Episode 107 - Bruce Clay on Video SEO, Page Rank Sculpting and Search Siloing Strategies
Bruce Clay brings his deep experience in search engine marketing strategy to DishyMix, answering listener's* burning questions on the latest machinations in SEM.
- Is there a hidden conversation between SEO & PPC?
- Does the "nofollow" tag still have value?
- What are the latest and best ways to build inbound links?
- What SEO ops does BING provide compared to Google?
- What are 3 great money-making uses of online video?
- Bruce's opinion of 12seconds.tv, Seesmic, kyte and other Flash-based video creation and sharing sites.
- Video tagging best practices for SEO?
- vSEO syndication options - what works for what outcome? YouTube, TubeMogul and Traffic Geysers
- Video tracking and analytics solutions and options?
- Advice for getting videos to appear in Google's organic universal search results.
Bruce gives great answers, artfully balancing the strategy with the tactics. Tune in for YOUR search update.
Questions in this episode were provided by:
- David Szetela, Clix Marketing
- Rebecca Lieb, Econsultancy
- Richard Snee, Creativity POP!
- Gregory Markel, Infuse Creative
- Dan Perry, Cars.com
- Michael Rosenfeld, Mediasmith
- Julie Perry, YouTube Secret Weapon
- Shea Park, Ad-Spark.com
- Tim Bratton, Personal Life Media
Transcript
Transcript
Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Bruce Clay, the founder and president of Bruce Clay Incorporated. Bruce is also a podcaster himself on a show called SEM Synergies at Web Master Radio where I got my start. And he is the author, the co-author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. He runs one of the most renowned search agencies and search consulting firms, search training firms, and we are going to do a whole show of listener questions with a big emphasis on video SEO because that seems to be what everybody wants to know about right now. So lets get him onto the show with a warm welcome. Welcome Bruce.
Bruce Clay: Thank you. I love the sound effect.
Susan Bratton: What are the sound effects? Bruce Clay Incorporated.
Bruce Clay: You know, you don’t always get that when you call people.
Susan Bratton: That’s true. It’s kind of like the Yahoo yodel, isn’t it?
Bruce Clay: Yup.
Susan Bratton: I like it. Well lets start out, lets just come right out of the gate with some great questions. One of the most wonderful people… I’ve got two, boom-boom, great questions from former Dishy Mix guests. The first one is from David Szetela, your friend and mine, CEO and owner of Clix Marketing. Here’s his first question for you Bruce: He says, “Many SEO experts believe there is a hidden connection between SEO and PPC. For example, that PPC advertisers are granted a higher page rank or serp position. Google denies this. What’s your opinion?”
Bruce Clay: I think that they are separate. I think otherwise the federal trade commission would be saying nasty things that goes on. I don’t think that’s actually going on. However, what you seeing is click per rates, if you’re in both, at least by reports published by PR Web, that the click per rate will go up if people see your name twice on that same page, but I don’t think that one causes a ranking increase for the other. There is a byproduct of this. It is if the same page in the organic is a landing page for pay per click, you may be inclined to improve your quality score by optimizing that page just a little bit more. So when you optimize it for pay per click perhaps your rankings are going to show a little better in the organic side. But otherwise there is not cause and effect there, there’s separation of church and state.
Susan Bratton: Got it. Thank you. We should always be optimizing, right?
Bruce Clay: I think so.
Susan Bratton: Here’s another friend, another mutual friend and a former Dishy Mix guest, Rebecca Leigh, VP North America for her new gig E Consultancy. And here’s her question: “Google’s been messing around with the No Follow tag lately. Does it still have value? Where, when and how should No Follow tags be employed now?”
