Webmaster Discussions

Video has emerged as one of the most effective mediums for marketing on the web.  This hasn’t happened overnight, as we have seen companies use video to market their products for many years.

In video marketing, there are plenty of topics that merit discussion.  Books could be written about how to plan and develop a successful video campaign, SEO video optimization or viral video marketing strategies.  I want to discuss one simple action that may give a company some added exposure and propel their idea or business to “online sensation� status: a well produced product trailer.

What is a Product Trailer?

A product trailer is a video showcase of your product or service, just as a movie trailer would portray an exciting new film.  For obvious reasons, it needs to be entertaining, concise and outstanding.  It can be hilarious or informative, but it shouldn’t go more than two minutes.  Your product trailer can be the cornerstone to your idea, be on the front page of your e-commerce website and even posted on the bottom of every company blog post (I actually saw that).  It explains your product in simple, easy-to-understand terms, or can provide a unique piece about something related to your field.

How Does Your Video Campaign Measure Up?

Many video marketing campaigns fail.  How many of you have seen that company YouTube channel with 20 different videos, most of them having less than 100 views?  I tip my hat to their efforts, but their videos are not yielding a return on the time or resources spent on creating those spots.   Perhaps the videos are poorly produced or simply are not being marketed correctly.  Either way, these videos are not making their company any money.

Imagine this same company using their time and resources to plan, develop and produce one superior product trailer.  Then the company spends time finding 50 news sites and online magazines to share this video because they know the video is funny or interesting.  With the potential for social media shares, you might create an “online buzz�.  It would be difficult to do this with several videos.  Do you see the difference?

Tim Ferriss Book Trailer

To further grasp the potential of an outstanding product trailer, look no further than New York Times best-selling author Tim Ferriss.  His latest book jumped from No. 150 to No. 30 on Amazon immediately after the launch of his 59-second book trailer.  The video debuted on The Huffington Post and eventually garnered spots on national TV.

The video was professionally produced, thoughtfully designed and well funded.  I understand some videos go for the raw, homemade video look, but in many cases a video with the right effects and lighting will make a better impression.

Is it always counterproductive to produce several videos?  Absolutely not.  Many times, especially if a brand or product is established, creating a series of videos is valuable. It creates stickiness to your video channel.

But if you are looking to start a video campaign or your current video campaign is not performing well, put all those great ideas of yours into two minutes or less.  Then go nuts with it.

What ideas do you have for producing a product trailer?  What are the best ways to push out a trailer?

This post summarizes the results of a recent internal test conducted to understand how a website’s navigation menu affects the ‘First Link Priority’ rule. A method for avoiding the consequences of this rule was also tested with positive results. While these tests were in no way exhaustive, they do add to the body of evidence available on the subject.

Optimized anchor text has long been an important aspect of search engine optimization because it helps the search engines determine the relevance of the target URL. And while a good SEO link-building campaign can help you achieve better optimized anchor text, a natural backlink portfolio will often be less than ideal.

For this reason, internal linking is crucial. It allows you to tell search engines what pages you want to rank for a certain term. In order to make your internal linking effective, there is one very important yet often overlooked rule you should be aware of called the “first link priority� rule.

What Is the ‘First Link Priority’ Rule?

The “first link priority� rule is Google’s way of making sure a webmaster doesn’t add hundreds of anchor text links into the content of their website. Basically, when the search engine spider crawls a page on your website and comes across two links pointing to the same page, it will only consider the anchor text of the first link and disregard the second. While this rule has been well documented by many SEOs, there seems to be some confusion on whether or not this rule applies to the navigation menu of a website.

Problems with the Navigation Menu

On the vast majority of websites, the navigation menu is located above the majority of content when viewing the source code. As a result, the spiders end up crawling your navigation menu first. This creates a problem because most navigation menus do not use fully-optimized anchor text. For example, if I sell bunk beds, I might have two tabs in my navigation menu, one labeled “wood� and the other labeled “metal�. Of course those are not the keywords I am optimizing for, but “wooden bunk beds� and “metal bunk beds� don’t always look good in a navigation menu.

As a result, many professional SEOs have assumed that Google will still count an internal link’s anchor text within the content of a page. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

I created a test a few months ago on www.christiangreiner.com, before I redesigned the website. I made a page using 15 randomly generated letters with no search results (christiangreiner.com/zjjiurzcfccylco/). I then linked to this page twice, using other randomly generated letters. One link (pbnrnqdmzbeloxd) was in the navigation menu, with another (cxelwjgqaajlost) in the content of the homepage.

In the search results shown below Google ONLY considered the anchor text from the menu in ranking the page named zjjiurzcfccylco. Results were the same in Bing and Yahoo.

Results of this test and others that have been performed show that webmasters should re-examine the internal links of their website. If you have a link within the content to a page that is also linked to in the menu of your website, then the anchor text used in the content is most likely not being considered by Google because of the first link priority rule. However, all is not lost because there are a few ways you can still get your desired anchor text.

