News Search SEO:  Jon Myers introduced the panel which commenced with SEO Consultant David Radicke who was discussing his work for a German publishers network. 

David opened by indicating that the priority for germany is Google, with 98% traffic.  He explained how he is working with a conservative newspaper called Welt.de (the world) and how he has got them to open up the archives and has worked hard to get all of the articles indexed:  they now have about a million articles in the index.  They have been trying to push into the German news results through this campaign and today, Weld.de has 17 appearances on the frontpage of news.google.de.  They have been so successful in their efforts that Google has had 3-4 complaints from other news companies about this level of penetration.

Images has been also very successful for them.  They get lots of traffic from the different news sites around the world and lots of this traffic comes from their images.  The universal search results where images are shown are what is important, for example:  a ‘Darwin’ search renders an image from Welt.de site which is driving much traffic around the world. 

They do not do link building in any way and so rely solely on natural inbound linking from people who believe their site to be valuable and informative.

Radicke says there is no easy way, no cheap way to do this.  They do not employ black hat techniques:  it has to be clean, ethical because of brand.  Their code is very clean, too.  They do some SEM, but this is minimal.  What is key is the content:  they produce 300 German and 30 English stories every day.  This is not cheap:  they need good, original content. 

Radicke advises, “follow the rules” he refers to the site googlenewsblog.blogspot.com which has rules that are excellent, according to David.  Websites just need a solid block of text, good URLs; sitemaps; include stockticker symbols in articles, for instance, which Google can find much better.  Keep original content separate from press releases.  Give articles unique titles, format images properly, etc.

• Need to create a lot of news stories. The more hours you have for publishing the better, and should not stop for vacations!
• Good length and must differ from news agency stories: you have to do some work
• Use lots of nice pictures (main pictures should be recognizable as thumbnails – i.e. see face)
• Xml news sitemaps. Refesh frequently.
• Set keyword and section names in the sml sitemap
• Todays news and this weeks news pages are good for linking
• ANNOUNCE to google.com/support/news_pub/
• Create html archive (sitemap) as you want them in the normal index as well as the news index

Do NOT

• Play with timestamp
• When to publish (faster / later on news wave)
• create duplicate stories on purpose
• Create content around what is strong on the google news sites
• Do not guess the google doodle and build content around it
• Do not create content only for google news

© Propero Online Marketing

18^th Feb 2009.  Moderated by Li Evans, the Podcast SEO session introduced veteran search marketers Amanda Watlington and Joe Morin. 

Amanda commenced with the question:  Who is listening to podcasts anyway?  They are not as prominent in the Search results as video so why bother?  Amanda shared 2008 data on this which indicates that the UK is No. 3 in penetration in 2008.  There are 7.5 million video users within the UK and 20.6% have downloaded a podcast. The UK is the 5^th largest in market size in 15-64 age range.  That has a massive impact.

Who is watching video?  What are they doing with it?  According to Comscore, 27million people watched video in the UK last year, with 3 billion videos watched online.  This equates to 118 videos per month per viewer, 19.7 million viewers watched 1.4 billion videos on YouTube. 

The UK watched an astounding 161 million hours of video content in 2008.  Are you leveraging this?

Adding video and audio is compelling for both the brand marketer and search marketer.  The Brand Manager is ‘challenged with creating brand personality, engagement and loyalty in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem’ according to Watlington.  The advantages of podcasts are that it creates a direct communication channel, adds new media outlets accessing audiences that are unavailable via traditional broadcast media.  Podcasts create engagement through emotional connection with target market:  there is nothing like a sound or moving image.

For Search Managers, they are challenged to achieved SERPS.  The proof is in the search results:  video content, audio content for music. 

So, how do we look at video and audio? What should you do?  Host or Post?  A simple resources question will answer this:  who takes the bandwidth hit? 

• 1. Host it – optimise it!
• 2. Post it – YouTube – optimise for uploading

Hosted video:  challenges.  No clear standard format on video.  Sites are advised to include a player.  Most users do not know where to look for video so make it clear where to look on your site.  Make sure it is there.  YouTube, Google video, Yahoo, etc. get most of the ‘noise’.  Do SEO appropriate to your own site as better to rank there.  The benefits of hosting it yourself include:

• Generates traffic to your site
• Generated links
• Combine with posted video for greater reach
• You have control over: metas, context, content, advertising, monetisation

Duplicate content screens do not yet screen out the combination of a hosted / posted video solution, so at present there is no disincentive to both host it and post it yourself.

Tips and tactics

Offer videos in multiple format, tags and descriptions, site keywords, video sitemaps, etc.  Amanda then gave an example of video optimisation in action via the Web Marketing Today interview of Amanda Watlington, herself, with Ralph Wilson.  She advocated:

• creating a video with branding in it;
• write clear titles and descriptions
• Create tags to identify subject
• Add social bookmarking options, send to friend, etc.
• Avoid pop up players

SOUND:  Podcast SEO

This, according to Amanda, is not a challenge of technical proportions, but of planning: “Getting from ‘ere to ear”

Plan the implementation carefully, optimisation of audio files, optimise your landing pages, build effective RSS feeds for distribution, tactics to market to audience.  So before you begin you need to make certain decisions.  Consider:

One off?  Series? Online entertainment?  You will make different decisions based upon this answer.  This will drive how you name the show.  Make sure you do not employ a name that is already in use as changing the name is difficult once you already have an audience.  Change episode names – each episode will need its own title and description.  Carefully write these for both shows and episodes.  Decide whether you transcribe or abstract what is on the podcast.  Transcribe if possible. 