Bruce Clay: This is a very appropriate topic for right now. SMX Advanced was a very interesting conference, as Matt Cutts was in a lot talking about different kinds of things. We’ve pulled together a pretty good article in our last newsletter, it’s volume 68, that actually has sound recordings of Matt Cutts in the sessions talking about the changes that Google has made to the No Follow tag. Now my personal opinion is if you haven’t seen anything break, don’t run out and fix things. You really want to let sleeping dogs lie until Google figures out what’s going on. To give the reader, your listeners and readers of the article a little more information, what really happened is Google has said that if you use the No Follow tag that some of you page rank is going to evaporate instead of automatically transferring to the remaining links. That is news to the SEO industry, nobody had ever heard that, there was somewhat of an uproar over it. But fundamentally, come the end of the day, if you’re doing it to just a few of the links on your page, I don’t think a No Follow is going to have a serious impact, and the nice news from Google is if you use No Follow there is definitely not going to be a spam penalty. They have no care in whether or not you No Follow or not. It’s just that not all of the page rank will transfer. And Matt Cutts also had a follow-up to our article on his site, and then we re-updated as an update on our article to include Matt’s comments and others that we found. Quite frankly I think that No Follow is still safe, it is still accepted, it is still usable. Use it in moderation. Matt also went ahead and said if you’re going to use No Follow to, what was referred to as page sculpt, page rank sculpt your site, the best way to do it is to do an architectural implementation, and he all but sited our siloing strategy, all the other people that were there started citing siloing, but we’ve been teaching sidling for six years, it’s the right way to do it, I encourage you to do it our way because it’s safe and it works.
Susan Bratton: Can you give us an example of what your siloing strategy is?
Bruce Clay: Well what we believe is that even though Google hasn’t supported it and they, you may have seen comments against it, that if theme and align your site so that your site has content that is aligned by your major keywords, the way people search, that there’s a tendency for that form of theming, where you’d line it by the way people search, not just general theming groups, but the way people search, that Google will believe that for that particular query you are more of a subject matter expert. So siloing is the structuring of the content on your site based upon search query, which relates clearly to the intent of the searcher. And then the No Follow is rarely used within that strategy just to make sure you don’t muddy up the theme boundaries, if you will. We always encourage you to link the landing pages, we encourage you to link within the theme, but cross beam landing page links, that’s the only place we really encourage No Follows. But if you architect your site to put the page rank on the appropriate pages you’re going to win, you’re going to line up by how the person queries, most of your links are going to be on topic because they’re within a theme. So pages linking from page A to page B, if they’re both about the same subject, that link is worth more. You have content on that topic and it matches the way a person queried, fundamentally you’re a winner, and that’s siloing in a nutshell.
Susan Bratton: Thank you. That was helpful.
Bruce Clay: I want to emphasize, to do siloing is not as easy as it sounds.
Susan Bratton: Yeah, it sounds like an entire new way of thinking.
Bruce Clay: Yes, it’s a new way of thinking, exactly. But once you’ve done it, we’ve never ever had less than a thirty percent traffic jump. We’ve had eight, nine hundred percent traffic jumps. So it’s a pretty effective tool if done correctly.
Susan Bratton: And there are resources to learn about it at bruceclay.com?
Bruce Clay: Absolutely.
Susan Bratton: Okay. Alright, lets move on to the next question. This is a question about the value of links. “Links are still the most important thing. What are the top ten – or however many you have, three, I don’t care – best ways to build links now? Are Dimas, Squidoos, social bookmarking like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious, submitting e-zine articles, still on the top of your list for biggest returns for effort, or are there some new emerging sites and strategies that yield better returns?”
Bruce Clay: Well, I think that what we’re finding is… First I’ll talk about some of the things that don’t work like they used to…
Susan Bratton: Mm, yeah, like Squidoo.
