Driving ROI from Awareness to Advocacy

Tips for B2B Marketing with Video

1. Identify stages in your customer lifecycle where you can use video to deliver your message.
2. Choose a tactic and focus your efforts on executing it well.
3. Hire a video production company who can partner with you to create content.
4. Produce your first video content and publish it with an online video platform.
5. Monitor the success of your initiative and use the insight to plan your next move.

Make Web Content More Discoverable – With “Common Tag”

Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging. Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can more easily create topic hubs, cross-promote their content, and enrich their pages with free data, images and widgets.

The companies involved in the development of Common Tag — AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag — offer services that help publishers get started.

An Update on Google Sitemaps

1. Google and the other search engines which are a part of Sitemaps.org now support up to 50,000 child Sitemaps for Sitemap index files (instead of the previous 1,000). This allows large sites to submit a theoretical maximum of 2.5 billion URLs with a single Sitemap Index URL (oh, and if you need more, you can always submit multiple Sitemap index files).
2. The Webmaster Tools design update now shows you all Sitemap files that were submitted for your verified website. This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file.
3. The indexed URL count in Webmaster Tools for your Sitemap files is now even more precise.
4. For the XML developers out there, we’ve updated the XSD schemas to allow Sitemap extensions. The new schema helps webmasters to create better Sitemaps by verifying more features. By validating Sitemap files with the new schema, you can be more confident that the Sitemap files are correct.
5. Do I need to mention that Sitemap file processing is much faster than ever before? We’ve drastically reduced the average time from submitting a Sitemap file to processing it and showing some initial data in Webmaster Tools.