Searchlight

Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to "Pro" accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.

Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, "If you're a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream...90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit...you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of 'long photos,' of capturing slices of life to share."

The philosophy is decidedly different than that of YouTube, and most likely the intention is not only to control size, but also subject matter; it is positioned to be member video and not the more wide-reaching (and copyright-challenged) posts of YouTube.

Videos can be uploaded and organized in much the same way as photos. They can be organized alongside photos in Sets and Collections or separately. An initial test of posting video shows that, like photos, links embedded in descriptions are nofollowed, but links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them and pass on PageRank.

A footnote: slipped in at the end of the video announcement is a second announcement that Flickr is doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded to 20MB per photo for pro accounts and 10MB per photo for free accounts.

So, the other day I posted about how you can fit LinkedIn into your SEO and Web marketing mix through optimizing the links within your profile as well as linking back to your public LinkedIn profile, participating on LinkedIn Answers, and optimizing member profiles. Of course LinkedIn is built around individual members, so business interaction is very individual to individual ... there's something kind of nice about this, more personal feel.

Conceptual LinkedIn Company Pages.

It's interesting how aspects of our lives come into play. Prior to joining this Web revolution, or evolution, depending on your point of view, I worked in the world of consumer packaged goods. I developed and managed some of the office products that most of you probably use everyday. I became fairly familiar with even more products that I didn't manage, but was naturally exposed to. One of these was the Rolodex brand card file products after that parent company was acquired.

Even though I didn't manage the product line, there was always something intriguing about the products. In this highly electronic world we live in, business cards continue to change hands every day. At some point or another, I'd guess that nearly every TV sitcom has someone pulling a card or looking up contact information from a card file; or at the very least, one is seen prominently on someone's desk. It just lends credibility and is something we've grown to expect.

By no means do I see business cards disappearing anytime soon--so pull those boxes back out of the trash. But, keep in mind that even business cards can only take you so far. Beyond business cards, everyone (and every business) should make sure that they are adding LinkedIn.com to their marketing mix.

While there are a number of services that can help keep you up to date with your contacts--probably better actually--the mix of features as well as the huge and continued adoption of LinkedIn by professionals makes it a worthwhile Web marketing venue.

So how can LinkedIn fit into your SEO and Web marketing mix? Here are three key areas to focus on.

Links & Linking

Every LinkedIn profile is able to add three links to other sites. These could be anything--perhaps to your company home page or to your blog. What many may not realize is that these links are live, direct, and not "nofollowed" on the public profile page...which is the page that is openly available to search engine spiders.

Rather than using the default choices that LinkedIn provides when adding links though, select "Other:" to add relevant anchor text to your links. Of course, you also need to make sure that your public profile is set to actually show these links within the Web site section of your profile. Since these public pages are accessible to search engine spiders, they'll also pass PageRank and contribute to overall link popularity.

Now that you've added links, be sure to link to your public profile URL from other sites when appropriate. This way you'll drive a little traffic to the profile, and depending on the link, also flow a little PageRank through the profile page to your chosen Web site or sites.

Answers

SEO of course has a strong focus on-site and in regard to search engine spiders. But SEO is also part of the much bigger picture of search engine marketing (SEM). This becomes especially clear when looking at the social media arena. And no where is this more evident than in the LinkedIn Answers section.

The Answers section provides members a forum for asking as well as answering questions posed by other members. While search engine spiders may index and even return these pages, more importantly, these pages are seen everyday by real live human beings who may well be potential customers. Participating within the Answers section is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership within your industry, draw additional attention to your Web site (since you did of course add a link to it from your profile as discussed above), network, and further build your brand image.

Optimization

Did I mention that your public profile may be seen, indexed and more importantly, returned within search results? What this means is that you have one more opportunity to rank, and not only rank, but rank via content that you control. LinkedIn is a great reminder that optimization is mostly focused on-site, but we should never lose sight of opportunities to optimize content we can control, residing on sites that may lead visitors to our site. And actually, LinkedIn may provide even more than one opportunity to rank since every employee's profile within a company may be one more potential search result.

Now this isn't a license to spam your LinkedIn profile. What it does mean is that it may be beneficial to give a little more attention to the summary information that you provide. Write it intelligently but also incorporating strong keyword-rich signals that are related to your brand, industry and Web site that you wish to be found for.

Best of all, even if LinkedIn decides to "nofollow" all links within profiles, or even block search engines from indexing member profiles, LinkedIn will still serve as an online marketing and networking channel to connect you and your business with potential clients and customers, which in the end, is what SEO is really all about.

But as I said earlier, don't go throwing out your business cards, or your card files. Who knows though, maybe in the future, business cards will look a little differently than they do today, and perhaps something more like this:

Brian R. Brown
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrbrown

Certainly allows for plenty of white space.