Bruce Clay: Yeah. We’re dealing with, well, all sorts of different kinds of things to fall into that. The social bookmarking things are not working as well as they used to. I think that a important consideration. I think that buying links, you used to be able to pretty well be able to fly under the radar. I think that really is not as good as it used to be. I think that, you know, there’s some things that are really working a lot better than they ever used to, and, you know, we just need to pay attention to some of that stuff. Buying links I think has gone from it’s easy to be under the radar to it’s hard to be under the radar. I think that’s a big consideration here. From the standpoint of the kinds of things, you don’t want to overdo the number of links from the same IP or the same site. You want it to be, you know, somewhat within what I would call within moderation. If I were to say, what are you doing, good sites that don’t have more than a hundred outbound links on a page, a unique IP range, they can’t have No Follow tags. Avoid the PPC space, the pills, porn and casino sites. Don’t do anything on those kinds of things, even if it’s a high page rank. Try to get the page linking you to be somewhere near the homepage, you know, only one click or so down. Or have at least moderate inbound links from other sites. If the page that links to you has nobody linking to it but the site that’s involved, you’re going to lose. And, you know, it’s kind of hard. I mean you don’t do them all in one day. Don’t run out and, today you just got a thousand more inbound links. Those are the kinds of things that you have to be careful of. Now at a strategic level you need to understand our approach is that the right way to do it is to attract links, not beg for them.
Susan Bratton: So provide really excellent content to which people want to link so that it naturally occurs?
Bruce Clay: Absolutely.
Susan Bratton: Any other way that you can attract links?
Bruce Clay: Well even if you have good information, what we’re finding is a lot of people are doing press releases. A lot of people do have blogs, that’s… And I’ll talk about social real fast. Social activity, even Twitter or, you know, Linked In or Face Book or anything, it is a community communication level kind of a thing. It gets everybody involved, as you know. And I’m a big believer in blogs and I’m a big believer in even programs much like this, where you talk to people and you get them involved. Well somewhere in the process of getting people to communicate with you, some of them are going to go to a website and it’ll link to you, and if it’s a link because they like what you’re saying, chances are that link is going to contain appropriate keywords. And it’s going to be, not in the margin, it’s going to be in the middle of the page and it’s going to be surrounded by appropriate text, appropriate to your subject. And those kinds of links are byproducts of social, and those are very, very valuable. It’s the same kind of things you’ve seen from press releases. The value of that particular press release is nowhere near the value of all the people that read it and then like you. So I think that social has a place in linking and we want to encourage that.
Susan Bratton: Any other areas that you see emerging besides continuing to do the press releases and having people blog about you and then link to you?
Bruce Clay: Well, not to talk about, you know, other things… I mean there’s companies out there selling link services that, you know, want to do, you know, syndication, right. There’s things that get into sharing, like video sharing and all those kinds of things that can cause people to visit your site. I think that the page rank contribution or the contribution of that individual link is a little bit less. I think, you know, video content sharing sites are fantastic if people use them and visit you, but I don’t think you’re going to get SEO contributions directly from those kinds of things. I think that it depends up the community you’re in, you were to play within the community. There’s, you know, corporate sites, much like I guess Bright Cove or some of those that are in the game. There are sites out there that certainly, you know, are individually selling links and things like that. There’s EDU’s, there’s government sites, there’s all sorts of things… I think linking is, the fundamental thing is if you build something with linking people will link to it.
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.
Bruce Clay: That is, in my mind…
Susan Bratton: Still comes back to the basics.
Bruce Clay: absolutely the right way to do it. We’ve been able to get, by building things correctly that people will link to, we’ve been able to increase the number of links per hour a hundred fold over, you know, targeted link solicitation.
Susan Bratton: Okay.
Bruce Clay: But a hundred fold is a very good return on investment.
Susan Bratton: Yeah, yeah. So focusing on quality content.
Bruce Clay: Absolutely.
Susan Bratton: Alright. Another one for you, switching gears to Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. “From an SEO perspective, what are our top opportunities and how should we be mobilizing to take advantage of the different of Bing versus Google?”
Bruce Clay: Bing is one of those interesting things that I almost can’t say it without the sound effect.
Susan Bratton: Go ahead, say it with the sound effect.
Bruce Clay: See, now you got me self-conscious about it.
