Monthly Archives: January 2012

30 million people visited Odnoklassniki.ru on New Year

30 million people visited Odnoklassniki.ru on New Year

 

Social network Odnoklassniki.ru (Classmates) achieved in the New Year, a new record and reached over 30 million unique visitors. Internal statistics confirmed the New Year’s trend - a dramatic increase in popularity of sending greetings through a social network. During the past holidays (compared to the same period last year), personal messages increased to 171 percent, uploaded photos – 57% while the number of queries in search of gifts has increased from 70 thousand to a shocking 2.5 million.

Odnoklassniki.ru

According Liveinternet, in the New Year holidays the number of users of the project Odnoklassniki.ru (Classmates) exceeded 30 million unique visitors a day. This confirms the fact that Russian audiences increasingly prefer to spend their free time in favorite social network.

The Mail.ru company owns two leading Russian social networks: Moy Mir@Mail.Ru and Odnoklassniki.ru, she also owns a significant stake in the social network “VKontakte”.

Video advertising in Russia will continue to grow

Video advertising market in Russia will continue to grow.

Content! Who said that content can be text only?

Many experts led growth of video marketing. Well, they are entitled. With the benefits of your video, you grow your market in an easy and effective way. Textual information also has advantages, but it is quite difficult to establish emotional contact with visitors. Visual perceptions in this regard can be truly convincing.

You can see, for example, Gary Vaynerchuk. He did not bother to show emotions and different viewpoints. Video raises reciprocal emotions and makes visitors to think. The video transmits to visitors these messages in more powerful way, as and can be more effective than text content.

Video marketing help attract more attention of visitors and keep them on your site.

Video marketing, may improve traffic to your site, and to attract new visitors.

Video marketing will help you build deeper relationships with your customers and will cause theiremotions, will encourage them easier to action.

Video Marketing

Video marketing direct more easily and within the targeted audience. In this aspect can think about whether the cost of video marketing will be more effective and you can eventually get a higher ROI.

The creation of the video seems a complicated task, but this is not true. You can record video with the ordinary camera, even at home. Even this has some advantages. The simple interior, and more accessible to viewers information are the main means, for visitors to feel closer to you.

Russian video ads market segment in 2011 increased by 22% and reached a volume of 800 million rubles. According to Mihail Ilichev, General Director of RuTube.

These data show the tendency of advertisers to follow users to expand their Internet presence through video content.

Do not forget to record your video in Russian. However, this is your audience. Here are some best places, where you can post your videos:

  • http://video.yandex.ru
  • http://rutube.ru
  • http://video.mail.ru
  • http://vk.com
  • http://www.youtube.com

Yandex purchases map content from NAVTEQ

Yandex Purchases Map License from NAVTEQ

Today, Yandex informed that has purchased a license for maps supplied by the leading provider, NAVTEQ. These maps will be used in the development of a better world map for the Yandex Maps service.

NAVTEQ has provided Yandex with maps from all over the world, including maps of Europe, North America, Australia and developed countries in Asia.

Yandex.Maps will add new content both to its mobile application and to its desktop version that supports all leading platforms. Using the Yandex Maps API, webmasters can embed maps of different countries into their resources.

Yandex maps

Yandex already purchased map content from NAVTEQ. The NAVTEQ-provided detailed map of Turkey at yandex.com.tr, featuring location search and other Yandex services, has been highly popular with users following its debut last year.

Our users have already appreciated high-quality detailed maps of Russia and Ukraine with the search function and other useful features such as routing, traffic information, satellite images and panoramic views. We continue to enhance our map services for Belarus and Kazakhstan,” said Maria Orlova, head of Yandex.Maps Production and Quality Control Service.

In addition to NAVTEQ, Yandex partners with other digital maps content providers to permit location information for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

To enhance and continually improve the map of Russia, Yandex acquired map provider GIS Technologies in July 2010 and began making city maps for various locations across the country. Yandex offers maps for 270 cities in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

Yandex Launches Face Recognition

Free image hosting service - Yandex Fotki

Yandex’s photo hosting service – Fotki, has implemented Face.com’s facial recognition technology for quick and easy tagging of photos. The service can now automatically recognize human faces and “recognize” previously tagged people.

After someone has been tagged in photos uploaded to Yandex.Fotki a couple of times, the service learns to “know” this person and starts suggesting common tags when the user needs to tag new photos of this person. All the user has to do is verify the tag for it to appear on the photos. People in photos uploaded to the service can be tagged with their Yandex.Fotki account name or with any other name.

