Ranking Factors: Google News from Google Employee Video
I came across this while stumbling stuff for a Spanish language site that I am working on and found it extremely interesting. There is a lot in there, almost all you need to know if your familiar with SEO, on how to optimize for the news search portion of the site. Without any more hesitation, here we go. The video runs about 15 minutes, so make sure you have some time to devote to watching it, just hit read on to get to the video.
Google News Ranking Factor Video from Google Employee explains the factors both positive and negative that go into ranking news items, whether it’s on Google Web search or separately on Google News Search:
Is Video Search the New PR Frontier?
Los Angeles, CA. (07/09/2009)…PR firms are continually finding new ways to exploit the potential of search engines to spotlight their clients and get the word out about the products and services they have to offer. Search engine optimization and purchasing ad keywords help to get clients’ websites ranked high in search engine results. For years the top dogs in the search engine arena have been Yahoo! and Google. But according to the latest figures from comScore, Yahoo! has now been eclipsed by an unlikely competitor—YouTube.
NOTE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN LAST YEAR, SO SOME FACTS ARE INCORRECT, I KNOW THIS, BUT I NEED TO GET CONTENT UP HERE, REGARDLESS - so pretent it’s early 2009 as you read this post.
YouTube is unique as a search engine, because every search performed there is for a video. And once it became clear that video searches were generating massive amounts of traffic to YouTube’s site, it was only a matter of time before marketers saw the potential for using that interest to their advantage.
A couple years ago YouTube instituted a program called “Sponsored Videos,” which is similar to the Google AdWords keyword-purchase program. Video owners can purchase keywords to promote certain individual videos, in the same way that website owners purchase keywords from Google AdWords to promote their sites. The program is still in the early stages of development, and YouTube personnel are keeping mum about the numbers of keywords available, pricing, and how extensive the program will eventually be.
But the idea is intriguing and filled with possibilities. A recent survey by BurstMedia showed that nearly 70% of the respondents actively view videos on the Internet on a regular basis, and people aged 35 to 54 are just as likely to view video content as people aged 18-24. An eMarketer study found that more than 120 million Americans view videos online at least once a month, and 76% of them tell someone about a video they have watched. Of the video viewers who have watched ads with online videos, 44% of them have taken action upon what they saw in the ads.
With all of this interest in watching videos online, it doesn’t take much of a leap to realize the huge PR potential offered by video searches; hence the development of sponsored videos. Spending money to encourage viewers to watch a video is not a direct approach to e-commerce, but it is a new concept that savvy marketers are learning how to use. For example, if a person searches YouTube for a video about iPhones, the sponsored video links at the top of the search results may include videos from manufacturers about peripheral products that work with iPhones. The person searching for videos about iPhones may see links to those advertising videos and be enticed into clicking them to learn more.
Video search engine optimization using purchased keywords is opening the door for PR firms to tap into the massive amounts of traffic flowing through video search engines such as YouTube, AOL Video, Google Video, and Yahoo! Video. As long as those millions of Internet visitors keep watching user-posted videos, they are a captive audience for sponsored videos as well.
The Ultimate Bookmarklet - Quix
If you are into bookmarklets, you might want to take a look at a side project that , editor of one of my favorite “go to” tweaking websites locations, Yoast has developed. Basically, if you don’t know what a bookmarklet is, its a drag n’ drop link that you can put on your browsers toolbar area and when you click it it does useful specific things. For instance I have one that will tell me all the .edu links to the current page, or even domain (but this is a different bookmarklet) - so you can see how easy it is to accumulate hundreds of these if you work in the SEO/SEM, Analytics, UI, Web Developer space. The Quix Bookmarklet solves this pesky problem by combining multiple tasks while using only one bookmarklet. In this case, the Quix bookmarklet is sort of an all-in-one solution to the many bookmarklets that are out there. You can do anything from check definitions on Google, Backlinks, .gov links, .edu links, tweet the current page, search Wikipedia along with facebook, linkedin, translate pages, check links on the current URL, show no-follows, find Yahoo inlinks for the current domain or page all from one bookmarklet. The trick is, you just need to print out the commands to do what you want it to do so you know what to type in the command window that pops up when you click the bookmarklet.