Susan Bratton: Oh, do it one more time. I’m going to shut up. Go.
Bruce Clay: Bingggg.
Susan Bratton: There we go.
Bruce Clay: You notice that little quiver at the end for it to work correctly? When I first heard it, my first thought was “I just had a bolt break on the bottom side of my car, I’m going to lose my transmission.” But when I (unintelligible) Bing, when I go through it I kind of, personally I liked the curb appeal of that particular set of results. I noticed a lot of them are quite similar, at least for the top four or five, they’re quite similar to Google, as pretty much are many of the same sites. For search engine optimization, number two is still Google, even in bidding. So, you know, of course the first thing I did is I looked for myself and I looked for all these other things. I found it to be a fine search engine. I don’t know that it’s particularly light years ahead of everything out there, but I find it to be a good search engine. I have noticed that the traffic for a couple weeks from being actually increased and then have sort of fall and back off, I think that that’s sort of curiosity that’s caused more people to use it and do searches. I don’t know that it is going to remain consistent. I think, you know, basically the jury’s out, there’s no verdict yet. But I think I like it personally. There’s some features that I find interesting and attractive. It’s just a little bit of a different engine. Now does that mean that everybody should write for Bing or write anymore for that than they would for Google or Yahoo. I think you ought to consider it a, anything that is over ten percent market share is certainly a viable traffic source. And they’re pay per click in particular, it might actually be more economical than a Google world, and their certain writer targeting is good, their ability to behaviorally determine that they’re going to show the right ad to the right people I think is great. All those things make it a viable place to get traffic. And one of the things people have to understand or at least think about, most companies can only stand so many leads per day. The rest end up being wasted. If you have more leads coming in than you can handle, it’s a wasted lead. Now in general, if you only need lets say you only need ten a day or twenty a day, and Bing can get you ten of them for less money than Google giving you the same ten, I’d be inclined to go to Bing because, you know, that’s quite effective. If you need tens of thousands I’m not sure that Bing is there yet.
Susan Bratton: Got it. That was helpful. Someone… Oh it was Kara Reid from Marker. She runs a social media agency in LA and she was on a recent Dishy Mix. She said that she’s been hearing rumblings that Bing is particularly good at surfacing images from photo sharing sites as a part of the search results. Have you heard anything about that?
Bruce Clay: I haven’t really paid much attention to the photo searches within Bing. What I have noticed is even within Google, they have their new feature which allows you to see additional information in the search results, you know, the…
Susan Bratton: Expanded results?
Bruce Clay: color wheel, you know, the see more kind of stuff. Show options gives you the ability to actually enhance them images as a result. It’s only a matter of time until that shows up everywhere. I think that certainly being as quite capable of showing a lot of results in the image area. I haven’t seen as much what would be referred to as blended search kind of results in Bing yet. Maybe it’s just that I’m not looking in the right spots, but I haven’t seen what I would call a lot of, you know, information like photos. The… Now across the top they actually have, you know, web and images, videos, I think news, I think they have maps in Bing. I’m doing it from memory here. But their page itself does not inherently have a lot of things at the top. They have videos and photos somewhere near the bottom. Their maps appear at the bottom of the page, not the top I think. We did a search for ‘cell phone’, and we noticed that they only give you five organic results at the top once you look at where the web results would be. But the page had a lot of other sections. They had this section on brands and I think a buying guide section and different service providers, and it was mixed up around ‘cell phone’ because they were trying to cater to the intent of the query. And they did it not by co-mixing all these into one set of ten new links, but having a section of five results on each of those. And that particular approach once you’re used to it, I think it’s going to be quite useful for the searcher because they’re, hey if my intent is to buy or my intent is just to get information and my intent is to shop, but for services, not a phone, then I can understand why segmenting your search page would be a very, very effective thing to do. Other than that, I haven’t really done much with the images and figure out if that’s good, bad or indifferent. It kind of reminds me, you know, images… If people have a lot of images or the same thing I think they’ll look at them, and a photo flipper, I think you’re going to get a lot of activity. But I don’t know that a lot of people, unless they’re, you know, looking for something they can cut and paste onto their website, I don’t think they’re going to spend as much time on the image area for Bing going to Google.
