Chances are that if you’re a fan of mashing up your home videos and photo albums into video presentations that are fun, snazzy and musical, you already know about Animoto. If not, you might want to check them out. Animoto gives some of the best video editing and creation software a run for its money.

Not just for home users, it’s available on different plans so it has features for businesses too. Video marketing is becoming a great Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tool for lead generation and direct response, and Animoto is ideal for that.

They’ve been around since 2006.Initially you could only upload photos, but Animoto’s popularity really took off 3 years later when they added video.There are 3 basic steps:

• Add images or video from the pic sharing or social media site of your choice (supported include Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket. You can use other tools too, like iPhoto if you’re on a Mac) or even upload from your PC
• Choose your background music, either from your own MP3 collection or from Animoto’s own music library
• Watch and share on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

If you don’t count the last one, that’s two steps. It’s that simple.

Grabbing your pictures is easy – just point it at your account on the photo sharing site of your choice, and it will display your abums. You can also add text but you’ll have to keep the caption to 30 characters or less.

If you don’t have music, Pro service users ($249 for 1 year) can access a library of over 1000 songs. Now, the free service is still pretty awesome, but each video is limited to 30 seconds in length and branded with their logo. Animoto Plus is the same as the free Lite, except with unlimited video length.It’sgreat for wedding and birthday videos, when stand alone video editing tools are out of reach.

For that ultra professional look, Pro also has‘exclusive styles’, designed and chosen by professional photographers and businesses. If your video needs more pizazz, Animoto have partnered with iStockPhoto for use of their video library.

Adding video to your presentation

It’s just as easy as pictures – you grab video from a folder on your computer or from devices like iPhone and Flip. You are limited to 5 seconds for each clip with Lite (more if you’re on a paid plan).

What makes Animoto really attractive to the amateur filmmaker is that you don’t need to be an expert in video editing or tools. It uses “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” to analyse the video and then mix it automatically with your photos and music to create something seamless and sporting a professional editing room look.

We tried it with some snaps and short videos some friends took during their outback trip, and the result is truly amazing – does the tourist board use Animoto? Maybe they should.

For commercial users, the Call to Action button button

Animoto Pro users can include a CTA (Call to Action, or end-of-video) button at the end of their presentation, which will send viewers to a website, page or download.  We wrote about it in 2008 here.  It’s great for B2B users or for smaller operators who just want some extra SEO juice.

And $249 a year for some extremely cool online video editing seems pretty good value for presentations that look a whole lot better than most of the amateur stuff on YouTube and Dailymotion.

SEOmoz hosts the web’s most vibrant SEO community, provides valuable SEO resources and develops and refines a wide range of SEO tools including SEOmoz Pro, one of the best SEO tools and the industry’s leading SEO software.

Some of the SEOmoz tools are offered as part of their free membership, but to gain the most out of the tools, we recommend that you sign up for the SEOmoz Pro free trial for thirty days – after the first month, it’s a $99/month investment.

SEOmoz Pro offers the following benefits to you:

• SEO software for monitoring and keeping up to date with your SEO.
• Frequently updated tailored SEO improvement plan.
• Resources for keeping up to date with the latest practices in search engine optimisation.

Watch the SEOmoz Pro Tools Overview webinar for more information: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/seomoz-pro-tool-overview

We have tried and tested numerous SEOmoz Pro tools allowing you to analyse pages, your links, find new keywords or even investigate your competitors’ links. The tools have great reporting features allowing you to download comprehensive reports as PDFs.

Another big plus to the SEOmoz suite of tools is that the Pro Membership is not contract driven, so you literally just pay month to month and can cancel anytime. But once you see the value in the tools, we know that you won’t be able to live without them.

Setting up and starting your first ‘campaign’ is relatively painless. SEOmoz provides very easy to follow steps to walk you through the process and allow you to take full advantage of your membership for one of the best SEO tools on the market.

Another great incentive to subscribe to SEOmoz Pro Membership is access to the Pro Webinar and Blog series, helping you to keep up with worldwide trends of Search Engine Optimisation and implement these into your SEO campaigns.

SEOmoz is one of the most comprehensive suites of Search Engine Optimisation tools we have used, and the price for the Pro Membership is well worth it. Interested? Sign up here.

Scribe SEO LLC have recently announced the launch of Scribe SEO – a plugin for WordPress that holds your hand through the optimisation process for your content, giving you a score out of 100, in your dashboard, before you publish…

Scribe SEO is a new SEO product that is designed to make SEO copywriting and publishing simple. It runs a real time analysis of your page for things like a breakdown on keywords, suggestions for fine tuning your focus on keywords, a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) preview and an overall score.

So can you completely switch off and write on autopilot? Perhaps not but if you are outsourcing your content and want to give it the SEO once over before you hit the publish button this could be a plugin for you.

Scribe SEO was originally developed for the Thesis Theme for WordPress, however it also integrates well with the Hybrid theme, the Headway theme and the free All in One SEO plugin.

This SEO tool would be very handy for anyone who outsources their SEO copywriting. You could run this tool before you publish to optimise the content without comprising the creativity of your writer’s style, helping to preserve the natural and creative flow of your content.

The program gives you an analysis of what the Search Engines think your topic is all about and then advises of the changes you need to make to better reflect the language used by searchers. The remaining content elements can then be tweaked based on best SEO practices. These include:

• page title: keyword usage, keyword placement and word count
• description: keyword usage, keyword placement and word count
• body of the text: keyword usage, keyword placement and keyword density
• hyperlink: Scribe SEO tells you the number of hyperlinks and prominence

Want a quick preview? Find out more about Scribe SEO here:

There are some common sense rules that still need to be applied and the first one is this…don’t aim for a perfect score. Agonising over a perfect 100 points will turn your content into a robotic, boring piece that is likely to backfire and leave you with a newfound list of unsubscribed readers. Take the advice on board, make it fit where it keeps with the natural flow and make a compromise where it doesn’t in order to preserve the context and quality of your content.

Overall, is it worth the money? If you are pressed for time and have multiple posts, multiple blogs and you update your content regularly then yes, this is an innovative plugin that has much to offer. However, if you are already an SEO expert and you are familiar and conversant with SEO copywriting principles, keep your credit card in your pocket. Although plugins like Scribe SEO can be useful, nothing beats great, original content written by an SEO copywriter.

Download a free trial of Scribe SEO, find out more about the Scribe  SEO’s plans and prices or read about some other handy SEO plugins for WordPress to optimise your site and boost your website ranking in Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Contact us to find out about our SEO Packages and SEO Services including our professional SEO copywriting services.