YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

"When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."

"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.

More WebProNews Videos

"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"

"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."

"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.

Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.

“If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we’ll just push that through,” he said. “If you don’t do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML.” In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr’s real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.

Sponsor

Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis.

The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he’s just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could.

Superfeedr could be described as “FeedBurner 2.0″ – for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.

Discuss

What’s the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there.

We’ve already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November, but Cascaad’s SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates.

Sponsor

Cascaad has released its first beta of the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to “add smart contextual information and monetization [...], including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores”. The SuperTweet provides users with “an at-a-glance view of additional information about stories, things and places discussed in the message, without forcing them to leave your application,” according to the API documentation.

The API allows developers to parse a tweet, identify separate “entities” and then gather external contextual information on those entities. It then adds this information to the original tweet to create a “SuperTweet”.

If a tweet mentions Lady Gaga, for example, the name “Lady Gaga” becomes a link to a biography pulled from semantic-web database Freebase. Next to that, the SuperTweet gives an affiliate link to Amazon, where you can go buy Lady Gaga CDs. And if a link to an article about Lady Gaga is included in the tweet, the SuperTweet provides a thumbnail preview.

In addition to wrapping these entities in contextual information, the SuperTweet API unwraps shortened URLs back into the original link so the user has an idea of what they’re clicking on. And, although not yet available in this release, the Conversation API will put the tweet in the context of a conversation, providing access to other public messages in the same conversation thread.

The challenging part of all of this is that the API needs to parse a rather variable piece of content – a user created tweet – and find the appropriate meta data. Just like a search engine, it needs to recognize misspelled words or other slight variations to find the proper content.

One Twitter developer we spoke with said that, while they like the idea of outside information being added to the base tweet, they have found the contextual results to be hit or miss. It would seem that the concept is solid, but the execution is still in the difficult learning stages.

While we like what we’ve seen of the SuperTweet so far, it will only be worthwhile if it can provide accurate results. If we tweet about the iPhone and it links to the Amazon page for the iPad, the service will fall flat on its face. Get this part right, though, and we’re willing to be you’re going to start seeing Super Tweets in some Twitter apps soon.

Discuss

Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren’t for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It’s a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you’d expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

Sponsor

No Cover Up Here

Below, an item page for a popular link shared about Toyota. Below is what appears to be the company’s direct response. Thus the name of the site, Conversations.

Easy to Use Logic Chains

Tweetmeme portal customers set up complex combinations of rules for which tweets to display using what company founder Nick Halstead calls “a mini-programming language – with a drag + drop interface for setting them up. Rules can be based on tweet, text from the story, title, meta data from the story, geo location data, twitter users who are tweeting…almost any data that is associated with twitter and the linked story that we spider as well. Each channel can have a number of chains – each chain can work separately – but be valued differently – i.e. have a confidence factor associated with it.”

The Big Dashboard in the Sky

This is what Tweetmeme HQ looks at, standing on top of all the channels. The ten person team calls its big set of rules “the pickle matrix”. Every time someone Tweets a tweet with a new link in it, or a Retweet, that data is thrown against the pickle matrix. That’s the field “access count.” Then an optimized process of rules are matched. “The data isn’t the problem,” Halstead says, “it’s the number of rules we put against it. This is 1,000 times more powerful than Twitter’s Track or search because we can apply tens of thousands of rules to every Tweet we see.”

Halstead’s company got a big boost from this deal, but Tweetmeme has been cash-flow positive for at least the last 3 months. “I think the more interesting fact,” he says, “is that I started this company for the sole purpose of doing this and companies are now only just starting to recognize the value in this kind of proposition. I think that shows how far social media has grown up. And that you have to stick at what you know is right – even if people ignore it to start with.”

No word yet on when this system will be opened up to the public, but used in conjunction with other media types like Toyota has it sure seems like there’s a lot of potential here.

Disclosure: FM Publishing, a partner in the Toyota project, is also RWW’s advertising network.

Discuss

Walled gardens are already under attack because of the ease of sending content like messages and photos from one website to another. Sites that don’t let content flow in and out freely, when that’s what users want, are fighting against the powerful tide of the internet.

Now a new proposal aims to take things to the next level and send a payload of item-type specific action options along with every piece of content that gets shot across the internet. A loose body of innovators from some of the biggest social networking companies online have begun discussing an addition to the Activity Streams standard format called an Action Stream. That could blow the world of social networking wide open, allowing users to try out other competing social networks without losing their ability to interact with friends on Facebook, for example.

Sponsor

Earlier this month social software designer Adrian Chan offered up a proposal for what he called Action Streams.

Action streams would not only share status/activity update meta-data but also permit updates to function as actions. For example, an invitation update posted in twitter could be accepted in Buzz. The vision for action streams thus involves a distributed and decentralized ecosystem of coupled action posts, rendered by third party stream clients and within participating social networks.