Susan Bratton: Got it. Alright, we’re going to go to a break, thank my sponsors. You, Bruce, you know how important that is. And when we come back we’re going to focus the whole second half of the show on the integration of SEO and video. So we’re with Bruce Clay, and I’m your host Susan Bratton and we’ll be right back after we give our sponsors a lot of focus. Stay tuned.
Susan Bratton: We’re back with Bruce Clay, and Bruce, I want to get right into the SEO and video world. My first question is from a listener, Richard Sneed of Creativity Pop, and he wants to know what you think three great money making uses of online video are.
Bruce Clay: Wow!
Susan Bratton: Sky’s the limit.
Bruce Clay: I know they sell blenders. The biggest thing I think is generally traffic, certainly branding. I don’t know that video in and of itself causes people to buy things because the video itself seldom has enough content to make you trust something sufficient to buy from something, if that makes sense.
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. So you’re awareness creating…
Bruce Clay: You’re awareness creating…
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.
Bruce Clay: and, you know, people put videos out in some of the strangest places, and I’ll tell you, I’ve probably seen a whole lot more video certainly in the last month than I have in the prior three years. Video is coming up. Now we refer to something in part as an extension of universal and part as an extension of the Google algorithm, referred to as an engagement object. Engagement objects are items that cause your site to be more engaging when a visitor comes to your site, and we know that Google is able to index that content on your own physical website. If you search for SEO training, one of the things that shows up is videos from our website about our training classes is actually right there on the page. And so if Google is indexing videos from an individual website and if Google, as soon as Universal came out, added 70 more algorithm factors – or at least talk about 70 more – it seems to me that engagement objects are part of the algorithm. So if you do video, I would imagine that one of the things that’s cool about the video is that people will see it, people will think you’re good, they will actually visit your site more. I think if you put it on your site, people visiting your site will be more engaged and they’ll have a tendency to spend more time on the site. I think that therefore video contributes to traffic, I think it contributes to ranking because that’s a factor that Google would find attractive. I think that video is going to become increasingly important over time. A year from now we’re probably going to have difficulty going to a website and not seeing a video on it. I think it’s going to be almost everywhere.
Susan Bratton: So, let me ask another question right in that vein. This is from Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative, you and I both know him. He wanted to specifically know what you think about 12seconds.tv, but I want to expand his question and ask your opinion about everything; Seismic, Kite, Vidler, 12 Seconds TV and other flash based video creation and sharing sites. What do you think about all of that, and where does that fit into the mix?
Bruce Clay: Well obviously Google is playing quite a bit with all of this. I think that, you know, what we have to do is understand that video… Okay, when you watch a video how long do you watch it?
Susan Bratton: Depends on how good the video is.
Bruce Clay: Doesn’t it. And if the sound is bad do people stay on the page?
Susan Bratton: No.
