When I started working with Video Optimization and YouTube my curiosity about “added channel features”, such as CSS design, caused me to seek out options for branding channels. Initially, I tried to figure out why some YouTube channels had big banners at the top while others did not. After doing some research, I discovered that YouTube channels can be branded by applying for their YouTube Partnership Program.

Although there really is no magic formula to be accepted to the Partnership Program, YouTube does take into consideration the number of views your videos get, the number of subscribers and friends your channel has, the amount of videos you have on your channel and how often you post new videos. YouTube states that if you apply to the Partnership Program and you do not get accepted, you will have to wait three months to re-apply, so I suggest that you wait until you:

• Have plenty of videos, subscribers and friends
• Have lots of channel views
• Are posting new videos as much as you possible before applying for the Partnership Program

The process can be slow but once you are accepted into the partnership program, it opens up some really cool features and branding options not available through standard YouTube channel membership.  Companies should definitely consider this program if videos are part of their marketing mix.

Here are the top 5 reasons why your brand should consider taking advantage a YouTube Partner channel.

1.) Increased Revenue – Brands can generate income by ad revenue sharing for “In Video” ads and other ads. These ads are placed along right hand side of the video and they work in conjunction with a Google AdSense account (Google manages payment). Revenue can also be generated via leads and conversions generated through your quality branded channel. Quality content drives traffic, and high-traffic volume can lead to the increased likelihood of onsite conversions — especially if the content you’ve provided users is of value and solves a problem. Lastly, depending on your product, industry and service offering, you can also rent your videos.

2.) Brand Awareness – You can add a customized banner at the top of your channel’s homepage.  The maximum dimensions for this banner are 960 pixels by 150 pixels. You can also link from this banner with image maps to your Facebook, Twitter or even your website. This drives traffic and increases brand presence across other social media channels.

3.) Customized Branding - You can add a customized side column image above the “Connect with” box. The maximum dimensions for this image is 300 pixels by 250 pixels. You can add links with image maps here as well.

4.) YouTube “Watch Page” Branding (not on your channel page) -In addition, you can upload a small banner of your brand that will be displayed at the upper left corner of the watch page on all of your video pages. This banner will replace the textually channel name and will link back automatically to your YouTube channel. The maximum dimensions for this banner are 25 pixels by 170 pixels.

5.)  Google Analytics Integration – You can connect your Google Analytics account ID to track visitors, page views, traffic and all the regular things that come with Google Analytics.  The insights gained from understanding how users are engaging your content is extremely valuable and can help dictate your content development efforts and marketing programs.

6.)  Consistent Messaging – Branded YouTube Channels also provide users with a consistent brand experience across social media channels and web properties because imaging, messaging, logos and color harmonies are correlated, thus imprinting the brands identity in the users’ mind.

As you can see, having a “branded” YouTube channel opens up a lot of opportunities for organizations and helps differentiate your brand from the many other channels out there.  Apply for the YouTube Partnership Program to have access to these great options and features and you never know, you may be the next YouTube star.

Happy Tubing,

Thomas Beatty, SEO Strategist

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by Alice Wansi Chen

What does BBS (Bulletin Board System) remind you of? Many of you may remember the old school Internet forum system, Bulletin Board System (BBS), from the 1990s in the US. For those of you who don’t, the BBSes are computers that can be dialed into mainly for the purpose of reading messages from and leaving messages to other users, sharing files, and accessing information of general interest.  And although we may think it’s a thing of the past, it’s actually the most widely used and popular social networking platform in China, NOW. Internet users in China interact differently from the users in the Western countries. Here are 5 facts of Chinese social networking:

1. Large population. Internet users in China are usually referred to as “netizen”, people who are actively involved in online communities. The population of Chinese netizens is over 420 million in 2010, and they are actively involved in different types of social networking; including Xiaonei (Chinese facebook), and Kaixin (online social gaming portal).
2. Netizens like to contribute. In America only 21% of people create original content, however, in China 40% of people create content.
3. BBS is one of the most reliable information sources for netizens. More than 80% of users are using BBS sites to search for information about products they plan to buy, and 61.7% of users are keen to ask other BBS users for opinions before making a purchase. Recent research shows that Chinese netizens are more likely to turn to the Internet, especially BBS, for program solving solutions, instead of turning to their family members and friends.
4. Netizens make friends through BBS, and they are likely to be friends in real life through many offline events organized through BBS.
5. Netizens frequently talk about brand in BBS, and many successful company campaigns are promoted through BBS and turn to be successful offline campaigns as well.

