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Digital Asset Management (DAM), or Digital Asset Optimization (DAO), has been floating around the search engine optimization world for a little while now. It is sometimes even referred to as SEO 2.0. Though it is a term that has been around for awhile, it still seems to be a relatively new concept to the SEO field. In my opinion, it is not a whole new internet marketing system, but instead an extension of SEO.

So you’re probably wondering, “what is it?” Well, Digital Asset Management has to do with optimizing digital media files (images, videos, audio files, etc). The difference between DAM and SEO is, SEO applies itself to text based files. With the uprising of video sharing websites like YouTube, it is as important as ever to ensure your digital media files are optimized for search engines.

How It’s Done
It is important that you properly name your digital media files. You also want to give them proper meta descriptions or image alt text. Often times, digital cameras will assign a generic name such as PA122058.jpg. Well, if you want your information to be found under search results for PA122058, then you have a winner. However, if this image is of a business product, then you want to name this image as your business product. A PDF file is another example of a file that can be optimized using this technique. By properly naming the PDF, and then by embedding the PDF file within an HTML file, you will gain SEO benefits as it will be searchable by search engine spiders. You can then tag the PDF file in the same way that you would tag image files and the like.

Videos are a little trickier to optimize. It is easy to just embed a YouTube video into your page, however that actually helps YouTube’s ranking more than it will help your own ranking. If you have a video to share, the right thing to do would be to host it in multiple locations. Not only on YouTube and other digital directories, but also on your own host servers. Again, you want to make sure you have a valid file name, and then tag the files with title and meta tags. This allows you to somewhat control how the videos get indexed by search engines. Hosting the videos yourself allows for viral marketing to take effect, but you also want to make sure your host can control that type of traffic flow.

Utilizing these techniques can help you attract more visitors in a different way.

Once you have identified a couple of your selected targeted keyword phrases, it is important that these phrases are placed throughout your website. However, just as important, is not being completely repetitive and have these keyword phrases repeated constantly. This can actually do more harm than good, as search engines will catch on to what you are doing with your website. This is called overstuffing.

They key thing is to have your website flow naturally, as ultimately that is what search engines are looking for. They are consistently reworking their algorithms to enhance their results. An ideal keyword density is around the 3% to 6% range. This means your targeted keyword is placed 3 to 6 times out of 100 words of content. Quite frankly, having much more than, you will most likely lose interest in your potential customer anyways because they will just feel like the website is not edited and therefore not trustworthy.

If you’re not sure how many keywords should be within your content, you can take a look at this keyword density tool. You can go to my site for more help on SEO and web design.

Online shopping is growing, and by the year 2010 it is expected that over $300 billion will be spent in online purchases. Therefore, having a solid online reputation is of great importance, and managing that reputation is just as important. People typically do research on the products and the businesses that sell those products. Do you know what is being said about your business?

By just doing a search for your company’s name, you will be able to see what your potential customers are seeing. This helps you monitor what customer’s are saying about your business and/or products.

There are a few things that you can do to maintain a positive online reputation:

• Articles and Press Releases – You can help to increase your brand exposure by issuing articles and press releases. By regularly publishing this content to various article and press release directories, you give yourself a better chance of flushing away the negative search results. Search engines crave freshly written content, so articles, and particularly press releases, tend to rank well. One article or press release a year won’t get the job done. You need to devote time to consistently publishing quality content and you’ll eventually start to take control of your online reputation.
• Guest Blog Contributing – One of the best ways to establish your authority and attract new customers is to be a guest contributor on top blogs in your industry. By guest blogging on popular blogs, your posts will rank very well and be associated with you or your business name. Additionally, you will receive free, high quality links to your site. If you’re a regular reader and commentator on a certain blog, ask the author if you can write a guest post. Many times, they’ll be more than happy to have a guest contribute unique content.
• Social Networking – Not only are social networking sites a great way to connect with your target audience, they also can be used to push down negative search results. If you create profiles on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, and Myspace, you’ll be able to influence what search users see when they search for your name. However, it’s important that you create useful profiles as your potential customers will be viewing these pages.

You must remember online reputation management requires time and devotion. If you are providing a shady product and do not offer customer support, than all of the online reputation management techniques in the word can’t help you. It starts with you and your business. Treat reputation management as an important part of your business management strategy.

Thanks to Eric Brantner for his thoughts on online reputation management.

It has been a little bit since we’ve gone into some SEO related postings, so I’m going to be delving into the topic with this blog posting. We’re going to discuss the importance of utilizing long term hosting plans and choosing appropriate domain names and how these things can affect your search engine results!

Choosing the Right Domain Name
This one is an important factor. It isn’t easy establishing a brand name, and it usually takes years to do so. Therefore, it is suggested that you choose a domain name that contains targeted keywords. For example, lets say your business name is “Zoomie,” and you sold mountain bikes. www.zoomie.com is going to take years for you to develop a brand and identity. If you wanted to put together a website for your Mountain Bike selling business, it might be best to utilize a URL such as www.mountainbikesforsale.com.

Avoid Dashes and Numbers
Numbers and dashes add no real significant value to your domain, and should be avoided in most cases. Dashes seem to be accepted, but through enough research it seems to take a slight hit in regards to SEO. Search engines find them spammy, and therefore a domain without dashes will get a slightly better ranking than the same exact name with dashes. For example, www.mountainbikesforsale.com will do better than www.mountainbikes4sale.com and www.mountain-bikes-for-sale.com. Numbers and dashes in the domain also hurt the resale value of your domain if you have plans to sell the domain down the road.

Register for the Long Term
When choosing a hosting plan and registering your domain, use the longest term that you can afford. Preferably, a three or four year term. The reason for this is so that search engines will know your domain will be around for a long time. This helps to differentiate your domain from spamming type of domains who may only be registered for one year. If you are purchasing a domain from a domain marketplace, try and find one that has been around for awhile. The longer the better, as search engines put more weight into domains that have been in existence for a longer period of time. Try and use the WHOIS tool as well as the Wayback Machine.These tools allow you to check if the domain’s have been registered before.

Purchase Similar Domain Names
If you purchase www.mountainbikesforsale.com, try and purchase www.mountainbikesforsale.net and .org as well. You will want those domains to point to your main website (.com in this case). This tells search engines that you are trying to consolidate your brand. If you have a website that might sound like other words, it may be a good idea to purchase those domain names as well.

So, as you can see, you need to keep SEO in mind from the very beginning! Utilizing these techniques, in conjunction with other SEO topics that have been discussed, will help to build your business .

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.