Bruce Clay: No. So, you know, in part, I think that if you have something that in the first second is attractive and it does have some good sound quality go to it, I think people watch, you know, as long as they need to watch. I’ve watched things that are fifteen minutes, and, you know, I don’t think 12 Seconds is necessarily an issue, I don’t think those kinds of things are bad. It’s a little bit like page links. That’s my opinion, by the way. When you look at a web page, a lot of people used to say, “Well all your content has to be above the fold.” Well how many of us no longer scroll? You go to a blog you scroll, you go to this you scroll, you go to Google you scroll. The more people are involved in the content, the content is better. I think that watching a video is the same way. You give them good content in a video people will watch it longer. But I do likewise think if you can get it into 12 Seconds and get your message out there, maybe on the secondary video that might be longer for people who want to do it, I think you’ve got it. I think you’re going to get people involved. Video however, in order for it to have an impact, has to be found, and if you can’t find the video you’re going to lose. So, you know, all the YouTube kind of things and the 12second.tv and all those kinds of things that have video where you can go in and look at videos and watch it for a little bit, those are basically search environments where people can search on a topic and you can find it, and then you can see something about it and then even determine if you want more information about it. I think that, I think that video should be embedded in websites, and I think video on external websites have to be hooks. It’s your billboard on somebody else’s site. It’s logically going to ultimately replace some banners. I think if I can get my video on somebody else’s site, I’m going to get traffic from it. It is more engaging, I think it’s going to be more fun. I think that it’s going to soak up a ton of bandwidth. I just can’t wait for the spammers to really spam video everywhere, it’s going to, you know, make it a whole lot worse in that regard. But I think video is serving a purpose right now, and it’s serving more of a purpose than a lot of other things that are out on the web.
Susan Bratton: Here’s another one for you that follows it Bruce. Julie Perry is a co-creator with Paul Colligan on YouTube Secret Weapon. Here’s her question; her main area is video SEO via the video content sharing sites, mainly YouTube, but including mass distribution via syndication services like Tube Mogul and Traffic Geyser. She’s curious about your advice to major companies and small businesses looking to establish an online presence via video. Do you encourage them to upload content to the video content sharing sites for the searchability and lead generation aspect? Or do you recommend just a few of the major ones? So her question is, “Should I just put it on YouTube or should I use the Traffic Geyser and the Tube Moguls to get the content kind of out everywhere?”
Bruce Clay: Well if your intent is to get a splash, get people talking about it, but then have them go to your site where ultimately you’re going to want to have most of the people going direct to you, then YouTube alone is probably the right answer. If your intent is to put it out, never really host it on your site, just use it as sort of a…
Susan Bratton: Bait.
Bruce Clay: a traffic generator, then you must put it everywhere, so Traffic Geyser I think is an excellent choice there.
Susan Bratton: Oh, so you like Traffic Geyser, using them to get your video out everywhere?
Bruce Clay: If that’s your objective, yes, absolutely.
Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. Okay. Another question for you, and I’m going to blend questions from two listeners here because they’re asking the same thing in a slightly different way, and I want you to hear how they’re asking it because I think that’s sometimes helpful. So Dan Perry is the SEO manager at cars.com, and here’s what he says. He says – and I don’t agree with him – he says, “Everyone knows the basics of video SEO” - which we don’t, so lets assume we don’t – “Title, meta, file name, contextual relevance. What’s new in the realm of video SEO’s that everyone doesn’t know? What is something actionable I can do today to increase my video SEO relevance?” And then Michael Rosenfeld, VP of new biz development at Media Smith said, “What’s the best practice on tagging videos? How can someone not in SEO/advertising determine the right kinds of words, etcetera, to tag?” So this is all about the construct of your video, and I think not everyone understands what Dan does about all these, what’s the meta, what’s the title, and then how do you tag. So could you just kind of explain that whole piece for us?
Bruce Clay: Well the tagging is somewhat easy. It’s like a, much like a web page where you actually get to decide the title, basically the title description, keywords kind of thing for video. The part I think that is coming soon, we already know that Google can transcribe the soundtracks. I think that there’ll come a time where the keywords must also be used in the content, and that the content will be scanned for the same keywords that are in the title. So just having good titles or good links or good contextual surrounding material, well all of that today works very, very well. The reason it works well is that nobody is actually optimizing the content. If nobody is doing it then everything is equal. If you can actually use the keywords in the content I think it would be quite useful. The problem you have is that a lot of video doesn’t make it easy for you to do that. So if I were doing a video and I was recording it myself and I had a script, use the keywords. If it’s a video of this guy driving down the street and having an auto accident, there’s not going to be a lot of body copy, so maybe you need to do some sound-overs to create some words that would appear within the particular video itself, and I think that it’s only a matter of time until that works out well for everybody. We do know transcription is happening on MP3’s, and I think it’s a matter of time until the same thing does work for video.
