We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Videos are and up and coming component to a good search engine optimization campaign. Online video optimization can help drastically increase product sales and increase site exposure. Website traffic does not come directly from videos or clicks, but from extraneous links, references and typed in domains from references in the video clips.

The goal of any SEO is to get videos to spread by word of mouth, or virally. This is much cheaper than paying per click to have videos viewed. This list is in a slightly different order than the one compiled by goviral.com

Top 10 viral advertising videos of the year:

1. Smirnoff -Green Tea Partay; 3.4 million views views on YouTube
2. Ray-ban – catch sunglasses; 3.2 million views
3. Blendtec – will it blend iPod; 4.7 million views
4. Lynx/axe – boom chicka wah wah; 2.3 million views
5. Wilkinson – fight for kisses; 2.4 million views
6. Cadbury – Gorilla; 1.7 million
7. Carlsberg – Mentos experiment; 1 million views
8. Dove – campaign for real beauty; 1 million views
9. Snickers – get some nuts; 700 thousand views
10. Quicksilver – dynamite surfing; 600 thousand views

Top 10 viral videos of the year:

1. Evolution of Dance – evolution, dance, danse Dailymotion 77,446,266 views
2. Avril Lavigne – Girlfriend MySpace 67,204,021 views
3. OK GO – treadmills (music clip video) Dailymotion 35,604,505 views
4. Nessun Dorma YouTube 34,756,252 views
5. Linkin Park – What I’ve Done YouTube 30,853,515 views
6. Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question YouTube 30,706,705 views
7. SNL Dick in a box Justin Timberlake Dailymotion 30,658,954 views
8. Trailer “300″ Dailymotion 24,575,620 views
9. Inspiring Story! Free Hugs Campaign (music by Sick Puppies Google Video 25,469,525 views
10. Battle at Kruger YouTube 22,751,690 views

Videos are truly international, with all of the global videos receiving over 20 million views each. For the 2008 year I predict the top video will have 150+ million views. Better make sure you have a good deal on bandwidth, online video is going to be the next wave for the new year of 2008.

See more viral videos here.

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This is an excellent piece of linkbait that shows how to bait the most prominent social network, Digg.com. It is well known in the search engine optimization community that a piece of linkbait making the homepage of Digg can get 30,000 to 50,000 hits in 24 hours. This creates enormous incentive to submit spam quality top 10 lists to this social news voting website.

Because Digg users hate being owned by anyone, they have developed an acute dislike of SEO’s and will usually automatically bury any content submission if it appears to be commercial linkbait.

So how do you steal 150 million dollars from Terry Benedict’s impenetrable safe? Gangster style – become their friend, tell them what you are doing, then walk away with their loot.

Socialnewswatch has beat Digg at its own game by posting a masterful piece of linkbait that doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that they are gaming digg.

So, let’s experiment. The idea has been percolating for a while, but James Pegram’s Blog beat us to the punch. No worries.

Another thing they did was pit them against an archrival, Stumbleupon.com. No self respecting digger wants to be second string to any other social network, especially one owned by the ‘corporate establishment’ (ebay.com inc.)

On Digg, as stories move down the front page and on to the next, the traffic slows, like tall rollercoaster freefall that hits tremendous speeds, then gradually levels out and slows. Stumble is like a bumpy rollercoaster in the dark. You know the traffic will go up and down, you just don’t know when it’s going to go up, nor when it’s going to stop.

It’s well known that diggers hate advertising with a passion (almost as much as SEO’s) so to appease them:

A quick note about incentive: This blog makes next to nothing in ad revenue. That can be expected, as almost all of its traffic is generated by social media users who are normally too web-savvy to click on adsense or purchase from an advertising banner.

Finally, offer to show data and results. Digg users love code, statistics, numbers, facts (even those of dubious veracity) and the chance to be part of a widely used online survey proved irresistable.

All data will be posted here with times and results as they become available… Please Stumble/review it. Please help. Data is coming.

The result – this story was dugg like crazy, with almost 1000 votes as of this post.

