There’s an interesting article today in SiteProNews about video search engine optimization. While Randy Zlobec makes some great points, I was a bit disappointed that he left out the most important part of video optimization, especially if you host your videos on your own site. He does cover some very important territory, however:

• Meta tags
• Submitting to more than just Google and YouTube
• Embedding on your own site
• Stay away from pop-up players
• Use a video search tool on your site
• Use some kind of analytics to determine which videos are most popular and how long visitors stay on your videos page
• Ensure your videos are high enough quality for TV
• Don’t use ActiveX controls
• Create a sitemap for your videos

All of these are important for video optimization and I wouldn’t leave any of them out, but Zlobec did leave out one very important item that should be the first thing you think of, namely, text content on your videos page that is descriptive and contains your important keywords. Aside from visitor usability, this is the most important thing.

While Google has announced that it can now crawl Flash files, there still is no evidence that all videos will be crawled. Even then, when Google crawls Flash it is only looking for text and links, two elements that are likely not to be the most prominent in those files. And other search engines won’t even do that, which means that your videos will have to be optimized using elements not within the video itself. Content on the page has always been the most important aspect of search engine optimization - and it still is. Optimize your videos will valuable text content that uses your most important keywords - that is, the most important keywords for that video.

The good folks over at ThinkEyeTracking.com have put together a great blog post on the importance of ranking well at Google. It’s based on comparisons between eye tracking studies conducted in 2005 and 2008. In a word, Google users’ search behavior has changed considerably during that time.

What was the change? We look at fewer results.

If you Google a lot then you have probably figured out that anyone not listed in the top 3 positions for most key phrases hasn’t done a good job of search engine marketing. Users today are more search savvy than they were in 2005. Anyone who doesn’t get to the top of the charts isn’t worth looking at - at least, that’s the popular notion.

What this study really means is, now more than ever, top listings are very important. The question is, how do you get there?

There are links then there are links. Some links are good, some are better. Some aren’t worth anything at all. How do you tell the difference?

Some folks swear by paid links. But if Google thinks you’re buying links then you will have your links discounted and the person selling them to you will have his website’s PR taken away. Bad, bad Google!

Actually, that’s not a bad policy. People selling links for PR are attempting to influence search rank unfairly. That’s the reason for the penalty. It happens because most links are actually good links that benefit the websites linking to and being linked to. But how do you get them.? Well, let’s count the ways:

• Reciprocal linking
• Directory submissions
• Write great content that people will freely want to link to
• Engage in article marketing
• Start a blog
• Do some social networking
• Social bookmarking

As you can see, you have some options. But which of these methods should you perform? The answer: All of them.

All of these are effective in building links, but you want to use a multi-layered strategy because if the search engines ever change their algorithms and the ways they count links then you want to have enough links from as many different types of sources available so that you decrease your chances of all of your links being discounted. Call it diversifying. Bottom line: It works.

Learn more about effective link building.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog wrote a post on duplicate content in June. They covered the topic pretty well, but there is one aspect of duplicate content that wasn’t covered as in-depthly as it could be. What should you do if your article content is scraped and a website fails to give you attribution.

Understand that duplicate content and scraped content are two different things. Duplicate content doesn’t necessarily have to be scraped. If you have the same content on two different sites and attribution is given to the proper source on both sites, it is still duplicate content. Articles, for instance, constitute this type of content. But if you do article marketing then the articles that are picked up at article directories by webmasters is not considered duplicate content by the search engines - at least in terms of content that they would prevent from being indexed. What that means is this: If you submit an article to a directory and that article is subsequently published by 3 other websites then all 3 of those websites could potentially have your article indexed for the same key phrases. That actually serves the purpose of article marketing and helps both the publisher of the article as well as the author.

What is frowned upon by the search engines - as it should be - is when a publisher picks up an article and doesn’t give attribution in the proper way. That is scraped content and goes against Google’s guidelines. So if that article published at an article directory and which was published by 3 other legitimate publishers is then published on a fourth website, but it is not noted that you are the author and your author resource box is not included then that is article scraping and a type of duplicate content that you should concern yourself with. If you notice that such a web page is listed in the search engines results for your key phrases, what should you do?