This idea was added tonight to the Activity Streams wiki where it will be discussed by the community building the Activity Streams format. The standard types of actions that can be taken in regard to content items of the same categories on Amazon and Facebook were listed as prior art. The discussion has just begun, and data interoperability isn’t something that everyone at big social networks agrees is in their best short-term interests. These idea are exciting and are supported by a substantial number of people, though.

The Activity Streams discussion is participated in by engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, Nokia, Yahoo and others. Chris Messina, who joined Google in January, is one of the key voices, and semantic web builder Monica Keller, who left MySpace for Facebook last month, appears to be taking an even more active role in the effort than she had before.

If Activity Streams with Actions can be implemented effectively, that would mean not only that you could participate in any social network you choose and still read messages from outside that network – you could also interact with them from those other networks as well. RSVP to Facebook event invites, tag yourself in photos, etc. without visiting Facebook, but from within whichever social network won your heart through its superior features or design.

You could interact with your friends on Google Buzz from inside Facebook, or from a social network that doesn’t even exist yet. More and better social networks would spring into existence because the ability to see and interact with friends would no longer be a scarce resource hoarded by the biggest social networks.

If you think social networking is a world-changing phenomenon today, imagine what it might be like if interoperable social networks sprung up like wildflowers. It’s one thing to make content available in a standard format – but making some basic actions transmittable and standardized would make the prospect of communication across networks all the more real and powerful. That could mean an environment ripe for innovation and a better experience every day for users.

Discuss

It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.

1. Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that – descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags

- Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:

- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags

- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.

- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.

- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.

 - Encourage participation by enabling everything.

- use meta data

- use captions and subtitles

- use watermarks

- use Google Maps integration

There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.

More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.

2. Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":

-  Add images to your Google Local Business profile

- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:

More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.

3. Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

- Only indexes articles three days old or less

- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.

More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.

4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords. 

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less

- Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

- have pages, mentioning your area of service

- directions on how to reach your office

- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)

- have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.

More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.

5. Ranking in Google Blog Search

Back in ‘07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.

More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.

Wrap Up

It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.

Which of these do you see the most traffic from? Tell WPN Readers.

Got more tips for ranking with these engines? Share your knowledge.

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides a wealth of information directly from Google. Once you have verified a site with Google, they’ll give you access to all sorts of information.

Here are just a few features of Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Errors
Google Webmaster Tools will show all sorts of errors with a site. Not only does it show broken links on the site, but also links that are driving traffic to the site for which there is no valid page. Google even tells you pages it knows about but has been restricted from crawling. That’s good to know incase someone accidently blocks to much.

Google Webmaster Tools Error Report

2. Set Site Defaults
Tell Google to show your page with the www or without, set a geographic target and select if you want the images show up in Google’s enhanced image search; aka Google Image Labeler.

Google Webmaster Tools Site Defaults

3. Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
Google will provide a list of URLs that have duplicate title tags or duplicate meta descriptions as well as if there are pages with to short, or to long, meta descriptions or titles.

Google Webmaster Tools Analyzing Meta Data

4. Top Search Queries
Ever wondered what people search for that your show up for? Outside of the obvious of course. This type of information is available in Google Webmaster Tools. It shows what a site is showing up for and what people are clicking though on along with your ranking. It can even be filtered by type of search (web, image, mobile) and by country.

Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries

5. Manage Sitelinks
If a site is lucky enough to get an additional block of links under their listing in Google, these can be managed in Google Webmaster Tools. You can’t tell Google what pages to add, but you can tell Google not to show a sitelink it has created.

Google Sitelinks

6. Enhance 404 Error Pages
Google can provide a bit of JavaScript that can be embed on a 404 error page so that when it loads, Google will try to guess what the user was looking for based on what Google has indexed. It also comes with a handy Google site search box.

Google Webmaster Tools Enhanced 404 Error Pages

These are just a few of the features of Google Webmaster Tools. Google continues to add additional features and functionality and we can only hope other search engines follow suit.

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. |
SEO Basics: 6 Tips for Google Webmaster Tools |
13 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.

1. Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that – descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags

- Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:

- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags

- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.

- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.

- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.

 - Encourage participation by enabling everything.

- use meta data

- use captions and subtitles

- use watermarks

- use Google Maps integration

There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.

More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.

2. Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":

-  Add images to your Google Local Business profile

- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:

More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.

3. Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

- Only indexes articles three days old or less

- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.

More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.

4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords. 

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less

- Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

- have pages, mentioning your area of service

- directions on how to reach your office

- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)

- have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.

More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.

5. Ranking in Google Blog Search

Back in ‘07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.

More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.

Wrap Up

It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.

Which of these do you see the most traffic from? Tell WPN Readers.

Got more tips for ranking with these engines? Share your knowledge.