Checkout the Socialnewswatch post to see this masterful linkbait in its full glory.

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At the pubcon.com search engine optimization conference last week, the conference organizers were kind enough to give us complimentary tickets to the Blue Man Group.
The Blueman Group currently performs in Las Vegas at the Venetian hotel, which is one of the nicest hotels on the strip. This hotel has the most interactive water features of any Vegas hotel including canals, fountains, and pools with splashing water. It is really a tranquil place in the middle of 24 hour gambling chaos.

Back to the Blue Man presentation – the best part of the evening was getting to meet the performers after the show. Talk about interactive – the 3 men were SOAKED with paint, food, glowing liquid and other remnants of the stage props. You have to respect them for getting so physically involved in each show.

The guys are super patient and let all the audience members take photos with them, and will answer all the same questions:

• what makes you blue – non toxic paint with blue gloves
• how do you get the psychedelic colors coming from the drums – acrylic paint
• does the paint rub off your head – yes if you touch their head you will be a blue man/woman

So go see the Blue Man Group, its a great show for kids over the age of 10 or so. Kids will love the messiness of the performance and all the flashing images. This is sort of like watching a live music video.

About Blue Man Group

Blue Man Group is best known for their wildly popular theatrical shows and concerts which combine music, comedy and multimedia theatrics to produce a totally unique form of entertainment. The blissful party atmosphere created at their live events has become the trademark of a Blue Man Group experience. Currently, their theatrical shows can be seen in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Berlin, Oberhausen, and Orlando. Blue Man Group’s newest theatre show will open in Tokyo on December 1, 2007.

Blue Man Group’s satirical rock concert How To Be A Megastar has toured arenas in over 104 U.S. cities, and has played extensively in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Megastar is currently back in the United States touring an additional 140 cities.

The company has applied its unique creative process to a wide variety of projects, including the recording of three albums: the Grammy-nominated Audio, The Complex, and Live At The Venetian ® – Las Vegas (available exclusively on iTunes).

Blue Man Group has ventured into toy development (with their Keyboard Experience and Percussion Tubes, produced by ToyQuest), fi lm and TV scoring (The Jury, Robots, and the upcoming Space Chimps), commercial campaigns, television programs (like Scrubs and Arrested Development), and a children’s museum exhibit, Making Waves, which is currently touring the U.S.A.

As the company grows, it remains true to its vision of providing exciting experiences in a variety of media, which appeal to a broad range of age groups and cultural backgrounds.

The rumor is that the Blue Man Group will start an affiliate program with partnerfusion.com in 2008 – sign me up please!

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Using these tricks for search engine optimization research you can find more details about a website. SEO’s need as much competitive information as possible to create the best possible online marketing campaigns for our sites.Google Fresh Date Search

See how many times you were mentioned in the previous week

http://www.google.com/search?q=netpaths&as_qdr=w

• q= keyword search
• as_qdr= times to look for (d=day w=week m=month)

Additional advanced Google search queries

• ~ synonyms
• OR command netpaths OR cvos
• also use the pipe command netpaths|cvos

An additional search feature is the ability to check flight status of any airline. I usually fly Alaska Airlines (note it does not work so well using Alaska Air) so if i want to see if my flight to Seattle is on time I can enter

http://www.google.com/search?q=alaska+airlines+4172

Google has a blog post detailing airline flight searches.

see more on Google’s Advanced Search Operators official page.

Microsoft Live search also has a great competitive intelligence search operator: IP address

Find Sites on an IP Address with MSN/Live Search

Do a search in this format at msn search ip:64.12.89.150 to receive a listing of all the sites hosted on the particular server. The information on this search feature is written up at Live Web Search Help page.

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Microsoft has launched the Adcenter Affiliate Program where they will pay you for new live advertising adcenter signups. The affiliate program seems to be a bit unfocused, it never states the payout, and the admin area is quite sparse. To be honest, when I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago I thought it was a joke, this affiliate program doesn’t seem to have much resources behind it.

