From the category archives:

Search Engine Optimization

Get More Video Views With These Optimization Tips From YouTube

by Bob Hazlett on January 4, 2010

Mark Robertson of ReelSEO caught up with YouTube’s Matthew Liu to get some insight on best practices for optimizing your videos. Here’s what he had to say.

Content

Creative should be engaging and compelling enough for users to comment, rate and ultimately share.
Shorter videos (2-3 min) perform better than longer (~10 min) videos.
Learn from your video Insights. If your viewers are engaged better than other videos, you’re going to be rewarded in search rankings.

Community

Clear and concise tags, description and title. Use complete sentences when you can. Tags should be relevant, don’t try to play off of popular terms if your video isn’t related to that particular subject.
Keep embeds on, the more links or times your video is embedded on outside pages, the better ranking you’ll get.
Videos with more ratings, comments and views typically get better rankings.
Use annotations to link multiple videos together. Don’t forget to add date and location to your video’s description.

Found a YouTube tip that’s helped you achieve better rankings? Share it in the comments below.

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What is SEO 2.0?

by Bob Hazlett on July 17, 2009

Tad tries to define this new shift in search engine optimization or what some are calling SEO 2.0 (which in my opinion is a lazy name). While many of the pros are still hatching out and evolving the definition, he gives it a go and says that SEO 2.0 is “not Google SEO, a Buzzword, a PPC scheme or part of an MLM formula, it’s the people’s SEO, about relevancy & ORM“(object relational mapping – allowing different systems to basically speak a similar language).

Putting it all together, SEO 2.0 is about changing the factors that currently impact what influences a site and relies more on community and trust. SEO 2.0 also takes into account other mediums much more, such as video, maps, books and looks to makes results more personal to the user. Here is the full SEO 2.0 article.

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Non-Profits Kicking Butt, New SEO Best Practices, Web Design Checklists and Google Advertising Rumors

by Bob Hazlett on July 7, 2009

Here are the interesting posts at the top of my reading list this week.

The fine folks at the Red Cross are working diligently on crafting a Social Media Policy Handbook. They’ve got a great start and are light years ahead of even most for-profit businesses. As it should, its available online for your viewing pleasure.

Staying with the non-profit side of things, NPR has a great feature of The Extraordinaries. Its a micro volunteering iPhone app that allows people to give small blocks of time (< 5 min) and knowledge to a non-profit. Some of the first tasks available are tagging images for the Brooklyn Museum building a map of childhood playgrounds. It’s a beautiful concept.

SEOMoz updated their SEO Best Practices to account for new industry data. They clear the air and a lot of confusion in regards to new search engine optimization standards. The synopsis is H1 tags are not all that necessary anymore, stop trying to sculpt PageRank with nofollow, use footer links, java and flash sparingly, traffic to a site doesn’t determine its ranking and quite a bit more.

Smashing Magazine compiled a great list of web design checklists and resources that will help improve your writing skills.

Rumor has it that Google is experimenting with product ads that would would work very similar to AdWords, but display an image ad along the right hand side of the SERP when the user searches on a particular term. These ads would run on a pay-per-action basis rather than a pay-per-click (PPC) basis.

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