Louisville, KY – Actors Theatre of Louisville today announced that they have engaged the expertise of local online communication and branding experts, VIA Studio. VIA secured the bid following a search, initiated by Actors Theatre, for a company to drive the re-imaging of their existing sites aligning it with current visual branding and address consumer demand for interactivity, including increased integration of social and rich media content.

On VIA’s appointment, Marketing & Communications Director Kory Kelly said: “We are thrilled to have awarded VIA Studio this contract. We were looking for imaginative proposals that incorporated both a user-friendly interface with high functionality and that also took into account the versatility of Actors Theatre and the diversity of our programming and audiences. We were impressed with the creativity, innovation and capabilities, VIA presented to us. They demonstrated a true understanding of Actors Theatre’s unique on line and web requirements. VIA have the caliber, expertise and track record to breathe new energy into our website. We are excited and grateful of their commitment to support our on-going marketing efforts in their new role as Interactive Marketing Partners. ”

“We consider it an honor to work with a group as esteemed as Actors Theatre,” said Jason Clark, President of VIA. “We can’t wait to get to work. I have been a big fan for a long long time.”

In business since 1996, VIA is an interactive marketing and design agency led by Creative Director and President, Jason Clark and CEO, Sales & Marketing Director, Kelly McKnight. They’ve received numerous awards in local, regional and international competitions, including the prestigious AXIEM and Horizon Awards. VIA specializes in building, maintaining, and hosting websites and creating marketing and advertising programs to drive traffic to the sites they build. This includes combining traditional with new media like search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and mobile apps media.

Their client portfolio includes Stock Yards Bank, Purnell’s Sausage, Jefferson and Boone County PVAs, WhipMix, and Floyd Memorial Hospital.

Development on the website will begin shortly, with a new site tentatively due to launch in the Fall 2010. For more information about Actors Theatre, go to http://www. ActorsTheatre.org.

About Actors Theatre of Louisville

Marc Masterson, Artistic Director
Jennifer Bielstein, Managing Director

Now approaching its 47th season, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the State Theatre of Kentucky, has emerged as one of America’s most consistently innovative professional theatre companies. For over 30 years, it has been a major force in revitalizing American playwriting. Its annual Humana Festival of New American Plays is recognized as the premier event of its kind and draws producers, journalists, critics, playwrights and theatre lovers from around the world for a marathon of new works. Over 350 plays from Actors Theatre have been published, making them available to producers and readers, and creating a significant addition to the nation’s dramatic literature. Actors Theatre’s programming includes a broad range of classical and contemporary work, presenting over 500 performances each season. The company performs annually to nearly 200,000 people and is the recipient of the most prestigious awards bestowed on a regional theatre: a special Tony Award for Distinguished Achievement, the James N. Vaughan Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement and Contribution to the Development of Professional Theatre, and the Margo Jones Award for the Encouragement of New Plays. Actors Theatre’s international appearances include performances in over 29 cities in 15 foreign countries. Currently, there are 40 books of plays and criticism from Actors Theatre in publication and circulation.

“We picked VIA because they demonstrated the best overall understanding of our unique online and marketing needs,” said David Jordan Vice President / Director of Creative for Stock Yards. “We liked the quality of their thinking and the scope of their capabilities. We interviewed a long list of their current clients and came away very impressed.”

VIA has a full package of services, including marketing, graphic & web design, copywriting, and a team of programming experts who can integrate web site design with advanced functionality into a comprehensive marketing campaign.

In business since 1996, VIA Studio has won numerous awards in local, regional, national and international competitions including the prestigious AXIEM and Horizon Awards. VIA specializes in building, maintaining, and hosting websites and creating the marketing and advertising programs to drive traffic to the sites they build. This includes combining traditional with new media like search engine optimization, social media, and mobile media.

Big secret: Keywords are not magic bullets.

Gone are the days of web pages that veritably scream at you from the computer screen to buy, Buy BUY! or sell, Sell SELL their Widgets or whatever.