First, try contacting the website owner and sending a friendly letter, asking for attribution or removal from the site. If contact information is not available (oftentimes it isn’t) then you’ll want to send a spam report to Google. To do that, log into Google Webmaster Tools. If you have sitemaps on file with Google then you’ll see those listed. On the rights side of those websites you’ll see a list of links. One of those links is “Report spam in our index”. Fill out the spam report and wait.

It could take some time before you see anything come of that. If you really want to push it, try looking up the Whois information on the domain name and finding the ISP. Report the scraper to their ISP. Reputable ISP ban websites that conduct themselves in a dishonest manner.

Today marks the launch of brand new search engine Cuil. According to the founders, some of them ex-Googlers, the need for a new search engine is the fact that the Internet is growing and getting harder to index. That is true, but I’m not sure that I agree with the principle that bigger is better. Cuil claims to have a larger index than Google, though Google disagrees. I don’t think it matters how big your index is if you can’t deliver relevant results to users. To me, the quality of the search results is the most important thing. With that in mind, does Cuil do a good job?

Well, according to Grokdotcom, Cuil hasn’t done well with brands. I’d have to agree. A search for “small business mavericks” turned up a “we didn’t find any results” page. Type that into Google and we’ re No. 1.

I performed a search for a search term that I knew should turn up exactly what I was looking for. I knew it because I know that there is only one page on the entire web that specifically offers a particular product. Type that product name into Google and every result on page 1, except for one, is about that product. In position No. 1 is the page on which the product is offered by the company that produces it. The rest of the results are product reviews, interviews with radio personalities and publishers with the product developer, and bookmarks of the product page at sites like Mixx and Propeller. Typing the same query into Cuil delivered a bunch of results not related to the product at all and the only result that was related was one of the bookmarks. Propeller seems to be heavily weighted at Cuil as several of the top results for the few queries I presented were Propeller pages - even if the pages I’d consider most relevant weren’t represented.

To be fair, I did go back in and type in “small business mavericks” with the quotation marks and I’m all over the page. I guess if you’re going to search for a specific brand at Cuil then it helps to put quotes around that brand name, but I did this with the aforementioned product and got back the “we didn’t find any results” page.

It’s clear that Cuil has a way to go before it meets its goal of producing more relevant results than Google. It’s methodology is clearly different than Google, attempting to deliver the most relevant results and not the most popular. I agree that most relevant is better than most popular, but I don’t think you can achieve that in the manner than Cuil is attempting. They seem to have done away with the link analysis algorithms that Google has based its results on. There could be an argument made that Google relies on that too much, but Cuil likely doesn’t rely on it enough. Still, as Greg Sterling says, let’s give Cuil another year to see how it develops before we rush to judgment over its competitive ability against Google.

Check out these other blog posts about Cuil:

Danny Sullivan
Mel Carson
TechCrunch

Talking to some friends the other day I had someone say to me, “Don’t you have to pay to be on page 1 of Google?” My chin dropped.

It dawned on me that the typical user of the Internet who has no interest in running a business online and who may never run a business online has no idea how to get their website ranked in the search engines. They, first off, probably have no interest since they aren’t running a business. I guess that’s just the way it is.

But if you do run a business and you do want to establish a Web presence, the first myth you need to get out of your mind is that you have to pay to be listed in the search engines. You don’t.

We live a pay your way world. You have to pay for all your basic needs - food, shelter, clothing - well, I guess you don’t have to pay for self actualization. But some people do. They have therapists to help them get there. Others just take up yoga.

Online, however, the economy is different. You don’t have to pay to be No. 1. You just have to learn how search engines work and build a website that does all the right things. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. It does take work. Like mowing the lawn. It’s virtually free. You pay for the gas in your mower, but if you do it yourself your only expense is your time. Or you can pay the kid down the block $25 to do it for you.

When it comes to making sure that you achieve respectable rankings for your website, you can do it yourself - if you have the time. Or you can pay someone to guide you. But Google doesn’t need your money.

I stumbled across this website called www.dontclick.it. Of course, the concept is intriguing, but the thought crossed my mind, How would this concept affect SEO if it were to roll out across the entire Web?

First, the site is designed entirely in Flash. In order for it to do very well in the search engines at all, Flash would have to move beyond its current state of interest and the search engines would need to capability of crawling them. That’s already happening to some degree. But Google would have to to do better than that in order for Flash sites to be indexed the same way that HTML sites are now. That’s for starters.

