We’d like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.

Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt

Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:

Playpage
Content and player
Thumbnail
More information about robots.txt.
 

Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in

Is your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can’t be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don’t need to include this.

Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed — protect the user experience

Sometimes publishers take videos down but don’t signal to search engines that they’ve done so. This can result in the search engine’s index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they’re taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn’t exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards.

To signal that a video has been removed,

Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages.
Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the element) or mRSS feed ( tag) submitted to Google.
For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search answers check out our Help Forum.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-videos-best-practices.html

While  most of the factors have decreased in relevance, the concept of domain trust is having a greater importance than ever. What do we mean by domain trust and how can you get search engines, especially Google to Trust your domain?

The terms “domain trust” and “domain authority” are bandied about a lot by search engine optimization services today. Domain trust is an expression that’s commonly used these days in SEO circles. Widely recognised as being of significant importance few people are able to offer a clear definition of domain trust and how it can influence search placements.

Here’s an explanation of domain trust, what it means and what you can do to build it. But let’s first have a look at the meaning of the term “trust” ..

The search engines work tirelessly in the pursuit of relevance. The name of their game is to match queries with the most suitable returns. The better they are at it, giving people simple stress free online search experiences that deliver the goods, then the more people will use them. In other words, the more value search adds to users’ lives the more value they add to their market price.

Google runs hundreds of tests against websites and checks numerous signals in order to establish relevance. One of the most important qualities that a web site can exhibit is domain trust.

The more domain trust you have the better you rank.

Domain Trust – Who links to you?

To a large extent domain trust is down to proximity. Google loves high quality websites. Well designed, well structured web sites bursting with great content and blessed with large numbers of satisfied visitors – these are Google’s trusted domains.

The closer you live to trusted domains, in other words the more direct links your site has from trusted domains, the more trust you gain.

Sites one link removed from the trusted domain network will generate 0.01% web spam. Two or more clicks from the trusted domain network and you are moving in circles that deal in unacceptable levels of spam – levels of 1.2% or more.

Domain Trust – Who you link to

It also matters who you link to. If you link to low trust sites, expect this to damage your domain trust. You’re in bad company. Link to trusted sites to boost your own domain trust.

Reciprocal links directories? Don’t do it. Why would any credible website link to a site that spams? It wouldn’t. Google is wise to this.

Domain Trust – Registration information

Google has been official registrar since 2003. Why? So that it can look under the web bonnet and access important web registration information. Being able to identify the owners of websites  means Google can spot themes. If you own 100 sites and Google spots that 75 of them are spam sites then expect this to be reflected in search placements  through

Domain Trust – User Data Signals

Google collects huge amounts of information about what users do on the web – through Analytics, through the tool bar, free wi-fi and through third party relationships. Signals reveal how naturally a domain is behaving. If the data signals are unusual the domain might well be penalised. Normal behaviour indicates a trust.

Follow Google guidelines, prioritise quality design and quality content and allow domain trust to grow naturally.

• Domain Age – it takes time to build trust and the past history of a domain may effect domain trust.
• Link Profile – essentially looking at the range of sites that you link to comparing the good links compared to the bad links.
• Domain Trust of other sites in a PageRank type relationship.
• Social networking (not yet but maybe in the future)
• On page information such as stop words?
• Links from a white-list of sites which is periodically checked by hand for quality? A list of manually checked sites that are unlikely to become untrustworthy overnight, Wikipedia (this rules out being correct as a factor), BBC, CNN, etc.
• Contact information on a page.
• Rate of link growth, natural growth – number of links grows as  a function of time and the number of pages in a site. More content should mean more link growth.  Is there a natural rate of growth for links depending on site size?
• Duplicate Content – a site that steals content from another site would be more likely to be dodgy.
• Bounce Rate – noisy but could be a secondary factor. It has certainly been touted as a possible ranking factor for a long time. A good site would satisfy the needs of its users but this could still be acheived in one page-view.
• Link distribution – how are the links distributed on the  site. Are there any deep links or is the entire link structure concentrating on the home page?
• Long-tail rankings – sites that appear for many long tail search are more likely to have good content than simple web sites.

Yes, just like the title clearly states: Google’s SEO report card, this new release from Google indicated that they focus on some key elements. They believe this report card can answer some of the questions frequently asked.

Actually the report card is for their product teams toimprove on their product pages using simple and accepted optimization. The provided almost a 50-page PDF, of course, ordinary website administrators would found some useful information in order to optimize their site(s).

In Google’s word:

These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.

The report is divided into three parts:

• Subject I: Search result presentation
• Subject II: URLs and redirects
• Subject III: On-page optimizations

SEO Tips from the report:

• The title page should be a maximum of 60 characters
• Longer Titles should be modified using fewer keywords weighted
• The meta description does not flow in the ranking of a page with a
• The meta description should always include two lines
• For Sitelinks is a hierarchically flat links with keywords helpful
• For a permanent redirect should always use 301
• Headings should be used in chronological
• keywords in h1tags has more weight than keywords in h3 tags
• The alt text of an image is similar weight as the anchor text of a link

Rapid Growth is Impossible Without Access to a Steady Stream of Qualified Sales Leads
The goal of a marketing campaign is to generate sales, something that depends on your prospective clients’ ability to respond to your campaign by taking action. The success in promoting your organisation or selling products directly to the public on the internet lies in your ability to attract the right type and volume of visitors to your website. Search engine being the most popular tool in today’s world has replaced printed business directories for most people. Your business gets extreme leverage with search engine marketing to reach a large group of prospective clients instantly and effortlessly. Online marketing on search engines has become popular because of the speed, cost effectiveness, convenience and most importantly the impact on generating sales and profits to businesses. Reach a specific demographically targeted group of potential clients with low overheads with no more printing costs, you also help to save the environment. ResultIT helps you with strategic plans tailored to your unique business channels the large stream of qualified sales leads.

The Search Engine = The Ultimate Sales Generator
Attract Genuine Sales Prospects Eager and Ready to Make A Deal
SEM helps target visitors that are interested in your product or services from a specific geographical region thus narrowing down and eliminating non-potential clients. By bringing information to people who need them brings interest to what you are trying to sell. These people also are in the right motivation to find what they want and thus are ready to make a purchase or can become potential sales leads to your business. You don’t have to make cold calls anymore as interested parties are brought to you business site. Your visiblity to the public brings on market presence and brand awareness.

The New Replacing The Old
New Rating Criterias from Major Search Engines have Levelled the Playing Field
Old websites that used to be in top rankings have been pushed down by modern and websites that has search engine optimisation implemented. This is good news for your business as that means you have a better chance as everyone else who just started to find out on the benefits of Search Engine Marketing. Of cos, a good and reliable company is the key to your answer. ResultIT has years of experience and is always keeping up-to-date on the ever changing internet business. We see it as an ongoing process to improve our customers’ websites and help them achieve better rankings to generate more profits.

How Long Can You Stay On The Game
Every Company Wants A Share Of The Pie NOW!
Many companies are quickly discovering that there is so much potential to generate profit from the web business. Many are already in the process of getting their sites up on the top positions of the search listing position. It is always easier to secure and mantain your ranking now before the competition gets stiff and it will take you more time and cost you more money to compete with bigger companies. Establish in your presence on the search engines now and get top ranking for your website.