Tagging allows for quick and easy photo search. This is especially useful for finding photos with a specific person. Using photo search on Yandex.Fotki, one can easily find all photos tagged ‘Ivan’ or ‘brother’ within one user account. The service can also find and show all photos of a person with a Yandex.Fotki account uploaded to different accounts on the service, if they have been tagged with their Yandex.Fotki name.

Yandex image hosting

Users can tag photos in their own account, as well as photos uploaded by someone else. Tagging is possible only if it was allowed by the owner of a photo. The owner can also remove any tags made by other users.

Having been available on the market for quite a while, Face.com’s facial recognition technology has successfully been implemented in public social networking websites. In fall 2010, Yandex acquired a minority stake in Face.com as part of its startup assistance program.

Yandex.Fotki sees over 260,000 new images uploaded to the service every day. Yandex.Fotki is a free photo hosting service providing an unlimited storage space for photos.

 

The public beta launch of Futubra

The public beta launch of Futubra

Mail.Ru Group today held a small conference with industry journalists to announce the public beta launch of Futubra in Q1 2012. Futubra will be the service of multimedia microblogs with a focus on mobile and will be device agnostic.

The developers of the service are of the opinion that the interesting people – is not only friends. That is why the available functional subscribe to your favorite microblogging in a single click, without having to confirm the mutual friendship, and all content Futubra – totally public.

Currently there is only a web version, which well adapted to the ability of any device, smartphone or a desktop computer. In the near future will be issued a special application for all modern and popular mobile platforms – iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone 7.

Mail.Ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin said today: ”We are excited by the opportunity facing Futubra as microblogging is a fast growing segment which fits well into the Mail.Ru Group vision of the growth in internet communications. Futubra demonstrates Mail.Ru Group’s ongoing commitment to internet communication platforms, innovation and mobile applications. The focus in the near term will be product development and the building of new online communities.

Futubra provides a convenient way to share a picture, photo or video and displays them in an excellent quality directly to tape the events the user.

We can not find Futubra English version at the moment, and how to search users, but Futura is very serious microblogging service at firs look.

Monitoring of competitors

Monitoring of competitors – one of the most critical functions of marketing.

Monitoring of competitors are the implementation of the collection, post processing, classification and analysis of information about competing web sites. Sources for obtaining such information through the Internet: search results, ranking, keywords, blogs, social media, ppc ads, video resources.

Monitoring of competitors is essential for companies seeking to strengthen its position in the market to advance or increase market share, increase web traffic, output to market new products, changing marketing strategies and pricing policies, as well as emerging and new markets.

The monitoring of competitors is gathering intelligence about competitor Internet activity. Identification of the media channels is of strategic importance. Monitoring for competitors can include a wide range of tools to collect and analyze data. This may be competitors websites, blogs, social media channels, forums, Internet advertising, e-mail newsletters. Monitoring of competitors, as a rule, receives information from public sources.

The resulting information should be analyzed. The analysis will be base on generalizing the data on search engines position, website traffic, sales, prices, the major types of advertising, customers opinions and other parameters affecting the performance of the company.

Several online services, that can save you a little time for monitor your competitors in Russia:

«AllPositions»

Thanks to service «AllPositions» You will be able to:

  • Fully control the position of a site in the search engines – it is enough to enter the desired keywords and software system instantly provides you with all the detailed information.
  • Analyze information about current positions of competing projects - you will have on hand all the basic information to enable you to get a powerful competitive advantage.
  • You will always have access to information that will show you the current position of competitors’ sites.

«advre.ru»

ADVSE.RU allows you to see the actual flow of queries that show the ad and find a stop word limit for inefficient hits.

  • Development of “semantic core” – a list of targeted search results for web site promotion.
  • Analysis of competitors’ advertising campaigns in order to obtain a new customer.

Keyword density – the number of words on the page for comparison with all the words of this page. For example, if a page contains a single word ’seo’, the density of 100%. But, If there is text on the page: “The best seo ideas from entrepreneurs,” the density of the word “seo” is 25%.

You can calculate the keyword density by using the service: http://pr-cy.ru/analysis_content

Title tags h1-h6 – Search engines evaluated to find the keywords in those headlines. H1 tag is more powerful than h2, for example. Be sure to determine the number of titles per page, and the occurrence of these keywords from a competitor. Optimal placement – 1 time tag h1 on the page, and use <h1> for top-level heading.

Todays search engines are too smart to fall for such imperfect seo optimization method.

Even a single incoming link with a valuable anchor text can raise a webpage traffic, more than page whit highest keyword density.

The positions of your competitors are important but do not forget the content. You should know how they are positioned and how their services offered. The reviews and comments are also important, and can contain valuable information for your business. Do not miss.

The monitoring process of key competitors must be constantly and continuously.

