Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

Source: Techcrunch

New Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe launched a bunch of new features today - new video and image search engines as well as a new visual bookmarking tool called stacks.

The main new feature, stacks, allows users to bookmark and group sites and share them, visually, with others. To create a stack, you simply drag results into a newly created stack. Relevance and ranking is getting better, though. It’s the focus on the company now, says CEO Randy Adams. And the effort is being led by new VP of Research Mike Mathieson who joined the company three weeks ago from Yahoo, where he was the director of engineering for web relevance.

SearchMe is one of only a handful of companies that indexes the entire web, so they’re serious about evolving into a big search player over the years. Search volume is up to 100,000 - 200,000 queries per day, says Adams. so they must be doing something right. Some users just want the quick text search results that they’re used to, and SearchMe’s visual results just slow down the process. But others (like my parents) like seeing the page before clicking on it.

Video is changing the way we use the Internet for entertainment, education, blogging, product promotion and so many other forms of content. Services like YouTube , Metacafe, Google Video,AOL Video and a host of others have created an enormous online viewing audience by making it easy for anyone to upload, search and share videos.

Online video viewings increased by more than 66 percent in just one year, coming to an average of more than 10 billion views per month in 2008, according to comScore estimates. Major entertainment companies, marketing  experts and advertisers are all scratching their heads trying to figure out the best way to turn a profit  on such a huge viewing audience, and many industry leaders are investing heavily in producing content exclusively for the Web. However, the real beauty of the current status is that anyone can create and post a video on the Internet and have a potential viewing audience of millions.

So why is that so important? Like written content, video content has become a powerful form of viral marketing material as well as link bait for search engine optimization.

Videos should first be published on the Web site they were created for. Each video posted on the Web site should have an individual URL (uniform resource locator) that is fully optimized according the key phrase targeted by the video. For example, the page should include targeted keywords in the title tag with a corresponding h1 tag, along with image alt attributes and any other keyword associated on-page optimization. It is also becoming popular to include a transcript of the video on the same page, thus adding a great deal of written content to that page.

Once the page is created, the addition of a video site map will help search engine crawlers to better index and rank the content. Posting the video on the author’s Web site first will also prevent any contest over the origin of the content.

Videos should also be posted on a number of video-hosting and video-sharing Web sites like those mentioned earlier. YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe and AOL Video are the most important sites for submission as they have the most common results in blended search. However, videos from many other submission sites are finding their way into high page ranks as well. Videos should be submitted to each of these by hand with keyword-rich titles and tags, as well as unique and interesting descriptions. By sharing videos on sites like these with friends and colleagues, more views will begin to accumulate, bringing more validity to the content. The higher the number of views a video receives on these sites, the more likely it is to gain a high page rank.

Bookmarking and social networks are now major players in search engine optimization, with major search engines indexing this user-based content. The specific URL of the video should be bookmarked on social media sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Digg and others, and will appear as an actual image icon with a new specific URL on the corresponding site.

Though YouTube is the most likely platform for obtaining a large number of views, creating buzz through social media Web sites will bring more direct traffic and provide deep links to the optimized Web site. Achieving traffic through these methods is optimal because it drives traffic directly to the Web site. For this reason, it is also a reasonable practice to install basic bookmarking buttons on the specific video page so that visitors can easily add it to their favorites and bookmarks.

Utilizing video content in Internet marketing and optimization campaigns is a very young strategy that will continue to evolve along with the continued development of search engine technology. These strategies basically follow a previously established and proven link-building model, already widely used to optimize written content.

By following these basic protocols and constantly seeking new avenues for attracting viewers, video can be an extremely successful form of online marketing. The time is now to begin creating videos for the Web. Because the concepts are so new, the opportunity is ripe for businesses to control the video space of their specific industry. Source: TechNews