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Me.dium Social Search Engine is testing the water.

Posted on 14 July 2008

Social network Me.dium is putting the power of its people into a new social search system. The search tool will combine the new Yahoo Search BOSS platform with results collected from Me.dium social sidebars and toolbars. The toolbars are used by participants to share and endorse websites with others within the network, much like StumbleUpon , from which data Me.dium can rank sites based on popularity. Current figures put the number of URLs shared each day by Me.dium users at over 20 million.

As well as popularity, or crowd rank, website content will also be ranked using crowd level, recent activity and average visit duration. This information is then wrapped around the Yahoo search results.

The move should see social media websites being healthily represented in results returned by the social media search tool. More blogs and news articles will appear in the top results and more up-to-the minute content will be displayed based on what people are looking at in that moment in time, and being constantly updated in real-time.

“Me.dium’s Social Search gives you a new and unique layer of information that was never available before,” said Kimbal Musk , CEO of Me.dium. “Using the activity of our community and our real time technology platform, users see search results ranked by what the crowds are surfing right now.”

Video Links: The Best Lures in the SEO Tackle Box?

Posted on 13 May 2008

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

Improve your ranking with the top 30 Social sites

Posted on 07 May 2008

Spending a lot to pay per click programs? You want to cut the costs and at the same time increase your ranking and backlinks? So, there is the list according ebizmba.com with the 30 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. Although no traffic metrics are completely accurate we do believe the data below to be useful for gauging relative audience size.