The Web Design Journal

With Google giving more and more attention to video in the search results one can really gain a good deal of traffic by utilizing video search engine optimization. I stress the word “optimized videos” because its not just about uploading videos to YouTube and other sites. Its about making sure that the videos are tagged with the right keywords in the right places for the search engines to pick up.

Here are some tips for optimizing videos on your own site. Take the source video file and infuse it with your keywords; in the Title, Description, and Keywords tags. Make sure your video is the main feature on a page and surround it with relevant text and embedded links. Keeping your video content at one place off the root directory helps in providing easy access to search engine crawlers.

Of course don’t forget to submit your video to RSS and MRSS.

YouTube has recently released a feature that allows you to insert an overlay into your videos. This will really help promote your sites but the biggest breakthrough is that you can embed links in the overlay. These links can be tagged and tracked for ROI purposes. Previously it was super difficult to track ROI and this may be the solution.

Well that is enough for now and you have alot to work on so get to it! Remember that video is getting prominent placement in the search engines and the competition gets harder and harder each day.

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Or did he even ever go anywhere?

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Today I played around with a little site called Pipl.com, its a people search engine.

Pipl.com

But the cool thing about it is that it crawls the “deep Web.” The deep Web basically refers to pages that have no links, in other words the search engines cannot find them or index them. Password protected pages, large hidden databases of content, pages or directories blocked by the robots.txt file.

Now because Pipl does such a deep crawl it unearths what many might consider TOO much information about people. All of your social profiles will show up and of course public deep Web pages. It really is scary, go ahead, try it.

But this whole deep Web thing started to spark my interest, especially when I learned that the deep Web is estimated to be several magnitudes larger than the Web that we all know.

It got me thinking about what Google thinks of this, un-indexed, content. After all their mission is to organize the world’s content. Well guess what just came out not too long ago??? A python script to that allows one to create a full xml sitemap, meaning that it will find and crawly everything on your server. This is great news to many, who used to have problems getting their large sites completely indexed (may people developed their own custom python scripts).

To me, this seems like Google’s attempt at indexing some of the deep Web. Their index should grow substantially with this new sitemap building tool. What do you think? Is this Google simply trying to help webmasters or is it part of a bigger plan to crawl more of the deep Web?

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