Using a green screen can allow you to step up the professionalism of your videos, with just a little work and not too much money.

Rather than trying to regurgitate Steve’s article, just head over to his blog and learn how to add a green screen effect to your videos.

Greg Jarboe is president and co-founder of SEO-PR, an SEO firm that specializes in optimizing press releases, videos, etc. He is the author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day and in this interview he explains just how important the use of YouTube is for your business.

She discusses the Google Keyword Tool, that shows search numbers and search trends month by month over the year. Google Insights for Search helps you spot trends from year to year. In the recession, keyword search trends have changed dramatically, so you may need to update your keyword research. Google Insights for Search also shows geographical use as well as rising search terms. Google Sets helps you quickly expand your keywords by helping you find sets of keywords, when you put in a few keywords in a set, such as car brands. Paid tools to consider include Trellian Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. These draw on different databases and help you determine the rank order of keywords, unaffected by artifacts introduced by spiders running ranking reports, etc.

Paid tools are worth the cost because (1) they offer management capabilities, such as the ability to manipulate lists, and (2) they are usually parts of larger sets of SEO tools that increase your capability. Manipulating keyword lists into “buckets” can be useful to manage your account. Microsoft Excel’s concatenate function can help you build keyword lists rapidly.

Christine Churchill is the president and CEO of Key Relevance, a full-service search marketing company based in Dallas, Texas that does both paid and organic search as well as consulting and customized packages for clients. This interview was recorded on August 12, 2009 at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, California.

recent industry research from TrustWave’s Spider Labs showed that hackers went after hotel networks more than any other destination in 2009, accounting for 38% of all known security breeches, more than the financial services industry (19%) and retail industries (14.2%) combined.

To make matters worse, the hotels didn’t discover that the breeches had even occurred for an average of 156 days, leaving plenty of time for the cyber-criminals to use stolen credit card information, or take advantage of the personal data harvested for any number of identity theft scams.

Just this week, Wyndham Hotel & Resorts, operators of hotel chains Days Inn, Ramada, Super8 and Howard Johnson, reported that their central hotel network had been compromised, with hackers stealing customer’s names, credit numbers and expiration dates.

You need to read Hackers Lurking in Hotel Networks, twice.

“We really don’t manage the conversation,” says Evans. “Rather, we manage our participation in the conversation and the experiences we create.” Through the social media marketers and small businesses can begin to understand what they do as a product or service to drive the conversation in the first place. It is a place to listen and understand.

This conversation is new in the sense that (a) more people are now connected to it in digital media, and (b) marketers can go back to the conversations to research them and learn from them. Consumers are talking to each other, says Evans. Marketers can now join the conversation and have a voice with the customers. Even if your business is rather small, you can learn from conversations about your business as well as from other businesses like it, so that you can get insight into how things work. If we’re truly listening to what is actually being said, concludes Evans, our businesses, products, and services can improve.

Dave Evans is the Consulting Director of 2020 Social and the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2008). This interview was taped in August 2009 at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, California.

Let me start at the beginning. A couple of months ago I won a copy of XSitePro. I’ve been building websites since 1998 or 99. Taught myself html and the whole thing. I’m pretty good at building websites, or at least I thought I was. I have tried a few website builder programs in the last few years but to be honest, they didn’t really do anything special. No matter how hard I worked at them, my sites looked pretty basic and didn’t come up to what I feel a truly professional website should look like.

A couple of weeks ago I started playing around with XSitePro. All I can say is WOW! I watched their training videos that walked me through building a site. Talk about easy, this program really seemed easy. But I’m sort of a skeptic and the thing that kept nagging at me was, how hard would it be to build a site from scratch? So that’s what I set out to do. I had a domain that I had bought with only a general idea of what I was going to do with so that’s what I decided to use.

After thinking about what I wanted the site to be, and pulling together a variety of content for it, it was time to get started.

In a matter of a couple hours I had built a professional looking website with 27 pages of content, including several articles, resource pages, some press releases, a privacy policy and even a sitemap. When I was finished putting it together, XSitePro uploaded it to my server and it was live. More importantly than that, anyone looking at it would think that a professional web designer had spent days building it.

I’m convinced that XSitePro is by far the best website design program on the market. It doesn’t just make a static website, it makes a true internet 2.0 website. In fact, here’s just some of the things you can do with just a few clicks of the mouse.

• Change the look (template) of your site without having to change any of your pages.
• Add audio or video files.
• Add Google Adsense.
• Add Amazon products.
• Set up an RSS feed.
• Make a mobile site so people can view your site on their phone.
• Add content with an RSS feed reader
• Easily change the colors of your site, and so much more.

If you build a lot of websites, or just want to build your own site rather than paying someone else to build it for you, I strongly recommend that you purchase a copy of XSitePro. I’m so impressed with it that if you look over to the side, you’ll notice I’ve put up an advertisement for it. I’m rather picky about what ads I allow on my site but I had no qualms at all about putting that one up.

To be honest with you, I wouldn’t expect you to go buy it just based on my recommendation so here’s what I recommend.  Visit the XSitePro website and read about it. In fact, there’s a video on the site that really showcases what XSiteProwill do. I think you’ll be as impressed as I am.

Using these free platforms you can create content using text, images, and video that informs, entertains, or engages people about your brand, products, or services.

To develop a content strategy, first define your goals — what you want to accomplish. This is also the first step in develop an advertising campaign. But instead of thinking: What can I buy? think: What can I create?

Since you’re developing your own content, you can put your own keywords into your content that are highly relevant to your business and will attract search engine traffic.

Assess the skills and capabilities you have in your organization to create content.

Then “think like an editor,” that is, create a calendar for your content creation, stick to it, think of new ideas and angles. Perhaps you can position yourself as an expert by discussing new developments in the industry.

Rebecca Lieb, former editor of ClickZ, has opened a US office for eConsultancy.com, the largest provider of interactive and digital marketing best practices, news, information, research, training, and events in the UK. This interview was taped in August 2009 at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in San Jose, California.

1. Create a prioritized to-do list regularly
2. Segment your analytics data
3. Always be testing to improve results.