3 Ways to Get Around the First Link Priority Rule

There are a quite a few technical ways to avoid the first link priority rule, some of which are demonstrated in a post by Giuseppe Pastore from Italy. However, I wouldn’t recommend all of these since some could be seen as misleading by the search engines. Instead, the following are three “best-practice� ways to avoid the consequences of the first link priority rule on your website.

1. Place the menu below the content in the source code of your website

If you have a static website this could be a great option. By using DIVs and absolute positioning it is possible to place a side navigation menu below the content in the source code. When applicable, this is a great option. Google considers any anchor text within the content first, and only when there is none does Google go on to count the links in the navigation menu.

However, before you get too excited you should know that this is difficult to do with a dynamic website, or any website using a CMS. It requires a smart developer, since one little tweak could ruin your absolute positioning and throw your website into a tailspin.

2. Internal link to deep pages only

Most of the time it is best to simply link internally to the deeper pages of your website, instead of duplicating links to pages already linked to in the navigation.

This is probably the most common solution and you see it used a lot by major news outlets. For example, I have never seen a New York Times article with an internal link to the “Sports� page within the content of article. Instead, they link to other articles with optimized anchor text. The result is a deep-linking strategy that is beneficial in getting deep pages read and indexed.

3. Use a hashtag for multiple internal links

The final option is a little trick that involves using a hashtag within your internal links. A hashtag is used within a link to bring users to a specific part of a page and is very common on websites like Wikipedia. Because only part of a page may be relevant to a user clicking on the link, Google treats a hashtag link like a link to a separate page, and therefore will consider the anchor text of multiple links.

In fact, the hashtag work-around works even when the link doesn’t bring you to a specific part of the page. For example, after the first link in the content (cxelwjgqaajlost, which was ignored by Google), I created another link with a hashtag in it (http://www.christiangreiner.com/zjjiurzcfccylco/#1) and gave it another random 15-character anchor text (mtqqjatxxwjfkod). Sure enough, as seen below, Google (but not Bing or Yahoo) considered the anchor text used when ranking the page it links to.

Even though it worked in my test, I wouldn’t consider this method to be a “best practice,� since it is essentially adding links which do not benefit users for the sake of manipulating search rankings.

However, if you do have an H1 tag that contains your keyword, and use an internal link with the same anchor text to bring users directly to that H1 tag on the page, this could create a good user experience and solve the first link priority problem at the same time.

Final thought

This was not the first test to learn more about the first link priority rule, nor should it be the last. Instead, it is simply meant to help us better understand how Google crawls a website and what it considers.

It is also important to note that having internal links within the content of your website (even when the menu already links to the same page) can still be beneficial as long as it creates a positive user experience. The point of this post is not to discourage internal linking, but to discourage internal links that will hold no value for a visitor or the search engines.

Bing is partnering with Baidu to deliver English search results in China. Baidu is a Chinese search engine that holds 83 percent of the Chinese-language search engine market. But Baidu has struggled to deliver accurate English results.

Bing is owned by Microsoft. And one of the problems Microsoft faces in moving into China is the Chinese government demanding access to Bing’s search engine so they can censor Baidu’s English search results, which are generated by Bing. Beijing will be able to manipulate search results on topics such as human rights and other items the Chinese government deems “dangerous and troublesome.� Will the tampering impact Bing’s credibility in the United States? Will Bing’s partnership with Baidu and the Chinese government tarnish your view of Bing?

Google recently pulled out of China and moved into Hong Kong because the Chinese government would not stop interfering with the search giant. Google maintains more than 65 percent of the search market in the United States while Bing hovers at about 20 percent. Should Microsoft have sacrificed the integrity of its search results by caving to Chinese censorship policies to gain access to a search market of 470 million Internet users?

One thing is certain; companies with an interest in organic SEO in China should focus more efforts into Bing.

The big news last month from ICANN is that .anything domain names, also referred to as generic top-level domains (gTLD) have been approved. This is a huge move for the governing body that has approved 22 TLDs, some of which are rarely used and almost never rank in Google, Yahoo!, or Bing.

Internationalization of domains

These .anything domains bring unprecedented international changes to domains where ASCII, Latin, Chinese, Arabic and other character encoding will finally be possible.

Domains won’t look like domains anymore

The changes alter the familiarity of Toyota.com or Nordstrom.com domain names. I imagine future domains more like corolla.toyota, camry.toyota, shoes.nordstrom, and so on. Notice the missing “http://” and the “www.” For household brands, this shouldn’t be entirely difficult for consumers. However, who will have the rights to .cars and .shoes?

Barriers to .anything domains

Will there be a whole new land grab of domain names? I believe the market will heat up for those interested in charging direct registration fees. Some control is built into the $185,000 consideration fee and an annual maintenance fee of $25,000 per top-level domain (TLD). This slows the average domain owner from creating domains at will, but how many domainers will have interest in controlling gTLDs? I believe many will explore this option.

