Archive for September, 2010

The Financial Costs and Benefits of Video Conferencing

Video conferencing has been one of the most sought after technologies that are being used today not only in home setting but also in medium to large scale businesses. If you are one of those who are planning to take advantage of this relatively new means of communication, two of the major factors that you should consider are the financial costs and benefits of video conferencing.

More and more people are now into video conferencing because they are finally seeing its benefits and advantages. However, no matter hoe advantageous video conferencing is, there will still be major things to be considered to ensure that you will benefit more than you have spent for the technology.

Financial cost of video conferencing

Video conferencing refers to a means of communication that enables two or more people to a conversation in a real time. It involves the use of a high capacity personal computer, a web camera, a microphone, and high speed broadband connection to the Internet. Aside from these video conferencing equipment that have been mentioned, essential tools for making a video conference work are the equipment to be used, the video conferencing systems, and the video conferencing services offered by various people that are in the field of Information and Technology.

When it comes to financial cost of video conferencing, you will need to prepare or set budget for it. Before making any decision, make sure that you yourself understand everything about it. Don’t be overwhelmed too much by its convenience because you might be paying more than what you need and expect.

The major factor for financial cost in video conferencing is how much would the equipment would cost. Since you will be getting transmission—both audio and video—in real – time, you need high capacity personal computer that would amount to $500 to $1000 depending on the brand its specifications. Since video conferencing involves face to face meetings, you will be needing a web camera to capture the image/s and send it back to the other party.

A typical webcam can cost from $30 and above depending on its size and capability. For voice communication, you will need microphones that can either be tabletop or wireless that would range from $50 to $300 depending on its capabilities and brand name. Other major expenses would include a video, a wall mount, and speakers which don’t require too much sophistication and budget.

Aside from video conferencing equipment, another major cost for video conferencing is the need for high speed lines or ISDN to ensure that there will be efficient, fast, and hassle free communication. You can look for video conferencing providers online that can suit your video conferencing needs and offer packages and discounts for you to choose from. The price of video conferencing services could amount from $200 to $1000 depending on its timely rates.

But the good news is that once you’re set up a video conference room can be as little as $10 per month.

Benefits of Video Conferencing

Although video conferencing would normally cost you a lot of money from the installation process to the equipment, services, and system requirements, these cannot amount to the benefits you can get for your business.

The major benefits of video conferencing include ensuring that there will be increased productivity because people don’t have to spend so much time traveling for meetings and conferences. Most savings come in terms of eliminating travel costs and allowances in lengthy trips during meetings.

It helps save a lot of time because people can transact businesses without having to spend so much time getting to the place of the meeting and ensured safety of the people involved because they will no longer have to risk their lives during travels just to close a deal or meet a client.

These are just some of the benefits of video conferencing.

If you are a business owner, it is always best to conduct a study or a research first about the financial cost or benefits of video conferencing to ensure that you are making a good business move and decision.

Get Video Conferencing for up to 50 people for less than $10 per month.

Google LOVES WordPress Blogs!

Why?

… Because WordPress Blogs deliver content and keywords that are designed to meet “world best practice” for keyword optimization.

Now the point about keyword optimization is that Google wants to match the keyword terms that people are searching for with the pages that highly match the content that is available. If you optimize your web pages around a certain keyword phrase then you will be better indexed inside the Google Search Engine – as well as other Search Engines.

Google calls this Quality Score.

You may have heard the term Quality Score associated with Google if you’ve been into PPC (Pay Per Click or Search Engine Marketing) – it’s generally not a term that is sprouted when talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Now what Google is actually trying to do is use the keywords associated with your page and rank you site in their index for those keywords or keyword phrases.

What I’m talking about here is On Page Optimization for the Search Engines. You can get traffic easily enough using on page optimization without having to get many backlinks.

Google will reward your site for it’s on-page keyword terms and it can even outrank sites that have hundreds of keyword optimized backlinks in the “anchor text”. But if you want to rank for terms effectively them you’re going to need to know exactly what to do.

Using SEO Pressor to enforce your keyword selection in WordPress is the key to getting indexed effectively in Google's Index

I use a product called SEO Pressor to help achieve exactly what Google wants in their index for my keyword search terms.

Check out my example of that below for the term Cherry Kitchen Cabinets.

(ASIDE: I use Market Samurai for my keyword and competition research. You can download the free trial version of Market Samurai here. There’s video training on every aspect of how to use the program, and it’s only a one off price under $200 – no monthly fees.)

In my example of Cherry Kitchen Cabinets, I want to rank a site for these keyword terms. I’ve used Market Samurai to determine that these keywords have high demand to be profitable but have very low competition. This means that I should be able to rank well for them against other terms in the Google Index.

So my next step is to develop a web page associated with my website (it’s a kitchen based website for a client, and I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing the way I did this with my subscribers).

The page itself needs to be optimized with the keyword search terms in a number of places, and also a few other on-page factors that Google considers important. Now I thought that most of my websites (blogs) were done extremely well in terms of on-page optimization for my selected keywords, however after installing the WordPress plugin SEO Pressor I found that most of my keywords only counted for less than 35% of the total paage Quality Score.

So I’m now in the process of updating every web page to make sure that they actually do count to 100% of the Quality Score and it’s improving my website rankings dramatically.

Here’s a look inside WordPress and the SEO Pressor plugin to see how it works.

Once you start your page, you enter your primary keyword for that page in a box under the content page. By writing on the page and giving it a title, heading, a picture and some content, SEO Pressor can give you an update of your page’s Quality Score simply by hitting the Save Draft button inside your WordPress site.

Now the aim is to meet all the requirements that Google wants to index your page the highest for it’s on page keywords.

There are options inside the plugin for you to change the way that SEO Pressor handles different parts of your page elements.

If you don’t have enough information on your page, then you’ll get a nasty red cross where it fails to meet the indexing standards of Google. Simply address the issue and update your page to meet the expected keyword terminology.

Now you can aim for 100% keyword optimization if you want – though I’ve been warned by some people that if you over-optimize your sites then this is considered Search Engine SPAM and your site will be ranked a little lower. I aim to get greater than 85% keyword search terms optimized, up to 97%.

This will satisfy your on-page optimization strategies so that you can rank well for your chosen keywords.

You now have no reason why you can’t do this yourself. Go out and try it