Another thing that I think would happen if the entire Web looked this way is meta tags would go out of fashion completely. There’d be no need for them. If the search engines could crawl the Flash files and read the text and images for indexing purposes then there’d be no need for meta tags whatsoever. They’d completely disappear.

The most obvious issues related to search engine spiders would be the links. Since we’re talking about mouseover effects inside of Flash, there might be an issue with the search engines being able to crawl those links - at least at their present stage of development. Google has been known, however, to find solutions for its algorithms based on new developments in design so it is not entirely impossible that Google couldn’t figure that out. And what Google does the other search engines are sure to follow.

Still, the biggest downfall of a Flash-dominated Web would be the interlinking. Would webmasters still want to link out using mouseover links? Today, if you want to leave a website to get to another, you have to click a link and that takes a conscious effort. What about if you simply had to mouseover it?

You could make the mouseover require an action like swiveling the mouse in order to activate the link, or add a timer, but each method has some drawbacks. No matter, there would still be some SEO ramifications to any of these solutions. Would link building still have the same effect that it has today?

I realize some of this may be over the heads of readers who are new to the Web development and are still trying to figure out why linking matters at all. But eventually these questions will have to be answered. I see Flash becoming a more important part of the Web, but just how important remains to be seen. And, of course, like any new development, there will be adjustments. But the SEO part of the equation is one that I find intriguing and am somewhat concerned. Does anyone else share that concern?

An article at Inside CRM lists 15 websites that can influence your business for good or bad, but the article is rather flawed. Here are the 15 sites the article lists that are influential enough to make or break your company:

• Google
• YouTube
• Amazon.com
• Wikipedia
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Digg
• TechCrunch
• Colbert Nation
• Valleywag
• Twitter
• The Smoking Gun
• Oprah
• The Consumerist
• The Huffington Post

The problem with this list is that most of these websites don’t give a hoot about your small business enough to pay it one iota of attention, let alone boost it on a pedestal or drag it through the mud. Of this list, most small business owners need only consider 4 of them, maybe 5, as potential websites to concern themselves with in protecting their brand.

Those 5 sites are:

• Google
• YouTube
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter (wild card)

Google, of course, is the most popular search engine today. They really don’t care about your site. An impartial source, Google algorithms do all the work. It’s up to you really how well, or how poorly, you are perceived through Google’s lenses. Google does nothing; you do everything. They catalog information; you present it. But you can build a solid business online without being listed in Google (though I wouldn’t recommend it).

YouTube is a video sharing site. Yes, you can have videos go viral. Many have. But look at the odds. Seriously, millions of videos uploaded, only thousands with a record of success. Possible, but don’t bet money on it. Just build your brand honestly, create and upload videos if they’ll benefit you, and just do good business. To be honest, YouTube isn’t for everyone, but for those that it will benefit it has potential.

Facebook is one of the best ways you can build your brand. Like Google, it does nothing. You do everything. These sites provide the opportunity; it’s up to you to take advantage of it. Network, network, network.

MySpace is for teens. Does your business cater to teens? Use it. If not, forget about it.

Twitter, I’ve never used it. I’ve heard it’s great. It probably is. Many people use it and say sweet things. If you want to give it a go I see no reason why you shouldn’t.

But what about the rest of these sites? Amazon.com is an online book store and product retailer. Do you sell through them? Is it a place that you could sell through? Then by all means it could help you. If you’re not a retailer then Amazon likely won’t be much good for you.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. Most of us don’t need to be listed there. Have you made any significant accomplishments? Maybe they deserve a mention. But don’t expect a flood of business just because your friend Biff went up and told the world that you won the Blue Ribbon Award for Dog Grooming in Nantucket, Illinois (Is there a Nantucket in Illinois?).

TechCrunch, Valleywag, The Smoking Gun, The Consumerist, and The Huffington Post are all news sites. If you aren’t newsworthy then you likely won’t be mentioned on any of these. TechCrunch and Valleywag only deal with technology so if you aren’t a technology company then don’t count on it. The Smoking Gun destroys reputations. Sound inviting? The Huffington Post is a political site. The Consumerist is The Smoking Gun of the marketplace, but if you aren’t a big brand worth talking about then they likely won’t care that you ticked off Bongo the Clown because you didn’t have any red balloons.

