to keep them visiting.

Most people don’t realize that asking to make their product go viral is the equivalent of asking to become the most popular girl or boy in high school. Unlike high school, there are plenty of opportunities to succeed in creating a good optimized buzz around your website with creative Internet marketing and website marketing strategy.

The first way is a classic: gossiping. The more something is talked about, the more it sticks in people’s minds, and the more likely they are to pass this information along. So, how do you acquire this stickiness? Incentives and Inspiration, backed up by excellent website content that is optimized for your highest ranking keywords!

Incentivized marketing comes in the form of “chain e-mails” and other promotions that reward your loyal customers to refer their friends for some kind of monetary compensation. An excellent example would be sending out an e-mail campaign to your customers guaranteeing a discount on merchandize or some kind of freebie if they refer a friend, and the friend either signs up to your e-mail list, or purchases your product. It trickles down to the friends also receiving a reward for referring their friends, and so on.

Inspirational marketing is the tougher nut to crack. Think about it, viral videos on YouTube are generally of things like sneezing pandas and babies dancing to Lady Gaga. They have some unique emotional appeal that is universally liked and promoted by sheer “cuteness.” Unless your industry deals with cute, your approach has to be a little different.

To inspire passionate fans promoting your website out of sheer love, you need to market your industry or product properly. Basically, you have to have something people want, and you have to back it up with providing these customers a reason to love you: excellent customer support.

If you have these two website marketing strategies implemented, though, you’re on your way to going viral. Stay tuned for the next step!

One of the best things you can do for your website speed is to incorporate CSS. Cascading Style Sheets do a fantastic job of reducing page load time in a way that would make programmers and optimizers weep with joy.

On a web design front, you can use CSS to go beyond the standard table layouts to CSS style layouts that allow for more flexibility in the web layout. It’s faster, too. CSS can also be used instead of images to reduce that immense drag that comes with tons of images loading up on your website.

Other than CSS, you should also use external style sheets and link them to the main site, external Javascript and finally, get rid of any unnecessary white space in your HTML. For the external sheets, your browser chache’s them the first time and doesn’t waste time loading and re-loading the information.

As for the white space in the HTML, it’s really just inelegant to look at (from a coder’s perspective) and adds time for the website to render the code. Once you’ve assured your code is up-to-date with these easily done enhancements for the images, design, layout and functionality, your search engine optimization efforts will finally be able to compete without restriction.

In order to improve your website performance, there are a few important adjustments to make to your site. Images can make or break the optimization of a site, because while they give your customers a way of seeing your products or processes, their load time, the quality of the photo and other negative aspects of an image can truly put off even a loyal customer.

The first, and most important thing a search engine optimizer will recommend is to compress. Compress your images on Photoshop or using one of the many free softwares out there. Compress (or get rid of) those unnecessary Flash elements on your page, and you will cut down on the load time instantly.

Images, particularly, are heavy and drag down a page, which is worrisome if you’ve got a web marketing site that relies on pictures to sell your product. Use thumb nails instead of trying to resize within HTML (they still have to load the original size), descriptive title and meta information, and do not forget to write this content using your best keyphrases.

Another thing to keep in mind is optimizing the size of your images. Figure out the best sizes for your products and define those sizes in the width and height attributes section while placing the image. This cuts down on how long your page will take rendering the images, and make things go more smoothly.

We’ve put together a short list of useful tools for SEO & SEM processes. This isn’t the end-all-be-all list, mind you, but to keep your website performance healthy, you should have tools similar to this.

Google AdPreview- First off, as a budget-conscious search engine optimization expert, you should have Google EVERYTHING. Why? Because unless the other search engines step up their game, Google runs the show. That being said, AdPreview is a great tool to preview what a PPC advertisement looks like before it “goes live.” It also has a nifty feature that allows you to change your geographic location to preview what the ad would look like locally or otherwise.

Another bit of Google you should have in your arsenal is Google Sets. It generates related keyword ideas based on a handful of keywords and key phrases you enter. Why WOULDN’T you get this optimizing tool? It’s FREE.

SEO Digger- This is a nice little tool that builds reverse indexes. What does that mean? It shows which search queries your business is ranking in the top 20 Google results. This has a bonus of showing you key phrases you might not have thought of or optimized for originally.

SEO Book/SEOMoz Plug-ins- Among other things, these plug-ins are boss for showing you metrics on how you are ranking for SERPs on Google. SEOMoz has a great blogging community ready and willing to help you in your search engine marketing, web design, and performance improvement projects!

You should also keep an eye out for a tool that checks for keyword misspellings, so your internal search is optimized. We don’t have a favorite just yet, but it’s worth an honorable mention.

Online surveys work great for any company with an e-commerce aspect to it; even the big box stores like Target and Walmart have web-only sales and specials. It’s an ideal way to get honest feedback on how your company and website performance. It also keeps your customers engaged, and takes a little bit of the guesswork out of website analysis for you.

For a successful and optimized survey to generate the best kind of feedback on website content, performance and improvement, there are a few basic rules to follow.

1)      Keep it Short- Even the most dedicated customer will not take a million questions without some really, really good incentive.

2)      Keep it Simple- Ideally there should be a yes/no/all of the above/none of the above and that’s it. You should also leave a section for comments.

3)      Reward Good Behavior- If you want your customers to keep giving you feedback, offer some kind of a discount upon successful completion of the survey.

Make the process painless on yourself and use an online quiz/survey generator like SurveyMonkey. Use surveys to get feedback on anything from web design changes you want to implement to having something interesting to promote on your social media newsfeeds. It’s a quick and easy way to get some interesting results, so, have at it!

For e-mail campaigns, a/b testing is the flashlight to help you figure out, as a web marketing expert, what is working better for your company. It can also help you optimize your campaigns, subject lines and ultimately, gain new subscribers and loyal customers for your product and company.

A/b testing, as the title suggests, allows you to test variables in the types of emails you send; e.g. text e-mails vs. image emails. Does an all text e-mail work for your company, or a heavier image-only version? What about subject lines? Do long ones work, short ones? All CAPS?  Which gets you the most feedback in terms of click throughs? Also do “call to action” e-mails work for your sales and products, and what time of day (the time where your emails are most likely to be opened and read) works best for your target audience?

Having a finely-tuned set of variables and running a/b testing can help create the best optimizing conditions, not just for your email marketing campaigns, but how you run your affiliate marketing and search engine optimization processes.

A few ways to keep your subject lines sexy and appealing in that optimized way you have to think like the people who write subject lines for products on eBay and Amazon. For you grammarians and spelling snobs out there, e-mail subject lines are not prime examples of either. E-mail marketing web strategy is all about titles that are catchy and clever, compound sentences that use symbols like “+” instead of “and” and the shorter they are, the better.

From an SEO perspective, or even a web analytics perspective, writing a great e-mail title breaks the rule of good content for an eye-catching display. Your competition is an e-mail from grandma, and at least 7 or 8 “spam” e-mails promising enhanced body parts and free 30 day trials of snake oil. If your e-mails have the attention-grabbing words like “free,” “sale” or promises something like a “huge discount” without going into detail, it would encourage the e-mail recipient to click through the e-mail to see what it’s all about.

Finally, do not forget to do some good old-fashioned a/b testing to figure out what your e-mail subscribers are responding to positively and negatively. For the uninitiated, we’ll go into the process of a/b testing in our next post, so stay tuned!