SEM Wired

Nowadays video counts for an impressive amount of content. Making this content available to search engines is therefore a crucial aspect in SEO, so that they can be correctly indexed and bring some more traffic to your website. If SEO often focuses on text content, there’s plenty of things which can be done to improve your video content and gain a good amount of organic traffic.

According to a study recently released by Nielsen, time spent online by users watching videos increased 45%. Also overall number of streams and streams by users increased significantly on month-to-month and year-to-year basis. If videos are considered this important by users, SEO on-site video optimization becomes a necessity, not just a secondary task to a more traditional search engine optimization.

First things first: file types currently crawled by Google

Google can crawl the following video file types: mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf, so long as the files are accessible via HTTP. Metafiles requiring a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported. Just make sure you’re video is available in one of the mentioned formats and you should be fine.

What to optimize videos for?

Videos can searched through Google Video, Youtube or generic Social Media platform.

However the same optimization focus might easily be applied to all of these sources, considering that Google alone and Youtube make up for a 90% of all video search queries. A slightly different approach might be considered if we want the video to spread virally through social networks, hence some strategic planning ahead of the launch and  strict

URL structure

As for generic pages, the video URL must comply with the most typical URL optimization tips: avoid too many nested folders, keep your video file name clear and with relevant keywords separated by an hyphen.

Page text

Content surrounding the embedded video is considered relevant as well, so make sure you add some relevant text description to your video in the same frame or page area. It must be something related to the video, able also to spark some interest on the users and make sure your keywords are always present.

File names

Always keep your keyword list at hand, you’ll have to make sure that the video file name contains at least some of the keywords you want to be ranked for.

Create a video sitemap

If your website features a significant amount of embedded videos, you’d better get a video sitemap. A video sitemap would definitely help Google when going through your website trying to index and categorize your content, making sure no video gets lost or not indexed.

How to manually create a video sitemap

1. Create a text file and save it with an .xml extension.
2. Write the following lines at the beginning of the file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

1. Write the following to the bottom of the file:

</urlset>

1. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.

<url>     <loc>http://www.yoururl.com/</loc>     <lastmod>2011-01-01</lastmod>     <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>     <priority>0.8</priority> </url>

1. Upload your Sitemap to your site.  The file should be located at www.yoururl.com/sitemap.xml

Google’s webmaster central states, “Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.  If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.” As such, each video URL entry in the sitemap must contain:

• Video Title
• Short Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

Further information on the topic available here.

On the 21st september, at 2.54 PDT, Twitter has experienced a attack through a XSS (Cross-side scripting) vulnerability. Due to malicious code being executed, a massive retweet spread though all users,

Generally speaking XSS attacks exploit a lack of control on HTTP GET and POST requests. Malicious code is injected through a URL pointing to the affected website, allowing most kind of queries to be executed. Defacement should not be worst in case of less visited website but as the outcome can incredibly grow in magnitude if considered the amount of visitors.

This is the code used:

http://t.co/@%22onmouseover=%22document.getElementById(%27status%27)

.value=%27RT%20Matsta%27;$(%27.status-update-form%27).submit();
%22class=%22modal-overlay%22/

When you move your mouse pointer over a link and you are logged into your Twitter account, your account will post a new RT (ReTweet) that points to a link to the Twitter account of the user “Matsta”.

The worm spread over all terminals with javascript activated. Some people obviously panicking at Twitter Headquarters (or probably just laughing their ass off for being fooled by a script-kid), for a few minutes internet went back to be a less noisy, content based network, as it originally was. Considering the amount of uselessness spreading through twitter these days, a smart worm is for sure an improvement in content quality.

Back in the years you were like if you could score a shell on a *.ac.kr server, with a PHF or ftp-bounce attack. Script-kiddies nowadays can just hit the news with a smart URL… I’ve never though that web security would have grown according to the number of visitors and variety of services and protocols available, but is probably time to catch up more than ever.

On a side note, attacks like these may also show what the really security attitude of these companies, definitely in need of a real improvement.

Besides the new features discussed in the previous post, which focus on the semantic value of content, HTML5 also implies further changes regarding links, especially the value of the rel tag.

If you are already familiair with link scuplting techniques, you should already know the rel attribute (rel=nofollow anyone? . HTML5 introduced a bunch of new values for this attribute

• rel=”alternate”
  Using this attribute we will be abe to show the same content in different format (print ready or pdf). It definetely come handy when having to avoid duplite content issue.
• rel=”autor”
  Defining the right context is the first step towards making content fully available to search engines. Mostly used in blog or website whose content is produced by different authors.
• rel=”up”
  This attribute helps us out when having to define content hierarchy, when using breadcrumbs for instance or when setting up different categories for product pages.

As you can see this new values comply with the more general outlook of the HTML5 standard, which is mainly focused on adding a semantic valuer to code in order to better understand content.

Being able to track all clics from our Adwords campaigns is becoming more and more important, even when clics come from mobile devices.

A few months ago Google officially announced the launch of Adwords for mobiles, answering to the growing importance of mobile devices also amongst advertisers.

Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers.

On this side it is also quite important to be able to track clics coming from Adwords ads displayed through mobile devices.

The ValueTrack It works both for search and display networks and it can be used to both automatically redirect traffic to a mobile-optimized version of your website http://www.yoururl.com/{ifmobile:movil}

On the other hand it can also be used to actually track down those clics, showing you url www.yoururl.com?type={ifmobile:telefono}

Site architecture is quite of an important factor when it comes to code/architecture optimization and an overall crucial step in SEO.

This video from SEOmoz goes in deep with a few examples, so that you can get a real grip of page structure and architecture.

No matter how updated is your sitemap, a correct site architecture is the first step towards a site proper optimization. The video also mention the potential effects of this procedure on usability, keeping always content at a one-click distance from every page.

Content structure is a pretty invisible task in any SEO project but absolutely fundamental. I have always seen positive consequences anyway.

A flat site architecture does not mean at all that you have to get rid of directories in URLs and these are my two cents to those articles. On the contrary, it is something to add to the click distance + relevancy distribution equation.