A while back a colleague of mine introduced me to Yahoo! Pipes, an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that rolled out not too long ago. More information, tutorials, demos, etc. can be found on Yahoo!, but in a nutshell "Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:
- combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
- geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- power widgets/badges on your web site.
- grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.
While I haven't had too much time to play around with pipes, I did create an iCrossing pipe. Currently i am pulling in feeds from iCrossing's Great Finds and my blog SE4RCH.org (I will include Flickr feeds, relevant Media Post publications and more in the near future).
It's a very interesting concept, and still in Beta. Lets hope that the SEO community doesn't completely abuse it, it has a lot to offer!
Labels: icrossing, yahoo pipes
Is video optimization a part of your search marketing strategy? It should be! Following on the coat-tails of Google, mainstream search engines understand the value of incorporating videos into their result pages (universal search). Videos are an excellent way to garner more exposure for your brand, educate consumers about your products and services, and boost ROI to your search marketing efforts.
Video Search
As embedded videos become commonplace within the natural search results, savvy marketers understand the huge impact that videos may have on their brand.
Videos can also be used to bring visitors directly to your site. And that’s the goal, isn’t it? Get viewers back to your website to explore your content and interact with your brand. Video search optimization can (and should be) a key component of your website’s SEO link-building strategy. With these video search optimization tips, you’ll be able to give your brand a jumpstart in this ever-changing landscape of universal search.
9 Tips for Video Optimization
- Make it useful to your target audience. Provide users with information that may help them achieve something. Step-by-steps, how to’s, product reviews or responses to a breaking news story that’s relevant to your business. While branded commercials may help to increase brand awareness online, they will not snowball in the social media community and drive the results that you may be looking for.
- Keep your video short and sweet. Stay on point and be sure to include your company’s logo to help further increase brand awareness. Corporate videos should be watermarked with your brand name or website url. This will tell users who created the content, and encourage type-in traffic from viewers seeking more information
- Provide transcripts of your videos. Content is still king! It is important to give the search engines something to physically crawl and index. Do your best to surround the video with relevant content
- Apply standard SEO best practices that you use on your own web pages when submitting your videos. Use important keyword phases in the Title, Description,etc.
- “Tag” your video with keyword phrases that you want it to rank for. These tags should coincide with the keywords found in the Title and Description.
- Look into video distributing services. Services such as Tube Mogul can help create submission and tracking efficiencies for all of your video assets.
- Build out a video area on your own website. Use video.yourdomain.com (as an example) and be sure to follow best practices for internal linking, site architecture, etc. Include links back to your site when submitting your videos
- Make it easy for others to post your videos elsewhere. Whether it’s on their personal pages or favorite social media sites, including links to common file formats that other video engines accept (.avi, .MOV, .MPG, etc.) gets your video noticed. Provide copy and paste coding to your video source
- Syndicate your video like you would other products and services on your website (submit to RSS feeds, include social bookmarking widgets such as Ad This)
Labels: icrossing, universal search, video optimization
For years we at iCrossing have been making recommendations regarding international optimization. It's a well know fact that international domain extensions, and region specific hosting locations improve rankings within the international search engines. That's still the case, but Google is making it a bit easier.
Within Google's Webmaster Tools you can now "Set Your Geographic Target". Current text found with this section of webmaster tools states:
"Some sites target users for a particular geographic location. For example, a site may target all users within a specific country, or it may target only those users who reside within a very small geographic area within that country. If your site is targeting users within a particular geographic area, please provide us with the relevant information below, using only the fields that apply to your target audience."
While this is a great feature, and it may decrease the importance of country specific hosting, international domain extensions are still critical (in my opinion). Also, lets not forget about those other engines. =)
Labels: google webmaster tools, icrossing
According to Google representative Matt Cutts, the search engine giant is now providing "Minty Fresh Indexing"! In other words, optimized content and documents on a website can now show up in a few minutes as opposed to a few days, depending on popularity.
Google continues to revolutionize search by not only incorporating a polling system that requires the crawlers to go out and discover new content on their own (rather than having to be notified of changed content), but to have such a fast indexing speed that it's almost real-time. Google's ultimate goal is to have instant indexing; meaning content would be indexed as it is created.
Recent posts to this very blog are getting picked up in a matter of hours, Google Alerts are hitting my in-box in a matter of minutes.
Labels: google, icrossing
PageRank is Google’s rating of a website’s link value and popularity. This rating is based on a 0-10 scale, with 10 being the most popular, 1 being the least popular, and 0 being banned or unknown to Google. PageRank once played a large role in the way webmasters determined the value and popularity of a site. However, from the onset this method was flawed. In fact, at one time PageRank was given so much weight that it was the sole factor in determining website value and popularity.