Susan Bratton: Yeah, I transcribe Dishy Mix and every episode has a transcription on the page where you find that episode.
Bruce Clay: It’s very, very common for that to happen. One of my larger clients is Edmond’s, and they do a lot of videos and were doing much the same kind of stuff.
Susan Bratton: So Bruce, explain it to me, ‘cause I don’t understand it. Tell me the difference between the title, the meta, the file name, the contextual relevance, all the stuff Dan’s talking about that’s a no-brainer for him, go Dan, but doesn’t completely make sense to me. If I have a video, where am I putting all that, all those words? How does… I understand that my video, my file has a name, that’s the title of the file, but what’s the meta and what’s the contextual and how does all that work?
Bruce Clay: Well based upon how you’re doing it you could actually edit it, if your video editor supports it you can edit material around that particular video. We’re finding that using the xml file for videos, the way it’s described… We wrote a rather large article in our newsletter about how to actually properly use xml to point to things such as videos and photos and things like that. You can define it externally and have it picked up by Google at the time it’s being spidered. Generally you edit it into the file itself using appropriate construct.
Susan Bratton: Can you explain that a little bit more?
Bruce Clay: Well at the time you create the video you’re normally going to use a video editor, and advanced video editors allow you to do the ghosting on top of it and add a URL to it. I mean you’re editing on top of the video normally, correct? If you’re doing that kind of stuff, at that same time you have the ability to put in this is what the video is, this is what it’s about, this is what the keywords are. You can do that physically within the video itself, and that is what we’re referring to as the title description keywords for a video. The other part is when you have that video on your page, what do you write about that video as other content on that particular page. So that page itself has its own title description keyword. The video itself has its own words that surround it. And generally you’re going to want to do all of the above, not just part of the above.
Susan Bratton: Yeah, I had no idea any of that was actually even happening in the universe, you’ve opened up a door for me around that.
Bruce Clay: Well we’ve been doing quite a bit of optimization. I mean we have clients do a lot of videos, and the only thing that is true about videos is every two or three weeks there’s something else you can do about videos. You just have to pay a lot of attention, but if you do pay a lot of attention you’re going to win.
Susan Bratton: Okay, we are almost out of time and I don’t want to forget the tracking and analysis and results of all of this work that we’re doing, right. Shay Park, founder of AdS Park, says that she’s looking for suggestions that you might have about video tracking and analysis solutions. She has, she wants a service that will attract clients via videos and the traffic resulting from the videos they produce, post and distribute.
Bruce Clay: Yeah, having things track video, I mean if it’s on your site it’s a little bit easier. But, for instance, in Omniture there’s something called an action source. It’s basically the way you can have Omniture track the video loading or MP3 loading or anything you, any external loading, and we’re using it on our own site within our own players. When you play an MP3 or a video, we actually had that separately tracked within Omniture. The other way is to have the flash itself call a javascript to action code to trigger a page view for the MP3, and I would probably say that’s the most common way to do it. And if you distribute and integrate it into the flash, then theoretically anybody on any site playing your video should be able to be triggered as a page view for your site. So those are the common ways to do it. I would say embedding it in the flash is probably easiest, but if you are an Omniture site, you really want to be able to consider using the action source right in, either in the invocation or within the flash movie itself.
Susan Bratton: Well and doesn’t Tube Mogul, isn’t their whole thing analytics around you put up a piece of video, they distribute it on all these different sites, and then they do the analytics, they tell you how many plays you get, isn’t that part of what Tube Mogul does?
Bruce Clay: Yes, and certainly, I think that’s one of the things that they’re actually doing is this. And it isn’t clear to me though that everybody wants to have their video on other sites. I mean you do need to count it if you’re distributing it through some form of syndication to other sites, you do need to count it. But if it’s playing on my own site, how do I count it there and…
Susan Bratton: Right.