In the process of reviewing a client's Flickr account with my colleague and fellow Searchlight blogger Brian Brown, we noticed that Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to links placed within its Web site. Flickr has been one of the few social-media entities to continue to offer "link juice" from links placed with user-generated content (in this case photo descriptions), making it a viable entity for improving inbound links to a given site.

While it's understandable that Flickr implemented nofollow tags for the exact same reason other social-media sites have--misuse and spamming--it nonetheless marks another step toward the end of major social-media sites passing on PageRank.

It's not all bad news with Flickr, though...at least not so far. The nofollow tags have not been implemented throughout the whole site. While links embedded in individual photo descriptions are nofollowed, so far, links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them. Will this change? Only time will tell. SEOers everywhere are certainly hoping not.

It may be a toss up today whether the talk around the office will be more about the game (way to go Giants) or about the commercials. The commercials of course are a big draw for many and at least an entertaining bonus for others. Big name companies employ big name ad firms to come up with something that will hopefully be extraordinary and memorable. And at $2.7 million for 30 seconds, getting the most bang for the buck should be a no-brainer.

But unlike some of the popular TV shows, if the Super Bowl ads are any indication, it appears that many big companies and ad firms just don't get it and continue to deliver "Ads 1.0." Perhaps it is the big brand mentality that we so often see when dealing with the Web, but I'm not even talking about full-blown social media campaigns here--how about just getting the URL up on the screen.

After re-watching the commercials from the game over at MySpace, I saw that more commercials had URLs shown than I remembered. But the fact that it took another viewing and perhaps a freeze frame of the video to catch it is very telling. What's more amazing is that many of these advertisers spend huge amounts year-round on brand advertising--just building up impressions, maintaining that top-of-mind presence of keeping the brand out in front of people. This type of advertising should be all about capitalizing on building that connection with the audience, and what better way to do that than to get them to the Web site.

Never mind whether the commercial is a hit or a dud, it is still an impression, and the last thing I'd want to leave the viewer with would be how to see more about the company or the product. A number of the ads didn't feature a URL at all, and for many that did, it was so insignificant to even matter (especially when these end up in small video windows online). Only a handful of the ads made sure that the last few seconds of the precious 30 left the viewer with a clearly readable and hopefully memorable URL.

Thankfully though, not all of the companies missed the mark. There were a couple standouts that do get it, like Tide, with MyTalkingStain.com, and SoBe Life Water, with Thrillicious.com. They developed sites around the commercials to continue the conversation after the season wraps up. With some online interactivity, these are great examples of making the most of traditional advertising in a Web world. Hopefully if or when these standalone sites are decommissioned, they'll also be savvy enough to put 301 permanent redirects in place to capture continued traffic, PageRank, and link love.

The good news is that there is a year before the next Super Bowl for the company and ad execs to start thinking about how they can get more value out of the big game. Here's a little food for thought:

• Get your URL up in the last 5 to 10 seconds and make it big and easy to read, not just on the big screen, but for when they make their way to online.
• Put commercial outtakes or bloopers up on the site.
• Get the commercial out on YouTube or other video sites as soon as it airs.
• Give people a reason to stay on the site--coupons, games, tips.
• Give people a way to interact--put together a blog and have a number of posts ready to launch out of the gate and allow visitors to comment and discuss the ad.
• Look to other social media venues to round out the campaign--MySpace, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc.

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg, but at this rate, better to aim at crawling before we worry about running.

Social media has certainly come into its own over the last year. Whether you log more hours online than you do sleeping or are the type that only turns your computer on every couple of days — gasp — there is a good chance that you have some familiarity with social media, even if you didn't know that's what it was.

Maybe you get a chuckle every now and then from a video on YouTube, upload photos to Flickr for friends and family to see, ask and answer questions on Yahoo Answers, do a little networking and reconnecting with old classmates and work colleagues on LinkedIn, keep track of popular news on Reddit, jot notes on your mates' walls in Facebook, or have carved out your own little corner of the web with a MySpace page. If you have a username and login at even half of those sites, then you know all to well the impact of social media. And for many, that list is but a mere sampling of their social circle.

But what happens when social media collides with daily life? Good, bad, or otherwise, most of us live extremely busy lives. We've found that all of the great tools that have been developed to simplify our lives and allow us more time, often just allow us to do more with the time we have. Is that a bad thing? After all, it is our life and if we are doing the things we want to do and that are important to us, wasn't that the ultimate goal to begin with? If you are expecting answers to those questions, sorry, they aren't coming.