PageRank-A working definition
PageRank reflects Google’s view of web page page value by comparing one web page with more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google deems important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results”.
Over-emphasis on PageRank
In 2002, any website with an optimized title, a litany of Meta Keyword tags, and high PageRank would outrank other sites. Keep in mind – that was years ago, which from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, is an eternity. The formula was no secret. Higher PageRank + Optimized Titles and Meta Tags = Good Rankings. Webmasters found that any site with thousands of pages and a “PageRank 7 or PageRank 8 link” which pointed to their homepage was able to rank for numerous keywords in a relatively short amount of time.
Manipulating the Distribution of PageRank
Mass hysteria ensued in the SEO world as webmasters and website owners discovered the untapped potential for buying and selling PageRank. Sites with high PageRank started selling links to sites with low PageRank who were willing to pay inflated prices to boost standings. The buying and selling of PageRank skyrocketed, in fact, many companies were built with buying and selling PageRank as their sole purpose. Companies with eBay-style auction sites emerged with the intention of enabling users to independently buy and sell PageRank. Some of the newest and least-ethical websites prospered by gaining top rankings in Google’s Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPS) through the purchase of PageRank.
Some of the newest and least-ethical websites prospered by gaining top rankings in Google’s Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPS) through the purchase of PageRank.
Google Adapts the Value PageRank
Google’s ranking algorithms were forced to adapt to the influx of websites that were manipulating their positioning. This behavior triggered a decrease in PageRank importance. As it began losing its value in Google’s ranking algorithms, PageRank started playing a secondary role to other important factors such a, quality content, the age of a domain, and the associated trust (or authoritativeness) that is placed upon a quality site.
PageRank in Link Popularity
Now that Google’s algorithms have become more sophisticated and are leaning toward link popularity as a main ranking factor, it is important to outline the effect, albeit minimal, that PageRank plays. In today’s SEO world, link popularity is the most important ranking factor for Google. While PageRank was Google’s way of determining the quality of a link, what’s more important now is the number of quality links that a website has. A link from a page (such as a directory listing) with low PageRank, but high search-engine rankings is a much higher-quality link than one with high PageRank but little or no visibility in search engine rankings.
Conclusion
With each new search result exploit that emerges, Google rises to the challenge and responds with an optimized algorithm. In the early SEO days PageRank played a major role in determining search ranking. In today’s search ranking universe, PageRank is one part of the search pie, one factor when all other ranking factors are equal.
We at iCrossing look at PageRank when assessing a pages value, but that's where our research begins.
Labels: google, icrossing, pagerank, seo
As the ever-evolving industry of search continues its genesis, few would disagree that optimizing press releases is now key in getting relevant, newsworthy information about a company, organization or product to a target audience. Increasingly, end readers, journalists and bloggers alike, are turning to news wire services like PR Newswire, not to mention search engine sites like Yahoo! News and Google News, as important sources of content and information.
That said, the not-so-secret secret to getting your product or company “out there” and in the living rooms of millions of potential customers is via a well-crafted press release. Granted, there are thousands and thousands of documents published to the Internet everyday, but there are some simple steps you can take to increase your visibility.
10 Tips When Writing Press Releases:
- In the headline, always include popular keywords and keyword phrases that correspond with the major theme of the release.
- Include popular keyword and keywords phrases in the release summary, or the secondary release heading.
- Reinforce the major keyword theme noted in the headline in the body of the release, particularly in the first or second sentence of the first paragraph.
- Include the company URL after the company name in the first paragraph.
- Always include the full path of the URL (including http://) so that all news based content management systems will activate the link.
- Use keywords to describe the company at the end of the press release. Search engines evaluate clustered text, and this text will further help search engines evaluate major company themes over time.
- Keep in mind that keywords and keyword phrases placed anywhere in the document can trigger a release alert via Google, BusinessWire, Yahoo! Alerts, or any other keyword based notification system, so it is important to use relevant keywords throughout the release.
- If you are using an online interface to submit your own press releases, enter the most important keyword phrase first, and backfill with supporting keyword phrases from the release
- Passive syndication: Publish press releases on your website. Provide linking infrastructure, RSS feeds, and subscribe chicklets to allow readers and search engines to easily find and index past, current & future releases.
- If possible, incorporate an image into your release. With Google’s Universal platform, your release may include an image with the natural search results.
Labels: icrossing, press release optimization