Few tips for optimizing your images for Yandex

Traffic is crucial for each website. Now any looking for best natural way to increase traffic. Usually, one source for relevant traffic, that often overlooked is the images. Images are an appropriate tool for generating traffic to stores, real estate sites, travel sites. You might be surprised, but quite often Yandex puts images from images.yandex.ru, in the top positions. In any case, the images can attract consumers’ attention, because sometimes even the best description is not enough to imagine well enough product. Visualization helps to visitors to remember the product, by better way.

Often your images displayed in Yandex images (http://images.yandex.ru) later than the main results about your site. This is because YandexImages crawled a little less frequently than leading Yandex bot. Don’t worry about this.

Use these few tips for optimizing your images to improve their performance. They will help to you to get better ranking in Yandex, and Yandex image search.

URL – must contain the main keyword

www.mysite.com / samsung / samsung-galaxy.html

www.mysite.com/ samsung / galaxy.html

Place the picture into exactly directory, and use directory name like keyword

/Images

/Samsung

Use these files extensions JPG (. jpg) or GIF (. gif).

Don’t forget to use keyword(s) in the file name -

Samsung-galaxy.jpg

Samsung-galaxy.gif

Finally, your tags will look like this example:

<img src=”samsung-galaxy.jpg” alt=”Photo of Samsung Galaxy” title=”Samsung Galaxy”>

Alt and Title

<img src=”samsung-galaxy.jpg” alt=”Photo of Samsung Galaxy” title=”Samsung Galaxy>

Title. Keyword(s) again, and again (user search query). Using right keyword in your title tag is essential for helping search engines bots to determine relevancy.

Alt. The good description can be one of the most significant factor for better ranking. Describe briefly exactly what the picture depicts.

Add relevant content to this page. Publish some product reviews by experts and users. Useful content, about the product from the picture, may be a key advantage to get a fair ranking for your photo in images.yandex.ru. Try to publish unique, original image, although, in many cases, this is not mandatory.

Several backlinks to the image from reputable websites will help for better indexing. Use them.

<a href=”http:// www.yoursite.com/ samsung/Samsung-galaxy.jpg/”>Samsung Galaxy Photo </ a>

Especially when you have, lower competition of similar to yours images, your presence in images.yandex.ru can give to you some advantages and become a valued source for increasing traffic to your site.

Use these few tips for optimizing your images to improve their performance. They will help to you to get better ranking in Yandex.

How to get returning visitors to your sites

If you want visitors or customers to return to your website, you must give them the reasons.

Little more detail of what is attractive for visitors.

We understand that you offer SEO services, for example. Ok, but why should someone choose you services instead of someone else? Because, you can provide affordable SEO services, right? Well, who does not offer such services today?

You tell visitors that you are the best. So sorry, but all SEO companies say in the same manner. What is the difference?

So do not you drop users. How to choose your services, when such services can be provided by thousands of companies. There is no serious reason to do so.

If you want visitors or customers to return to your site, give them a reason why thay should stay. Think about it.

You need to give them a some reason to do. Just try to attract customers to think. Because things, become sales.

What makes your services different, what makes you unique and what can be useful for consumers. We do not know. We have no idea.

Today, many webmasters think about how to improve web site functionality and occupy higher positions in search results. Right, but they all stop here.

These results are not for a search engines boots, because search boots cannot be customers.
Many entrepreneurs, today doesn’t know own customers, competitors, products and the market situation. But, they know all about search bots. Perfect! Well, want to try to sell something to a search bot. What happen?

Think about real people. Many of them may become your regular customers to come back again and be the best advertisement for you. Real people must have some reasonable reason to do so. If you do not find the ecxatly way about how your users to return regularly to you, you probably lightly skip.

Just use:

Social media buttons

One of the most easy and powerful tool. When a visitor likes your site, they can click easy on the button to place a link to favorite social networking page, and, of course, to share this info with friends.

Video

Video marketing is a publication of your message in video format. You can share everything – product presentation, promotional or; otherwise, that represents your business, company, products or services.

These videos usually are associate with a social media campaign, catch up to bloggers and posting on Facebook and Twitter.

Motivational text

On each page write the text promoted, motivating visitors to return to the site.
For example, it may be, something like that “in the next article we tell how.. “,
Or “will begin the sale of a product – do not miss“.

If you have a few returning visitors, this means that you need to add something to the website to attract visitors back to the site. Using stimulating and regularly updated content such as blogs and podcasts. This way you can significantly increase the loyalty of users.

Continuing to attract new customers to the site is extremely expensive in a long time. That’s because, you need to think how to hold customers, and how customers can return to your website.

If, however, you will have loyal visitors – those who will be returning to the site and become a constant source of conversion – you, no need to spend as much time, money and effort to attract new visitors to your site.