This being said, there is still irrevocable value in paying close attention to the keywords your potential customers are searching with, as well as the keywords your competition is using to guide their marketing strategy. I’ll give you an example. ((warning: the numbers in the following example are completely made up. The idea and the alluded to research is not.))

The keyword ‘Advanced Widgits‘ gets an average of (lets say) a million searches/ month. The keyword “AW“, however gets an average search volume of over 8 million a month. This little factoid tells us that while we may have written the most tantalizing and interesting copy ever for ‘advanced widgits’, much fewer people are going to find it than if we had written that copy using the term ‘AW’ instead. With just a little bit of research into keyword trends and some time spent on traffic analysis, we can make a simple change in the focus of our content. With this little bit of knowledge we can help our widgit site appeals to a much larger audience of potential customers.

Another place keywords come in super handy is in the world of Pay Per Click advertising. We’ll talk about this in another session, but its worth mentioning now because there is a lot of value to be found in purchasing ad space in highly competitive markets where your website may not hold a top rank organically.

Lets recap.
Dont:

• pack content with all your keywords
• expect keywords to tell the internet whats on your website
• duplicate content to generate more pages full of keywords

Do:

• research keywords for traffic and trend data
• write content specific to target audiences
• use keywords to guide your content
• consider Pay Per Click

Some of the key points we look into:

• What are competitive sites doing? Is it working? What keywords are they targeting?
• What are the relative traffic rates for the client’s pre-identified key words? What other keywords should they target?
• How well is the site performing in search engines? Is the traffic converting once it gets to your site?

Big Secret: Nobody knows all the answers

For each question, there is an answer, and for each answer, there is a tool. At VIA we utilize a plethora of tools that help us analyze sites and answer these questions. It often takes an exceedingly long time of extreme attention to detail to succeed. These are the days that seem to involve black holes that take us from nine to 5:30 without passing GO. We call it “Going down the rabbit hole.” Sounds yummier than it is, trust me.

This research is a big part of the monthly maintenance expense often dedicated to SEO. Reports, charts, spreadsheets and graphs abound. Kim and Jason spend a LOT of time on the phone, both talking to clients and talking to each other. Sometimes the answers are elusive and there are emails and blog posts to clear up ambiguous questions that they can’t parse out themselves. Fortunately, we have lots of tools to help us glean the answers that allow us to guide our clients through the murky depths of Search Engine Optimization.

We’ll go into detail, and discuss many additional tools, in more specific articles to come. Here are a few to get you started.

Domains

Tools that let you research your own domain and that of the competition can give you a good view of your site from high above. Much information is publicly available for free, most services offer more advanced paid features, and many let you see more detail about your own site by adding their code.

• Quantcast shows detailed traffic and demographics along with information on related sites and advertising
• Compete focuses on comparing one site to another with excellent graphing options and many premium features
• Alexa provides an additional view into the data with the usual domain information as well as links and search terms

Keywords

Where to even begin? These sites are a big help when starting from scratch as you can just give them a domain and they will give you back a list of terms to start with. So much easier to start with a list to whittle down rather than a blank sheet of paper.

• Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool lets you see search volume, leaving the keyword field blank to get an initial list
• Google Trends leads to more tools, including Google Insights for Search, that let you see what people are searching for
• Keyword Spy, SEMRush, and SpyFu all provide useful lists of keywords from just a domain name, if your interested in what your competition is doing, which you should be and many, many more tools

Summary

Be careful! Clicking on any of those links may lead you down the rabbit hole. And that’s the danger in too much data. How much research is enough? One of the hardest things to do in SEO is to find the actionable items in the stream of information. You can drown in that stream if you’re not careful. To purrrhaps paraphrase Avinash “less data, more action”.

See how I waited until the end to warn you? It was a trap! We need and want more people to understand SEO so they will see the value in our services. I’m sinister, I know. I come by it naturally.

Jason oversees the day-to-day operations of the business, as well as taking a supervisory role in the creative direction of the company and its clients.

Clark joined the company in 2003 after having worked at Power Creative and Corvus Digital, as well as having a successful career in music and event production. Clark is a Louisville native and is currently President of the Louisville Graphic Design Association.