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;
}

We all know WordPress is one of the most versatile and easy to use CMSs, with plenty of features which made him one of the best blogging platform available on the market. However it still lacks and adequate support for multilingual blogs, for instance when we’d need ot post the same article in more than one language at the same time.

If the CMS itself does not provide enough support for this feature, we can sort thing out pretty easily with a few plugins:

• Google Ajax Translation, this Google API makes available translation to users on your blog frontpage. It is not to be considered a proper WordPress plugin but it works just as good.

• WPML Multilingual CMS, with this plugin we would be able to get a fully working multilingual blogs in just a few minutes. No need of any change inside the source code or tables, it works straight out of the box.

   

• qTranslate, with this plugin we would be able to manage content in different languages from the WordPress editor, through automatic translation and permalink management.

Robots.txt has got its own system of codification for content, which does not allow any text codification different than US-ASCII.

According to the URI specifications, only the US-ASCII character set has to be used in order to define URL’S. This very point can create quite a lot of trouble for webmasters trying to set up their own robots.txt with a different set of characters.

ASCII’s 128 characters only covers the English alphabet, numbers, and punctuation marks, making impossible to control search engine behaviour when some “weird” characters are used into folder codification, like ñ in Spanish and ç in French, which are left out of ASCII.

Most characters in non-Latin-based alphabets, such as pi (π) in Greek, ya (я) in Cyrillic, and entire alphabets from many other world languages, can’t be accurately written in the limited, English-oriented ASCII.

robots.txt file codification is the following:

• ANSI (Windows-1252)
• Unicode
• UTF-8

The file however supports following codifications for its content:

• ANSI (Windows-1252): 8 bit
• ASCII: 7 bit
• ISO-8859-1: 8 bit
• UTF-8: 8 bit

Let’s take the case of a russian website, using Cyrillic codification for its folders and directories. In this case, characters like π or я should be correctly encoded into US-ASCII.

Percent-encoding comes into play, making possible to encode a non-ASCII string into a set of characters which can be perfectly read by search engines.

Let’s consider a russian website with a admin folder we do not want search engine to crawl:

http://www.domain.com/папка/

In order to avoid search engines crawling the admin folder, the folder’s name should be encoded as following:

Disallow: /%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%BA%D0%B0/

…while the following line won’t work, since directory specifications into robots.txt must be always encoded in US-ASCII:

Disallow: /папка/

You might also want to read this article from the Bing Community, which explains the issue.

A news realase of WordPress has just been made available and is supposed to fix several security flaws, as explained here on the WP blog.

WordPress got so popular that any security update can actually be crucial, considering the amount of websites using it. Recently a well-known vulnerability allowed a worm to spread around affecting several blogs, according to this article. Still, there’s something more we can do to make our WordPress installation safer.

The WordPress Exploit Scanner extension can scan for well-known vulnerabilities and exploits which might affect your WordPress installation. In order to be used you just need to download, the extension, upload it on you server, active it by the extensions dashboard and a link will pop-up on your general dashboard.

Once you run the extension (it might need a few minutes to complete the task) the report you get is extensive. The plugin analyse in depth every single file, looking for malicious code embedded into standard file. It’s pretty useful, even if a standard report can require some programming knowledge to be fully understood. It’s a very neat tool, I guess it should be included in every WordPress standard setup.

Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.

according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.

In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.

However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.

Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:

Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds

These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.

A new search engine has just been launched and it’s time to update our analytics software.

Google hasn’t released any major update to automatically recognize traffic coming from Bing into Google Analytics but I guess it is not gonna take too long.

In the meantime we can easily tweak Google Analytics just playing around with our tracking code.

In order to add Bing as a search engine we need to use the addOrganic function: _addOrganic[domain, search query]

AddOrganic Function: how it works

The addOrganic function has two parameters:  domain and search query. It basically tells the Analytic engine to consider some referrals as proper search engines, hence appearing on keyword statistics.
This two parameters are embedded in every search query we forward to a search engine:

Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=[searchquery]

Yahoo:
http://us.search.yahoo.com/search?p=[search query]

So let’s take a look to a standard Bing query:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=[search query]

As you can see, the right AddOrganic sintaxy would be the following:

pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q");

We just need to add this line right before the trackpageview() call into our Analytics code.

I think there’s an obvious update on the way but if you are already getting some decent organic traffic from Bing just add this line and see what happens.