Bruce Clay: these are the ways that you would be able to do that.
Susan Bratton: Okay. Last question. You’ve been so good, and don’t I get really good listener questions?
Bruce Clay: Yeah, you do.
Susan Bratton: I know, huh?
Bruce Clay: You’re going to have to fix that.
Susan Bratton: I’m going to just have to appreciate them so much for being willing to think up this great stuff. This is a universal search question. What are the – an it’s just from me – what are the top parameters that Google uses to chose which videos rank at the top of universal search? So essentially how do you get your videos to show up in the organic results? And I know it’s a lot of what you’ve been talking about, but this is kind of the last question. Stitch it all together, tell me what I need to do.
Bruce Clay: Well okay. The, it’s a popularity contest for the videos, just like for the images. If people go to video search and they search on that a particular keyword and then they click on a particular video a lot and they watch it, not just bounce back, then the assumption is that it’s more relevant for the query and it’ll automatically be more sucked in to the universal results.
Susan Bratton: Is that video, does it have to be on YouTube because that’s what Google owns or could it be a video that’s actually on your website as much as it could be?
Bruce Clay: So far we’ve only seen it really affect the working that way from YouTube, and I’m referring to videos that, and images that appear blended right into the search results. Now it may be that not all of those particular videos are appropriate for that particular query. For instance, if you search for Bruce Clay, my name, there’ll be three videos that show up; one from my site and a couple from Web Pro News, interviews that were out there where I basically said ranking is bad, etcetera, etcetera, some of the famous ones. The, those videos, none of them are from YouTube, but they’re blended right into the search results, so it’s clearly not all YouTube, but all else being equal I think YouTube traffic is given some form of priority, and I think Google hopes that you click on it, you go to YouTube and then you click on some ads over at YouTube while you’re there, and it’s overall I think some form of rev generating opportunity for Google. Certainly you can think about a Google result page as being full engagement objects. It has maps, it has images, it has videos, it has news, it has blogs, it has books, it has all this stuff co-mingled on the search result page. Fundamentally if you put it on your site it helps you rank as well, but they’re doing it for engagement but they’re also doing it to drive revenue. So all else being equal, I think YouTube wins. Where it’s appropriate for your site and not necessarily YoutTube’s site and they’ve spidered it. I think that your content can show up right there in the universal results right there with everybody else.
Susan Bratton: Well that is our goal, isn’t it? Hey Bruce, thank you so much for doing an awesome job just answering every single thing that we came up with. I really appreciate it. It’s been definitely illuminating, and, you know, your email newsletter is terrific. I got the number 68 yesterday with all the Matt Cutts stuff, and I really encourage all of you to go to bruceclay.com and sign up for his email newsletter because it is super high quality, chock full of information, so if you’re not getting that… And if you want more Bruce you can also listen to the SEM Synergies show on webmasterraido.fm. And, gosh, I think that’s it Bruce. Did I cover… Oh, and of course, your Search Engine Optimization for Dummies book, that’s a tome. That’s the definitive guide, the latest and most robust guide to search engine optimization, right?
Bruce Clay: It is, yes, it’s the all in one reference. It’s 746 pages. It’s not like a normal book. But, yeah, it has just about everything you’re going to need. Certainly if you have somebody you know that says to you, “What is SEO?”, you could either spend hours telling them or you say, “Go buy the book.”
Susan Bratton: Go buy the book. Well even if you do know about SEO, you can’t know it all unless you’re Bruce Clay, so…
Bruce Clay: Well some people just don’t want to spend the time explaining it over and over and over again.
Susan Bratton: Exactly. That’s great. Well its been terrific to spend time with you. I’ve really enjoyed your approach to answering questions and it’s always just great to be with you, even if it’s virtually.
Bruce Clay: You got it.
Susan Bratton: Thanks Bruce. Alright, I’m your host Susan Bratton. I hope you had a good time, learned a lot and I’ll see you next week. Have a great day.