BBS might be a virtual online communication platform in the Western countries. However, in China, it is a widely used social networking platform where companies could actually monitor and manage their branding, as well as significantly enhance their marketing campaigns. While we are all talking about Facebook and Twitter for branding purposes, in China it is a different story.

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Hello everyone.  I just wrote my second article in a three part series for SearchEngineWatch.com that talks about how to measure SEO success in 2010.  In this article I talk about how the recent changes to Google and the data that is now available through Webmaster tools has changed search engine optimization and the way that understand what SEO success is.  Enjoy!

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If you really want to rank well in search engines, you need to build inbound links from external, quality sites. Google looks at two sets of factors when assessing a web page –  the on page factors, which  are essentially the textual elements existing on a given web page (title tags, Metadata, content body, link text, etc.) – and  the off page factors which come from external sites, such as  what other people are saying about you.

Writing and publishing good articles is one of the most effective ways to build inbound links. This happens in two main ways:

• If you publish good quality articles on your own site, then bloggers, information sites, resource sites and industry experts may quote your article and link to it.
• If you submit your articles for publication on external websites that carry editorial content, then you’ll get exposure to a new audience and you can publish a link to your site as a credit for writing.

You can be useful, topical or controversial – it doesn’t really matter – but to get these inbound links your content needs to be something special. You need to be passionate about your industry and show your passion with every word you write. Your content needs to offer value in three ways:

• Direct benefit to the end user – it allows them to do something.
• Direct benefit to your own business – it must help you generate leads or generate a transaction.
• A benefit to the website that will link to you– by linking to you they provide something useful to their readers.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Take part in the online community that exists around your product area. Identify news and information sites, blogs, directories, social media sites and others that service your industry. Read them regularly and comment on articles and contribute – start to build an online reputation for yourself.
2. Write and publish keyword rich articles or blog posts on your own site. These articles should be useful to your customers and members of your community. From the article you write, reference and link to articles that you’ve written previously.
3. When you’re reading or commenting on external websites, mention and link to articles you’ve published on your own site when you’re certain they’re appropriate and add value to any discussion.
4. Mention your articles on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites and encourage other people to reference your articles.
5. Publish articles you’ve written as a newsletter and encourage people to sign up to a mailing list. Once you’ve established a list, you’ll find that each edition of your newsletter will generate a number of links from people on your mailing list.
6. Provide your content as an RSS feed. This is relatively simple to do and will again bring your content to the attention of other people.

I’m sure there are many other solutions on various ways to create link worthy content and I’m interested in any ideas and or comments that you would like to share.

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An XML sitemap is like a road map to every page of your site that search engine spiders can access and crawl without having to drill down through several levels of navigation. There are multiple XML Site Map generators out there such as Google sitemap generator, xml-sitemaps.com and xmlsitemap.com.

As with many generators, XML sitemap tools don’t always take into consideration the following:

1. Broken links – 404 error pages: If you discover broken links in the sitemap or 404 error pages consider fixing the issues with 301/302 redirects or removing the pages from the site. Bottom line; only include active links in your sitemap as opposed to dead links.
2. Duplicate URLs: Do not include multiple pages of the same URL in your sitemap. For example, if an XML sitemap generator included both example.com/index.php and example.com/index.php/, then remove one of those URLs so you avoid canonical issues.
3. Robots.txt: Many times XML sitemap generators will include files and directories that you have disallowed in your Robots.txt file. Comb through your sitemap and make sure those particular files and directories have not been included.
4. Images: When search engines index a web site page, there is a good chance that it will also index images within the page. Include ALT tags for each image, and let the search engines spiders focus on the content, rather than the images.
5. Videos:  Video content is separate from traditional content and so should an XML sitemap. A video sitemap should only contain links to videos and make sure they are not disallowed in your Robots.txt file.