That leaves Oprah, Colbert Nation, and Digg. Oprah is very influential. But you have to work your soles off to get on her show and it’s a task. Unless you have something that has a very wide and potentially popular appeal, don’t waste a lot of time chasing Oprah.

Stephen Colbert is a funny guy. Why would he care about your small business? Only Colbert knows.

And Digg, hmmm. Interesting site. Can help you get a lot of traffic. But if you look like you are trying to get publicity through Digg then you’ll get blasted by the in crowd at Digg. They either like you or they don’t and they generally don’t like marketers. But you can get some traffic here. Personally, I think you’re better off with StumbleUpon and a few other social sites. The most popular isn’t always the best.

Honestly, Yahoo and MSN Live can do you better service than some of these sites. As a small business, just stick to the basics and you’ll do fine.

Do you have a small business Internet marketing blueprint?

The article caught my attention, that’s for sure. The promise was bold and incisive. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. Get high rankings at Google. All you have to do is three easy-to-do things. Only it’s not that easy.

Here are three things you have to do to get those high rankings (the author of the article promises):

• Pick the best keywords and place them in your web page content
• Then you need to “find, get, and manage” great inbound links
• Finally, you need to monitor your progress

I agree that these are the three things you need to do to rank well in the search engines, but it’s not so easy. It’s hard work.

Picking the best keywords is not so cut-and-dry. You have to do some research. You have to look at the availability of the keywords and not just their traffic value. The best keywords are those keywords that get a lot of searchers trying to find information on them and where few webmasters are targeting them. That isn’t too many keywords. Plus, to add a kink in the garden hose, it changes from month to month.

This month, “auto repairs” might be a valuable search term. Next month, it could “tire rotation”. I wouldn’t suggest you change your website content every month to capture the latest high value search term.

To be sure, constant keyword research is necessary and finding the best keywords isn’t always easy. Even if you find high value keywords with little competition, you still are going to do better with keywords that are relevant to your business and if those are the keywords with the most content you are in for a long, hard drive to the top of search engine rankings!

Inbound links. Yes, you need them. Getting links isn’t hard. Getting valuable links consistently is hard work. Directory submissions are good, but even better are relevant sites within your niche that have authority. Getting them to link to you voluntarily is a difficult task, but it can be done. And when you do it those links can help propel you to search engine ranking success!

Monitor your progress. This is actually the easiest step. The hard part is finding the best keywords, developing great content, and building valuable links. But once you get the hard part out of the way, monitoring what happens on your site and using that information to make important tweaks that benefit you is much easier.

Need help with your goals. Try an Internet Marketing Blueprint before you go too far.

Rand Fishkin provides a really good example of why you want to be honest, straightforward, and direct with your customers. I even like some of his answers here. One of the best answers to questions people asked Google was on the question of spam. Here’s what Rand had to say:

Google can take anywhere from a day to 2 years to take action on spam reports. Generally speaking, unless the violation is egregious (or appears publicly in the media), Google likes to find scalable, algorithmic solutions to spam issues. Thus, they’ll take your report, compile it with dozens of similar reports of the same types of violations, and work from an engineering perspective to come up with a solution that will catch everyone using the tactic, not just the single site/page you reported.

That’s a good clue for webmasters. It’s not all about you. Google wants to create an environment that benefits the searcher all the way around. Creating algorithms to address issues like search engine spam is one way of doing that. That’s much more effective than just looking at one or two sites and engineering them through human-centered ways. But I do take issue with Rand’s suggestion to publicly out your competitors:

My best advice, if you’re seeking to really get a competitor booted from the index or penalized in the SERPs immediately, is to write about them on major SEO-related forums, submit a thread at Sphinn or a blog post to YOUmoz. When spam is reported publicly, Google tends to take action much more quickly and directly.

That’s really dirty pool. I’d say report the competitor to Google and, if you really want to be competitive, try to figure out what tactic they are using to get the ranking they have. If they are already using blackhat SEO techniques that Google has algorithms for addressing then you don’t want to mirror those. They’ll get their just deserts eventually and it could be bad for them. But if they are using techniques that are not necessarily considered blackhat, but might be questionable, then mirror them and when Google changes their algorithms the playing field will be leveled naturally. This will save you face with industry peers and customers, who might take your public criticisms of your competition and use them against you.

If you do use this mirroring technique, do it sparingly and wisely. You don’t want to get on the bad side of Google either.