This is pretty sexy to someone like me who was just getting into bookmarklets and having to collect multiples for the various things that i do on a daily basis with my job as an SEO specialist for sites like Family Fun, a Disney recipe, crafts, food, holiday, seasonal recipes and crafts site along with others like Family, Baby Zone, which is all about baby names, baby care and tips for the new mom and mom to be, and many other sites aimed at pretty much similar demographics.
To find out more about Quix I have included a video below that will show you the product in action and also provide some tips and tricks on the best features and why it’s better than using hundreds of different bookmarklets.
Technorati Tags: quix, seo, sem, tools, yoast, website tweaking, bookmarklets
Could Lack of Customer Support Kill the Nexus One?
For some it’s a pastime, poor customer service and a general mistrust and sort of half cocked hatred towards bad consumer electronics companies. I can remember before blogs became a sort of consumer equalizer many had no where in common to vent, aside from the BBB, email or unless a class action lawsuit was initiated, or just by word of mouth, which was broadened by email and the Internets older message boards, BBS’s, etc. and now we have been reduced to what DaveN, or Dave Naylor calls “http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/label?lid=18bf75ad33b7d554&hl=en as where a consumer turns for service on the new Nexus One Phone. And i know a lot of people have sometimes become frustrated by the voice recognition in their phone, for instance, just while trying to do the right thing by not sitting there dialing in traffic. And let’s get real, I live in a state where it’s illegal to drive without a bluetooth device in your ear, isn’t it more dangerous actually dialing the number than it is to actually talk on the phone once it’s connected? Also the not so great voice recognition customer service hotlines set up by all kinds of B2B and B2C companies that refuse to actually transfer you to a human being unless you first go through endless futile attempts to understand, what you thought was pretty good english…..(no smart ass j0kes here).
Nexus One Customer Service
My point here is about the new Nexus One and the copious amounts of money spent on the home page of Google the other day. And what search terms have spiked based on Google Trends? First you would expect the awareness numbers to jump up with all the attention. The index for this is 1 based on how Google Trends works. What other term has that same index is also 1, Nexus One Customer Service. This is based on the rules of how this index number is calculated which you can read on Google trends, but basically it’s a measure of that term against either other times and since there is not much data to work with, this might not be the best example. But I still think the biggest obstacle to the long term success of the Nexus One will be the amount of customer service Google is willing to give to it’s, as far as I can remember is Googles first consumer electronic hardware device of this kind.
I could be way off base here, but for anyone that has had to deal with Google as a regular consumer of adwords, adsense, etc., you know how much Google likes to dish out the customer service.
How to Create Proper Google Video Sitemaps
So back in December of 2007 Google’s Video team announced changes to their sitemap protocol. Specifically changes to the way Google uses sitemaps to index your video content. Now this can be done for a number of different sites that have videos, but would be an absolute killer change for sites that contain mostly video content, and we all know there are a lot out there.
How do I create my video sitemap according to the standards?
To create your video sitemap, even if you just have a dozen or so videos on your site, or even less, and just want to test out the service to see what kind of exposure your video’s get now that Google can crawl them and pick up meta data about the video such as aspect ratio, runtime, etc. I would take a look at the step by step guide to creating video sitemaps here.
How do I submit my Video Sitemap to Google?
Again, you can use the guide set up on Google’s Webmaster Guide for this topic. I have also added a screenshot below of where you would go to do the submission.
Google Video Sitemap Submission
If anyone feels like they have more to add to this quick guide on video sitemap creation, submission, feel free to leave comments, tips, suggestions and I will give appropriate credit to whoever submits an actual valid tip that I use, but as always feel free to leave comments about general SEO, SEM and Local Search as well. Questions are usually answered within one business day, and if can’t be answered as a quick FAQ, I’ll let you know that as well.
Another note worth mentioning is that when your videos do end up getting indexed by Google amd emd up on YouTube there will be the ability to easily embed videos in to certain websites, so in essence this makes your video content “portable”, which is huge.