If you would like more information on XML sitemaps visit sitemaps.org and be sure to access the Business Online complimentary search engine optimization labs.

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Video optimization is crucial if you want your video to be found by your audience.  Similar to how you would SEO your website copy to rank high, you can do the same with videos. What do you SEO with videos?  Well, with video optimization you SEO the script.  You might be scratching your head now so let me explain the benefits of video optimization.

The search engines can crawl a lot of content around the video which influences its ranking. In fact, the search bot will determine the videos quality by the textual content around the video. Meaning links, description, tags, title and script. The script is a transcription of the video that is attached to the timeline. This requires some time to create and embed but is well worth the investment.

Getting your video to rank can be an arduous but necessary task as YouTube videos are now dominating search behind Google.  These days, more and more people are not only watching videos like crazy on YouTube, they are searching them via YouTube (now second in search behind Google) making it viable platform to invest resources.   There are 28,800 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day so in order to rank high there are some tips and tricks to increase your chances.

With so many videos being uploading to YouTube the following video optimization guidelines can help increase your chances of getting positive rankings.

First, write a keyword-focused script for your video. That way you can put your video script in the description field and in the video timeline. The synthesis between placing the script in the description and timeline is a new advancement and has been shown to yield positive search results. This provides the search bot more info to scrape and will help the bot properly index your video.

For instance, if your video is about “Video Optimization”, the more times that you naturally have “Video Optimization” mentioned in your script the better chance your video has of being indexed properly, ranked higher and  being found easier.  The transcript text follows the video where ever it is embedded and users can also select chunks of the text and share it when sharing your video which helps rankings too.

Secondly, research your audience.  Find out their needs and interests and customize your content accordingly.  Also, be mindful of the platform. YouTube is a fast-paced platform and users rapidly cipher through and quickly scan content; this is why SEO and embedding transcripts is so crucial to ranking high. Keep your video short, concise, entertaining and to the point. If you have a dense or lengthy subject matter, break the video into sections with intros and outros.   Keep your video between 3 and 5 minutes long for increased user engagement; though some studies and data point to users’ attention spans being close to 60-90 seconds with YouTube Insight data supporting user bounce rates as quick as 5-30 seconds. Meaning: you have less than thirty seconds to capture their attention. SEO will get them to your video and good content can increase the chances of quality engagement.

Also, have a strong call to action at the beginning of your video. Communicate your most important point(s) first in case the user bounces and does not watch the video in its entirety. Strong calls to action in the beginning of the video increases your chances of converting and branding the viewer. This can also increase their likelihood of returning to the content later.

The title of your video should be keyword focused but keep in mind that there is a 25 character limit including spaces, so use this real estate wisely. The description should start with a link to your website or wherever you want the user to go for more information, followed by two sentences describing what the video is about and then the script. Tags are YouTube keywords. Think a bit outside the box when selecting keywords. Also include a few synonyms that make sense to you and potential users. Put yourself in the users’ position and think about how they would search your content.

Lastly, you want to choose a thumbnail for your video. This video thumbnail needs to entice the user to click on your thumbnail. Select a part of the video that will be valuable and interesting to the user. Because of the rapid scanning behavior of users on platforms such as YouTube, your thumbnail is going to be their first form of engagement after search so make it count.

I hope you enjoyed my video optimization tips. Happy YouTubing!

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Wow! I can’t believe it’s already time again for OMS regionals!  I am really excited this year to be talking about everyone’s favorite topic…links!  At OMS San Jose tomorrow I will be talking about link acquisition trends, techniques and strategies for building links in 2010.

It’s always fun at the OMS regional events and I am really looking forward to helping people with link acquisition this year, as well as getting an opportunity to meet folks and give them direct feedback on their sites via our SEO labs.

If you are attending OMS this year, be sure to come sign up for a free SEO lab!  I’ll be in San Jose, Long Beach, Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Francisco this year.  My apologies to the rest of the tour cities but I won’t be able to attend more than these shows in 2010 for OMS.  However, if you would like to get a free SEO lab (or usability for that matter!), you can sign up through this URL to get a virtual lab:  www.businessol.com/labs.

