HTML5 gives advertisers multiplatform support. The campaign will play back on an iPad, iPhone, Android phone, desktop and Internet-enabled televisions. It also enables developers to create online games. Agencies won’t need to develop 19 formats to support just as many campaigns. If the format takes off and is widely adopted, it will enable campaigns to easily work across devices.

Some devices do not support Flash or Silverlight today. Apple, however, does support a version of the new codec called H264. Today, HTML5 on YouTube is a TestTube experiment. It does not support ads at this time.

What’s in it for publishers? Evidently, support for paid-content subscription models online. Terry McDonell, editor at Sports Illustrated, demonstrated a magazine application in development that featured video running within a frame of text. It looks similar to a magazine with rich video running inside the page where you might see a still photo. Adding an addendum to the famous Field of Dreams quote “if you build it they will come,” McDonell says the online publication must be built open, well-edited, searchable, social, and available everywhere. “If we do that we can charge for it,” he says.

Despite the obvious reasons to rejoice, some industry executives believe the advertising and marketing industries can expect to experience little chaos near-term, before things settle down. “We’re building towers on shifting sand,” says David Dudas, vice president of product development at Sorenson Media, which pioneered codecs that provide the backbone for Apple QuickTime, Macromedia, now Adobe, Flash and YouTube, along with the encoding software for high-quality online video. “Agencies will need to learn how to develop around the format to take advantage of it. Frankly, I think that will become a challenge because everything changes so rapidly,” says Dudas.

This alternative to Flash should cut development costs for agencies trying to create and manage campaigns for clients, according to Peter Csathy, chief executive officer at Sorenson Media. The format will provide instantaneous playback and low power consumption and become much more efficient, he says. This matters as agencies try to deliver campaigns to everyone everywhere on a variety of platforms.

Google’s sole purpose in life is to deliver sites that they feel are exactly what people are seeking out.

Here are some other elements that play into the factor:

1. Title tags and URL structure. Very important. Also H tags.
2. Content. Content. Content. Extremely important.
3. Backlinks from trusted sources (a lot of them)
4. LSI – Google is using this more and more and it’s Latent Semantic Indexing which is a fancy way of saying that the spiders which crawl the site are smart enough to recognize concepts that should relate. In other words, if your site is about baking cookies, then the spiders will expect to see stuff about sugar, or baking soda, or eggs, etc.

On the other hand, there are quite a few indirect SEO benefits associated with dedicated servers. First of all, you don’t have to worry about your website being in a “bad neighborhood”. The main problem with shared hosting is that a lot of websites, sometimes even thousands, end up being hosted on the same server/IP.

Unfortunately for the people who only employ legitimate approaches to search engine optimization, not everyone is willing to play fair. There are webmasters who are always on the lookout for the fast way to success and it’s safe to assume that out of hundreds or thousands of websites hosted on a certain server, at least a handful will be “problematic” from that perspective. In other words, even if you do everything right, there’s a chance that you’ll have to pay for other people’s mistakes.

Aside from that, there’s also the issue of page loading / page refresh speed which needs to be taken into consideration. Algorithms are constantly changing, but at least some search engines take page load times into consideration at least to a certain degree. It makes perfect sense if you stop for a moment and think about what search engines are meant to do. Search engines all want to display the best possible websites when someone searches for a certain term and fast page load times are important when it comes to the experience of your visitors. Of course, there are other factors which also are taken into consideration and most of them have more weight than page load times. But still, having an edge, however insignificant it may seem, is always a good thing, especially if you’re targeting terms which are extremely competitive.

The most important thing that dedicated servers put on the table is complete control. It’s your server and you can use it as you please. This means that you have more control over the software that you’re using and that you can tweak absolutely everything.

Nowadays, “only pay for what you use” is an approach which is as controversial as it is innovative. Cloud hosting is all about usage-based billing. In other words, if you’ve used more server resources today than yesterday, you’ll pay more today. An eloquent example is represented by websites which are subject to the digg effect every once in a while. Let’s assume that your website receives 1,000 uniques per day but that it makes it to the digg frontpage once or twice per month. The result: a huge spike of traffic which takes its toll on the server.

The owner of such a website has a difficult decision to make: normally, a Virtual Private Server or even shared hosting is enough if you’re only receiving 1,000 visitors daily. On the other hand, you can get in trouble if your websites receives sudden spikes of traffic.

Should you stick with your current plan and pay less? You could do that but what if your server goes down the minute you start receiving a lot of traffic from Digg? Would you be willing to let tens of thousands of visitors land on a page which doesn’t load and never come back?

How much is that traffic worth to you? Should you upgrade to a dedicated server? Wouldn’t you be overpaying if you go dedicated just because you receive more traffic a few days per month?