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.

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.

A few months aho Google announced Gmail would switch to a default https connection, increasing protection against sniffing and any other network related threat. It was great news, even though the SLL was already available, Google made it the default option for users.

Nowadays all over the world millions of Facebook users get connected via standard http, keeping themselves quite vulnerable to sniffing or man in the middle type of exploits. Is there any way to switch to a safer connection making our Facebook login a bit more secure?

Just type https://facebook.com when logging in and your connection will pass through SLL encoding, making it safer: your machine will exchange a key with the facebook server through which all date will be encoded.

This means the secure socket layer connection s already availbale: how long should users wait for it to become the default connection in Facebook?

CSS transition have been finally made available on Firefox (3.7, pre-alpha2). With this feature developers will finally be able to apply movement to CSS elements, quite a good alternative to the more common use of Javascript. Here’s the developers Firefox version if you want to have a try.

// HTML
<ul>
 <li id="long1">Long, gradual transition...</li>
 <li id="fast1">Very fast transition...</li>
 <li id="delay1">Long transition with a 2-second delay...</li>
 <li id="easeout">Using ease-out timing...</li>
 <li id="linear">Using linear timing...</li>
 <li id="cubic1">Using cubic-bezier(0.2, 0.4, 0.7, 0.8)...</li>
</ul>

// CSS
#delay1 {
 position: relative;
 -moz-transition-property: font-size;
 -moz-transition-duration: 4s;
 -moz-transition-delay: 2s;
 font-size: 14px;
}

#delay1:hover {
 -moz-transition-property: font-size;
 -moz-transition-duration: 4s;
 -moz-transition-delay: 2s;
 font-size: 36px;
}