MSN tries to get you to promote Windows Live Toolbar and Windows Live OneCare but these payout .50 for every download by customers in the US only. Forget about these and go for the gold, the AdCenter affiliate program at Microsoftaffiliates.net.

The comission rate is not listed, but I have been earning $35 per signup. Conversions are awesome, over 50% for me!

Sign in to http://www.microsoftaffiliates.net/ with your Windows Live ID or Passport account (throws a security warning screen for me in Firefox). The affiliate manager is Jessica Lee at 727-324-0185 who is really nice and answered a few questions about the program for me. The area code is 727 which is in Florida, the opposite end of the country from Redmond Washington where Microsoft is based. Is MS distancing themselves from this live affiliate program? You will need to send in a unique w-9 form.

my current adcenter December stats

adCenter is the advertising platform that enables businesses to create, manage and optimize search marketing campaigns to targeted buyers made up of 99 million search users on the MSN and Live Search Network. Search marketing is one of the most cost-effective and efficient marketing vehicles available to help small and mid-sized companies grow their business.

I just realized that MSN has unique capitalization of their advertising network. Note the lowercase A and uppercase C in adCenter. Very web 2.0 of you Microsoft, way to jump on the new internet trend that started in 2005!

To signup go to http://www.microsoftaffiliates.net/

*note you need to fax your W-9 to the microsoft affiliate manager thinkpartnership.com Think Partnership, Inc. Kowabunga! Division

fax to 313.447.2398

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Mike Mcdonald did an excellent interview of Google employee Matt Cutts and former Google employee Vanessa Fox. These are two of the most notable figures in the search engine optimization world and they casually reveal important information about the current Google search algorithm.

Great takeaways from this informal conversation:

• Matt explains how paid links can get you into trouble
• Full pagerank update December 2007
• If your rank dropped first, your pagerank was reduced for link selling
• if your pagerank dropped later, inbound links that previously had high pagerank are now greatly devalued
• Vanessa spills the beans on the projects she worked on while employed at Google Webmaster Central: geolocation tools and including multiple languages
• Google is much better at valuing links and has a killer paid link filter
• Subdomains are not what they once were. Logical subdomains are useful for good site architecture, but superfluous sub domains will not get you extra spots in the SERP’s.
• Sites using sub domains likely to be devalued are shopping and e-commerce sites.
• Vanessa Fox explains how to not have your blog hacked
• Notable sites that were hacked: Donald Trump & Al Gore

Read more and see the comments at web pro news.

Tip for WPN – allow embedding of your videos like YouTube. You will get much more exposure by allowing others to post and reference your content.

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Any good search engine optimizer needs a good array of tools to quickly get data about a website. Data important to SEO’s include the number of backlinks, forward links (websites you link to), headers (we want clean 301 redirects and useful 404 error pages), number of pages indexed and other publicly available data. I also included a delicious.com bookmarklet and other blogging bookmarklet tools.

Here are SEO bookmarklets that will help you quickly link to third party data resources. To use these SEO bookmarklets drag them to your Firefox bookmarks toolbar. Are you using Internet Explorer? These tools may work, but to guarantee proper functioning and to use the full range of search engine optimization addons you should use the Firefox browser. Go install Firefox, we’ll wait for you.

To activate these javascript bookmarklets click on them while the website is loaded in the main window.

SEO Bookmarklets

Yahoo Backlinks – Checks number of backlinks in Yahoo
Link Forward – Displays the sites you link to with MSN Live search results
Duplicate Content Search – Searches Google for selected text on other websites
Sites on IP – Displays other sites on the same IP as the current site
Number of Indexed Pages – Site: search in Google for current domain
Whois.sc – Domain name ownership data for the site
HTTP Header Checker – Gives you the response code for the current page

Miscelaneous Bookmarklets

Del.icio.us bookmarklet – Add page to Del.icio.us.com in one click

Technorati
delicious bookmarklet – quickly add tags and copy bookmark to your blog