The problem, or at least the challenge, with social media for individuals is simply one of mass. There is only so much time during the day and night that any one of us can put toward the social media venues. At some point, most of us will probably gravitate to a few key sites. Will this gravitation be a slow fade, or cold turkey? Will it be individually, or a revolt of mass proportions? Only time will tell of course.

But hold that thought. The story for businesses is a little different. Social media provides a powerful channel to reach out and interact with the community. While things in business rarely come without a cost, social media can be an extremely cost effective extension of nearly everything a company does. Even as social venues shift in popularity or come and go, businesses can introduce themselves and interact with those who share the same interests. As marketing channels go, the ability to connect with highly targeted, highly interested individuals at a personal level, is pretty hard to beat.

So while the future and popularity of individual social media venues may as yet be undetermined, and individual users' levels of interaction may vary, social media is here to stay. There's so much more that could be said, but I have to go check my Facebook page.

Along with being entertained, what can we learn from them?

Over the years, and long before the Web entered into the mix, people have become very attached to their programs. While the networks may, and perhaps still do, have some trepidation about copyright issues and online file sharing, they've also realized that the Web gives them even more opportunities to get in front of their audiences.

The networks and shows aren't limited to the 30 or 60 minutes a week any more. The Web provides a 24-7 connection, and thanks to mobile access, nearly unlimited potential. But just like any other business, success on the Web isn't guaranteed. Let's take a look at three examples across the three major broadcast networks.

With the recent admission by Matt Cutts to Stephan Spencer that Google is using Adobe Systems' Search Engine SDK technology, a new set of optimization opportunities opened up.

That fairly definite confirmation of how Google reads text within Flash files makes it possible to create Flash .swf files with some level of search engine optimization.

"It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe Macromedia offers," Cutts said. "So my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text."

This has long been the suspicion of Flash developers and SEO professionals concerned with .swf files, but to my knowledge, this is the most direct and clear confirmation to date. The implication is simple but important: if Web developers--and specifically Flash developers--have the ability to test .swf files during development for textual SEO parameters, then Flash files can be designed to offer specific text to search engines.

While the concept is simple, the practice may not be. Flash is a complicated multimedia program with tremendous flexibility and many layers of content. Also, parent Flash .swf files can load secondary, child .swf files ad nuaseum, and this is a very popular, load time-friendly technique. The path between viable textual content and the "front" of a given Flash presentation can be very intricate.

There have been tests measuring what sort of text can be discovered by the Search Engine SDK program, much of it dealing with where in a Flash movie it resides, when the text crosses the stage, and what sort of text is most likely to be read. While there may never be absolute rules for optimizing text within a Flash file, now that it is known with fair certainty how Google reads Flash text, more testing is in order.

Well-designed Flash content can be a fantastic user experience. Google may not be pursuing this content, but it certainly has opened the door to the possibility. The ball is in Adobe's court to continue to develop and improve the SDK tool, but this is a great opportunity for Flash designers interested in SEO or for search engine optimizers interested in Flash.

Despite the shortcomings of the current Search Engine SDK software, (it would be nice to see an update, Adobe!), it is quite likely that SEO standards can be developed for dealing with Flash text so that Flash files can "tell" search engines about their content with more clarity.

There is still time to capture search traffic, even though the holiday season is half over. Here are some great tips that will give you a quick impact to encourage more shoppers to visit your site.

• Add a few keyword-rich links to your home page: In P.J. Fusco's article "Holiday Shopping: Wrap it Up," she had talked about how you shouldn't "trash the current navigation structure, rather embellish it with a few additional links containing well-targeted, keyword-rich anchor text. Doing so helps create one- or two-click shortcuts that efficiently channel search-referred visitors to all your great gifts and goodies." Did you remember to add one or two highly visible links on your site, directing traffic to your holiday specials?
• Revise your meta descriptions for the holidays: Are you promoting a holiday sale or specific items on your site? If so, don't forget to polish your meta descriptions so that searchers will recognize the keywords they're looking for. Last-minute holiday shoppers will be attracted to descriptions that speak to them, so remember to mention seasonal search phrases to encourage them to click through to your site. After you do this, make sure to make a list of the pages you affected so you can change them back after your New Year's Day sale.
• Be social: In my post "Last-minute tips for retailers for the holiday shopping season," one of the tips I had mentioned related to social media. The great news is that it is not too late to get out there, create viral content, and build your network of friends. Whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, etc., it can be as easy as giving a killer list of gift suggestions on UnSpun or Sk*rt. For example, the Great Gifts for Teenagers list was featured on the UnSpun home page recently. Note that with UnSpun, Amazon.com "employs" (probably through Mechanical Turk) an army of folks to spam the heck out of your list with Amazon products; it tends to happen a few days after you create the new list.

Well, there you have it. Just a few tips and friendly reminders that you can still ensure your holiday season is an SEO success.