SERPs considerations

As an online marketer, I can’t help but question how these domains will rank in the major search engines. You can see from the following examples that Google.com is indexing (not necessarily ranking) content from many different TLDs. But top rankings in Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Bing.com are rarely achieved by non-standard TLDs such as .us, .museum, or .pro domain names.

Search engines look at TLDs as an indicator of which index (country) they expect their audience to react positively toward listings. For example Google.com is full of .com, .net, .org, .edu and other TLDs whereas Google.com.mx and Google.co.uk are full of .com.mx and .co.uk domains respectively. This isn’t an argument over whether you “can” rank well, but rather an observation of Google’s defaults.

Schema.org and indexation of .anything domains

Another recent announcement by Google, Yahoo! and Bing is the support for Schema.org standards. With Schema standards, product information can be published with meta data to help recipients understand and boundaries provided by the publisher. This helps to organize the information of the web. Schema may help in suggesting the purpose, geography, industry, local/retail or global interest of new .anything domains.

As domains becomes less standardized (.com for commercial sites, .edu for educational sites, etc.) the search engine algorithms will have to adjust. Moreover, domain length considerations will have to be adjusted.

Changes to domain names also affects pre-determined standards such as .com for commercial sites and .edu for educational sites. The search engines will have to adjust their algorithm to account for new domains such as .baby, .bmw, .family, .motorcycles, .travel, and .vegas as they appear online.

I would like to hear your thoughts about generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and the changes required by search engines in order for there to be visibility of the new .anything domains from an SEO perspective.

Google recently completed their Inside Search event where a number of new products were announced and presented for demonstration. This recap discusses some of the products that may impact the future of SEO.

Search by Image

Perhaps the most exciting and interesting development from Inside Search was the announcement of Search by Image. Users may upload, drag and drop or paste the URL for images that Google will then treat as a search query.

The demonstrator searched Google by uploading an old picture near a beach. Google determined where the picture was taken, and returned the top result of a Wikipedia page on the location, followed by “similar images� of the surrounding area. In another example, the “y u no� guy (an Internet meme) was dropped into the search. Google returned two results about the image, in addition to a few similar images.

How does this impact search engine optimization? Optimizing images to be found by search engines is an often underrated organic SEO tactic. Image search volume is likely to increase due to the new Google features. While the majority of image searches will continue to be informational, an increased number of users may be searching with purchase intent.

Suppose you are an online retailer selling shoes. A buyer goes into a shoe store and takes a picture of the shoe itself in order to find more information. As users become more familiar with Search by Image, this kind of activity will likely become increasingly common.

The prospective buyer may be searching for competitor pricing, reviews or additional information. Depending on a multitude of factors, your product page and/or image may appear, and you increase your chance of a link and/or sale – even if they don’t buy from you until next time.

Businesses can increase their chances of showing up for standard image results and Search by Image through keyword-targeted filenames, alt text and optimizing surrounding text. In addition, having multiple angles of the same product will be more likely to trigger Google’s “similar� image results on Search by Image. In the world of online retail, multiple product views are almost always a good thing, and Google’s new service makes multiple product images a worthwhile goal.

Google Instant Images

Again, image optimization is a rarely discussed method of bringing relevant users to a site. Image visitors can raise your site’s visibility, spread your brand and attract links that may otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Even if a user has typed in two letters, Google will begin showing images. If your images are eye-catching, users may pause queries or stop their search because they have found what they were (or weren’t) looking for. There is only one piece of advice I can offer for taking advantage of Instant Images: investing in quality, attractive images is more important than ever.

Google Voice Search (for Desktop)

The vast majority of Google voice searches in the past have been performed on mobile devices, but, with the announcement of Google Voice search for desktops, that may change. In my experience, people tend to search using very different queries when speaking and typing. With a six-fold increase in speech-assisted queries since May 2010 (according to Google’s presentation), there will likely be slightly fewer broad search queries and a slightly increased volume of “long-tail� keywords to optimize for.

Obsessed With Speed

If Google is “obsessed with speed,� and they have found that faster speeds lead to improved user experience, perhaps we, as website owners, should be obsessed with speed. Specifically, we should be obsessed with the time it takes for a user to find what he or she is looking for. This is good advice for both conversion optimization and organic SEO.

Google has, at several points, mentioned that they are concerned with the user experience of pages within search results, though the method of measuring the user experience and the impact on rankings is still a matter of speculation. Whether user experience is measured directly through user metrics or algorithmically, a bad user experience is increasingly bad for SEO, and a bad experience has always meant fewer natural links. SEOs would be wise to suggest and implement improvements related to page load time, navigation and a better user experience.

What announcement are you most excited about? Do you see any of Google’s other new products having an impact on how we do SEO?