Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

Stay curious my friends.

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

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.

Campaigns like this one from Element Skateboards give me hope for the future of marketing. They pieced elements (no pun intended) of the online world, video, real-life events and the passion of their audience and created a truly simple and elegant campaign. Take notes from the video below.

A campaign for Element Skateboards where skaters can challenge each other to claim spots.

Facebook let it all hang out to a select group of members to test their new search interface.  The system would allow members to search their news feed for recent updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared on friends’ profiles and fan Pages. Users who have made their profile and content available to anyone will also be searchable.

SEOMoz yammers it up during Whiteboard Friday to talk about visualization.  I think visualization is one of those new and sexy fields that you’ll hear more and more about in the near future.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Visualization from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

12seconds is updating their iPhone app to take advantage of the new OS 3.0.  The app, which should be available soon, will allow you to send short video messages directly to your friends via twitter.

Back ‘dat thing up and pick up some great tips about landing page design through CopyBlogger’s Landing Page Makeover.  Their most recent tutorial covers CarsHelpingAmerica.org.

If you’re a fan of Indie Rock, I highly recommend The Veils – Sun Gangs. Rock out this weekend.

Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talks video in which she talks about life after your greatest successes are believed to be behind you, the art of showing up everyday and how you should put down your ego and realize that your genius is on loan from the universe.  It’s well worth the 20 minutes.

File this under things I wish I had thought of.

All Laundry Detergent teamed up with The Celebrity Apprentice to help create and distribute a viral video that donated 50 cents to two charities every time their video was shared. All is essentially using their budget as incentive to encourage people to share and distribute clips online, but to also build goodwill. The content of the video below is a little long, but overall the theme is pretty good. Since I knew that 50 cents was going to a charity, I was willing to tune in for a little longer.

What a great way to incorporate TV with online video, web, corporate partners and a good cause.

The charities supported were the Guide Dogs for the Blind charity and The Lili Claire Foundation. Razorfish is the agency behind this.