Preparation:

• Devise a keyword list – this will give insights into branding.
• Write the audio tag information and determine how you will brand it.
• Get album art ready even for non musical shows
• Write the audio tag info carefully in advance
• Be prepared to edit the audio tags yourself or carefully build a set of protocols

Joe Morin, Storybids, of ‘that’ viral Superbowl proposal infamy was next to take the podium to share his wealth of experience on video optimisation and the power of viral video. 

It is getting more important for companies to have a video strategy as it offers an amazing amount of branding opportunities.  Are businesses aware that 39% people find video via the search engines?  In google universal search, video now dominates.  Comscore fact: 58% people saw a video result in January 2008… and these videos are increasingly found on the search engines and not on Social Media sites.

Like Amanda before him, Joe covered the hosting or posting question and indicated the benefits of hosting:

• Control over on page text, encoded metadata, user experience, etc
• Control over monetisation / advertising and analytics
• Generate traffic to your site

While you can currently dominate the serps, with carpet bombing posting strategies, this may go away with duplicate content filtering in the future.  There is a 268% increase in views of a video through submitting to more than one search engine / video aggregator.

Morin stressed the need to tell search engines what is in video content.  One excellent tip he gave to companies looking to do this was to add the word ‘video’ in the filename – giving the user what they are searching for by answering their search query – ‘video on….’.  Search engines are not great at indexing meta data for video, but they are getting better and it is important to include this. 

 Your site structure when using video:

• Not to use popup video – embed
• Place your videos in root folder / directory
• 1 video per URL
• Create navigation and links

Social media is very much alive with video SEO, says Morin.  Include social book marketing tabs, enable comments, get interactions and get the video shared.  So, how do you get into the search engines? 

• Most video search engines accept RSS / MRSS feeds. 
• Use the media aggregators.  
• Google launched video sitemaps XML in December 2007.  Use them! 
• Provide a thumbnail URL
• Set video:player to embed
• Use analytics – e.g. Visible measures, analytics company to track views. Etc
• Video sharing:   put URL in the start of the description. 
• Youtube annotations – can click over to a different video.  Grab additional traffic. 

Search Engine Strategies London is being held for the second year running at the Business Design Centre, Islington.  A stylish venue buzzing with attendee’s enthusiasm for what promises to be a valuable and exciting 3 days for website owners, marketing directors and digital online managers.

Day 1 kicked off with a conversation with Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma - a blog-turned-book about the way that contemporary culture can start a movement, drive innovation, push the boundaries of any technological medium.  Mason discussed how the humble beginnings of a cool idea can drive both social change and business change and how businesses can and are leveraging this power.

After a welcome coffee, networking and the opening of the exhibits, visitors could then choose from 3 quality sessions covering Multilingual SEO, blended search and Google Universal and an update on search marketing moderated by the venerable Bill Hunt with Anne Kennedy and Cesar Mascaraque from Ask.com. 

One of the fundamentals close to the heart of SES is networking:  attendees are encouraged to interact with each other and develop business relationships.  Companies looking for a digital marketing company or other provider can interview prospective suppliers and can develop their knowledge further by talking to industry experts.  Additionally, visitors could get information about their sites from the site clinics run by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey of US companies Omni Marketing and SiteLogic, respectively.

Highlights of the afternoon included Recession-proof Performance Marketing plus, of course, the orion panel on measuring success, a vital indicator as to the success of your online campaign, an update on online video from Greg Jarboe, Li Evans and Shari Thurow.  The late sessions (5-6) offered a dip into analytics and mobile search.  All in all, an excellent first day for London SES. 

Whereas today we just enjoyed the show, tomorrow we will be covering selected individual sessions in depth to bring tips and tactics that can be implemented into your online marketing campaign.

Search Engine Strategies is an excellent conference series, spanning the globe, which shares information and strategies for companies for whom an online presence is a vital part of their business portfolio.  Organised and advised by top marketing industry writers, thinkers and practitioners, the conference’s content and speakers are carefully selected to provide the best experience and information – most of which is not available online – for attendees.  So you have an online presence. but what is the point of attending a conference like SES, especially in this market?

Eleven business reasons for attending Search Engine Strategies London 2009:

1. Differentiation:  learn at your own level.  With beginner, intermediate and advanced sessions for most tracks, you can be sure to get the information you need at the level you need it.
2. Learn from industry experts:  the coffers are opened to attendees so that you are taught direct from people who do this every day for a living.
3. Understand what exactly is involved in a campaign to rank your web site and know what first steps you need to take
4. Speak directly to the search engines:  Google, Microsoft & Ask.com will be there!
5. Understand the difference between paid search (advertising on the search engines) and search engine optimisation (ranking organically on Google for your product or service keywords and keyword phrases).
6. Get to grips with the ranking factors for your web site:  what do you need to look at / work on to get more visitors to your site and sell more products.
7. Understand how video, news, podcasts, blogs and press releases can help your company’s products or services be put in front of potential clients. 
8. Got sites in different languages?  Want to sell to non english-speaking markets? Understand the impact of multilingual search engine optimisation and search marketing on your business and the factors to consider and implement.
9. Learn how to track your visitors from how / where they come to your site, through to purchase or abandonment of the buying process.  Start to interrogate your data.
10. Find out key tips and tactics for looking impartially at your site with the open site clinic featuring the frank and forthright Dave Naylor, Microsoft’s Mel Carson and moderated by the highly experienced Amanda Watlington.
11. Go away feeling empowered to ask the right questions of your marketing and IT teams and eel confident that you know how to interrogate and interview a digital marketing company to help you rank your website.