One of the things I enjoy most about the OMS experience is getting a chance to talk to people about their sites and offering them tips that can really make a difference in their bottom line.  That’s why I think SEO is so fun in the first place.  It’s great to be able to help people succeed and OMS is all about education.  A big reason why BusinessOnLine is a sponsor and supporter of the events.

I’m off to the airport!  See you in San Jose!

Catfish

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In order to successfully complete all tasks required in a comprehensive SEO campaign, it is helpful to organize those various tasks and tactics into relevant categories. This allows us to have an organized approach to consistently addressing all elements of an SEO engagement. It also allows us to describe SEO in a way that people can understand and serves as the foundation for a consistent process and approach to SEO as a service.

In the past, I have always divided the SEO landscape into 3 categories: On Page, Off Page and Site Wide.  On Page Optimization refers to aligning the content and Meta data of a Web page with the targeted keyword phrases that the page is relevant to.  Off Page Optimization refers to aligning the link connectivity of the Web site to the keyword phrases that are most relevant for the situation.  Off page optimization is further divided into two sub categories: Internal Off Page Optimization and External Off Page Optimization.  Internal link optimization is concerned with site elements like the global navigation template and breadcrumb navigation.  External link optimization is primarily focused on 3rd party links that point to your site and what keywords are being used in those links.  Site wide optimization refers to cleaning up all the technical issues which can cause problems for search engines in indexing and ranking your site.  Issues like URL structure, 301 versus 302 redirects, flash, Ajax and Java script, rel tags, xml sitemaps and many other details make up our list of Site Wide Optimization rules and tactics.

Until recently, this model was an accurate reflection of the issues that need to be addressed in any SEO campaign.  But as search has advanced and new metrics have been developed that affect search rankings, a new model is necessary to encapsulate all of the variety of new tasks that are important to any successful SEO campaign.  So for 2010, here is the new search periodic table of the Eight Elements of SEO:

1) Discovery
2) On Page
3) Off Page
4) Site Wide
5) Universal Search
6) Usability
7) Social Media
Analytics

Obviously there is a lot more to the optimization process in this new model, and that’s because a lot has happened in the world of SEO in the last couple of years. So today I would like to put some context behind this new model and explain what else it covers.

The first element in the new model is called Discovery.  This part of the SEO process refers to all activities that are required to understand the parameters and goals of the campaign.  The Discovery phase includes keyword research, competitive analysis, understanding the business model and a review of the current analytics landscape including keyword rankings to understand as much as possible the “current state” of the SEO campaign and what the goals of the campaign are moving forward.

Universal Search Optimization refers to all activities that affect rankings for universal search elements like video, images, news, shopping, reviews and local listings.  Activities include but are not limited to optimizing video content and title tags, image alt tags, shopping feeds through Google base, and local optimization through the Google Business Center.

Usability is a separate Web discipline that focuses on user experience.  Until recently, the correlation between usability and SEO was implied but not well defined.  With the recent advent of the Google Web site Speed Test and all of its associated recommendations, the first concrete metrics that tie usability to search rankings have been established and more will follow soon.  It’s in the best interest of search engines to reward sites that have superior user experience, so you can be sure that an increasing amount of emphasis will be put on usability metrics going forward.

Social Media has long been a favorite tool of SEO practitioners for link building, reputation management and user generated content.  But now that real time search has become a prominent feature of the major search engines, the subset of social media activities that affect SEO is worthy of special attention and those activities need to be part of any successful SEO campaign.

Analytics is the engine that allows you to make decisions about your SEO campaign in terms of understanding performance and deploying resources on an ongoing basis.  Having an understanding about the differences in paid and organic traffic, brand versus non brand keyword performance and the long tail performance of your campaign are a few of the basic essentials that must be in place to strategically run a successful SEO campaign.
In my next post, I will describe a two phase process for running an SEO campaign that addresses all of the Eight SEO Elements on both a foundational and continuous basis.

I hope this gives everyone a good foundation to describe the process of SEO.  I will be speaking more about the eight elements of SEO at the Online Marketing Summit here in San Diego later this month as well as SES New York in March.  Have a great weekend!

Catfish

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