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.

Sentiment Analysis: the next big thing in SEO?

If you browe the web long enough I’m sure you’ll find plenty of guides and articles about Adwords and how to get the best results from your campaigns. In spite of how useful this guides can be, getting to know what not-to-do can be equally as useful, considering how important is to avoid mistakes rather than actually trying to do the right thing.

1. Bidding to low from the very beginning

You’ll never know how good or bad your adverts are unless they will show up in the first positions. Don’t be afraid of getting a lower quality score for bidding to high from the beginning, things will even out in the end, but you need to know your adverts perfomance on the first positions.

2. Mixing content with search campaigns

Search and content campaigns behave in a completely different way, thus with different performances and optimization routines. Mixing up the two will make decision making and optimization harder.

3. Running all keywords with broad matches from the beginning

Unless you’ve got already a comprehensive list of negative keywords, activating all keyword with broad matches might result in a huge amount of impressions with low CTR’s. However it depends on your budget: for the sake of keyword research you might want to activate all keywords with all matches available in the same time,which would result in a more expensive setup, but the insight you might get would be really valuable.

4. Tweaking bids too early

CPC will lower itself once you’ll get a  good quality score, most of the times there is no need to lower CPC yourself. Just give it some time, do not act like you’re always in a rush, Adwords optimization needs time and effort.

5. Forget about testing

Always save some time on adverts testing, beside the normal keyword research. Testing is essential in order to reach good CTR’s, while most people start off running a few adverts and keep the one with the best CTR running indefinitely.

6. Running too many keywords

Fewer selected keywords mean getting more focused on the specific niche you want to get your message to, narrow your focus with different groups of highly selected keywords to increase CTR and quality of your adverts.

7. Forgetting about single keyword performance

A specific campaign could reach a satisfactory CTR giving us some peace of mind but if you dig down another level of analysis you might find out that most of the keywords are no producing any clic and they’re just a waste of impression. Always analyze through different levels and perspectives, through adverts, keywords, campaign performance.

8. Focusing on one (wrong) metric

Do not focus only on a few metrics, try instead to get a global vision of your performance. Most people get focused on they’re ads CTR’s forgetting about cost for conversion or overall conversion rate (in the case you’re dealing with objectives). Even if you’re not using Adwords to increase your sales or you’re just aiming to get some more exposure to your brand, CTRs is not the only thing that counts.

9. Not considering landing pages as a factor affecting overall performance

Beside directly affecting conversion rates, landing pages can also affect quality score and overall campaigns performance. Always build some kind of semantic relevance in between the advert copy and the landing page content and keep in mind bounce rates. These factors can seriously affect your ads quality score hence your results.

10. Give up to early

Managing Adwords Campaign can be quite of a daunting task. You might feel to give up to early unless you realized that it is all about a trial&error process, when everyday you learn something new. Setting up a really successful campaign require mostly time and effort, whether you’re an online marketing consultant or a small business owner.

HTML5 is already here and it is changing the SEO world forever.

HTML 5 basically follows the way the web evolved in the last years and includes many useful tags and elements. It develops more towards a semantic approach to content, with specific tag which mark the kind of content is going to be displayed. It might seem as its developers where aiming to create a PHP kind of programming language but it is still an XML-based markup language.

The major development from HTML5 is a bunch of new tags with outline the semantic content of a page section. It is quite of a revolutionary change, considering now search engine will be finally able to understand the actual content of a page.

It’s easy to see how letting sites mark individual blocks of their page with meaningful information would assist in the segmentation of a page. Search engines would be able to know instantly what is what and decide how to treat it.

Here is a short list of a few new tags and the way the should be implemented on page:

<article> tag – The new <article> tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The <article> tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine.  It will reduce the need to use <div> tags, hence making the code cleaner and easier to be understood both from humans and search engines. Search engines will put more importance on the text inside the <article> tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.

<section> tag – The new <section> tag can be used to identify separate sections on a page, chapter, book. Each section can have its separate HTML heading. As with the <article> tag, it can be presumed that search engines will pay more attention to the contents of separate sections. For instance, if the words of a search string are found in one section, this implies higher relevance as compared to when these words are found all across the page or in separate sections.

<header> tag – The new <header> tag (which is different from the head element) is meant to give developers much more flexibility in term of heading categorization. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag but the difference is that it can contain a whole different set of header tags (h1,h2….) or whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.

<footer> tag - Both the footer and header tag can be used several times in a pge, which means the do not have to belong necessarily to the standard header and footer of the page. For instance it can be used to define recurrent elements on a page (think of a blog post) with specific header and footer.

<nav> tag – The new <nav> tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages. It is quite important when it comes to define page rank distribution through links on a page. We often have to struggle a bit in order to distribute page rank through link, this should be make life a bit easier.

Beside these tags there a whole bunch of new ones which might require further explanation. For instance, <audio>, <video> or <dialogue> tags are also part of the HTML 5 standard and they will allow to further separate the content into the adequate categories. As you can see the main point of this update is making HTML closer to a human level of understanding, besides the obvious consequences with SEO.

How it works: HTML4 tags vs HTML5 semantic tags

Currently with HTML4, mark-up coders are working with document structures like this:

<div id=”header”>
[logo]
[links or navigation]</div>
<div id=”leftnav”>[navigation links]</div>
<div><p>text</p></div>
<div id=”footer”>[footer links]</div>

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.