NZS.com Newsletter : June 2008
June officially means we are halfway through the year, even though it seems like Christmas was just weeks ago! This month we look at Freebies, NZS.com's Hitwise success, HTML coding for search engine optimisation, the advancements in online video marketing and NZS.com's new lotto section.
Contents:
- Top Ten Sites
- Freebies, Giveaways and Free Lunches
- NZ Lotto
- Satisfied With Your Content?
- Video Ad Targeting
- Hitwise Awards
Everybody loves a good contest, there's nothing like a little excitement to get your heart going. This month's Top 10 is all about competitions, and it's not surprising that the most popular competition sites in the NZS.com directory allow everyone to enter for free!
Top 10 Competitions Category Sites
| Rank | Site Name | URL |
| 1. | Be In To Win For Free | www.beintowinforfree.co.nz |
| 2. | The Great New Zealand Survey | www.kiwisurveys.co.nz |
| 3. | SmileCity | www.smilecity.co.nz |
| 4. | Blinky.co.nz | www.blinky.co.nz |
| 5. | Contest | www.contest.co.nz |
| 6. | Competitions.co.nz | www.competitions.co.nz |
| 7. | New Zealand Free Stuff | www.ourfreestuff.co.nz |
| 8. | EzyCoupons.co.nz | www.ezycoupons.co.nz |
| 9. | NZ12Free | www.nz12free.au.tt |
| 10. | Txt2taste | www.txt2taste.co.nz |
Searches for free stuff are continually popular on NZS.com, the first article in this month's newsletter was posted on the NZS.com blog last year and persistently performs well - apparently everybody is searching for a free lunch!
Outside my door last week, I found a box with my name on it. A big box. I wasn't expecting anything, so it was with some excitement I opened the box to discover two large packets of bagel chips (like bagels, only cut up, cooked until crunchy, then seasoned). The next day, a tin of Mediterranean style tuna arrived unannounced (I don't eat fish, but my cat does!). Later, bags of chewy candy and samples of olive oil materialized in my letterbox.
What did it all mean? At last, I'd discovered a source of free lunches!
Actually, I was reaping the rewards of dabbling in our Free Stuff category. Register for this, express interest in that, fill in a quick survey and before I knew it, I had free food arriving by the boxful. For New Zealand companies and consumers, it's a win-win situation - they get your input into what products you'd like to see on the shelves of your local supermarket and you get a taste test for free.
As well as food, there are heaps of other freebies and giveaways up for grabs in this popular category. I'm awaiting my next tasty installment...
Are you constantly struggling to find the Lotto, Big Wednesday and Keno results? It's often impossible to find the exact draw you are after, especially if you have a ticket from a past draw. Have no fear, NZS.com is here!
We've just launched our NZ Lotto section, giving you a simple, easy to navigate way of viewing your Lotto results, Big Wednesday results and Keno results. We've even got a handy archive which details the winning numbers from every past draw since each game was launched.
So instead of getting lost in news websites and other online sources trying to find results, make NZS.com your source for up-to-the-minute NZ Lotto results online!
Understanding how the layout of your site is read is important when thinking about improving your optimisation for search engines. When thinking about the placement of script and navigation menus - do you know what search engines look most favourably towards?
Content is key to differentiating your website from spam-filled domains. Make sure your content is unique and not repeated from page to page within your website. When you've got text about your product, service or organisation, you want it to be as close to the top of each page as possible. Make sure you use targeted keywords often, but don't overdo them - you'll run the risk of looking like spam.
This will ensure search engines read your site as full of real information, which is easily accessible to searchers - meaning they are getting the information that they want, faster - a core ideal around every search engine's philosophy.
It also helps if you put your website's scripts and navigations at the bottom of each page. This means repetitive parts of your website are not the first thing search engines will read. Search engines actually read your website's HTML code (viewable to a user by right-clicking in a webpage and selecting 'view page source') when spidering your page, not the HTML view that users see. You can still have your navigation menus at the top or side of your pages, but by putting the HTML code for them at the bottom your unique, informative content will still be read first.
If you haven't already realised, online video is taking off at an extraordinary rate. A recent survey identified that 31% of adults who use the internet view online videos weekly - up 6% from last year. 73.7% of adult internet users say they have viewed online videos at one point in time. Given these high statistics in video patronage, it is not surprising that sophisticated internet marketing techniques are emerging from the big online video websites to assist advertisers in targeting their chosen audience.
The world leader in online video YouTube have developed a system for advertisers called "Buzz Marketing", alerting them of videos that are expected to 'go viral' and offering advertisement space surrounding those videos. 'Viral' videos are ones that spread across the globe like wild fire, normally because they contain particularly unique, scandalous, hilarious and/or exclusive content. Determining what videos are expected to go viral is not a science or even a predictable sequence of precursory events, however YouTube staff look at the uptake in videos tagged as favourites, and linked or posted on other websites and blogs to determine a video's potential.
US film studio Lionsgate was the first to test Buzz Targeting, placing advertisements of a new film around entertainment-related videos, each made popular by external user interest. While figures are not available on its success they claim that it has "allowed them to reach a large, diverse audience".
While all of this sounds very large scale and possibly even irrelevant to New Zealand businesses, Buzz Targeting coincides with YouTube's recent analytics development which has launched in recent weeks. This tool allows advertisers to view the age, sex and geographical location of viewers of particular videos, and compare this to other videos viewed by their target audience. This means New Zealand businesses could potentially buy ad space surrounding a soon-to-be-widespread video which is set to be viewed by the specific Kiwi audience that their product or service is targeted towards, even down to their location throughout New Zealand.
The first quarter of 2008's Hitwise Award winners were released late last month, and NZS.com has placed in the top 10 in not one but two different industries!
For the quarter January-March 2008, NZS.com has placed #5 in both the Business and Finance - Business Directories industry, and the Computers and Internet - Search Engines industry. This status is based on the market share of visits among all New Zealand websites within those industries.
We're interested in your opinion, if you have anything you'd like to hear about in the newsletter, let us know.
Images from Flickr: Plugs, Keyboard, Credit Card.
