Robert Moorman is a Video Strategist at Hunting With Pixels, a company that specializes in strategic social video campaigns. Robert has over 20 years of experience working as a video producer for media organisations like Fremantle Media and MTV in the UK, Australia and Europe.

Content is king but distribution is queen, says Robert. Content is now about ideas, not tech. For example, 8 year olds who use iPads don’t need to know interface design in order to use it. Video content must be engaging, authentic, simple and memorable.

Robert kicked off showing a corporate video that emphasizes the relationships formed by a business rather than the product they sell.

Video Content Optimization

There are a couple of major things to remember when optimizing your video content, says Robert:

• Highlight your branding early so people associate it with the visual message.
• Include your call to action early, in case people don’t view the entire video.
• Don’t forget audio quality. Poor audio will automatically reflect poorly on your brand. TEST it!
• Short videos generally perform better. If possible, keep your videos to 2-3 minutes.
• Use graphics and captions in your videos to highlight key points.
• Be engaging and relevant.

Robert then showed a Nintendo 3DS promotional video that acknowledges the audience is smart. Clever approach, it worked well with the target market and had a viral impact because it was funny.

Video Distribution Channels

There are quite a few video distribution channels available – YouTube is not everything. So here are the options:

• YouTube – the obvious choice.
• Vimeo Pro – is an excellent HD quality hosting option.
• Vid.ly - is great for video transcoding and checking if your video is viewable on multiple platforms.

Video Content Syndication Tips

• Get your videos embedded by others. If you haven’t already read it, read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It will give you some ideas for how to make your videos memorable and sharable.
• Make sure your videos are fully searchable. Fill out all the fields when uploading them to YouTube and other content placeholders. Put the http URL in the video title and/or video description so it becomes a clickable link.
• Use playlists to your advantage.
• When viewing YouTube, choose the right thumbnail, do keyword research to find popular related keywords.
• Turn on transcription / subtitles when uploading your videos to create an automatic text version of your content.
• Context matters – be wary of where your vid appears.
• Use seeding and video advertising platforms – eg. TubeMogul or YouTube advertising to auto distribute your video content via similar content.

Video Marketing Tips

• Be sharable – use video plugins that make it easy.
• Be easy to use.
• Make your video content easily navigable.
• Don’t use shortcuts – quality is key with video content.
• Use YouTube analytics to keep up with viewer statistics and tweak your videos based on viewer activity.
• If you need to create a video-based site, try Vidcaster – instant micro websites made for videos.
• For tips on how to SEO your videos, read Reelseo.com regularly.

Robert then talked about a new marketing trend – interactive video content. He showed the Choose a Different Ending video that paused and gave viewers two storyline options to choose from eg. “take the knife”, or “don’t take the knife”, like the alternative ending books you used to read as a kid. Ultimately, you choose whether to live or die. The video was created by DropTheWeapons.org as an awareness tool to break the circle of youth violence and weapons crime.

Robert then showed a video that was a Flash video that entirely mimicked a YouTube page – A Hunter Shoots a Bear – with the word *shoots* able to be replaced by user chosen via keyboard [fun tip - type in *dances with*]. It was a clever ad for Tipp-Ex correction fluid. Apparently they shot over 100 different keyword scenarios. Robert showed another where the company had created an entire website just using video.

In summary, video marketing doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Just give it a go. Look into buying a mid range video camera, a cheapish background screen and a spotlight in order to DIY videos for your site. You can get an entire package for under $1,200.

Brivin Corp is currently seeking an SEO Consultant to join their SEO Team in Miami, FL: If you have a thorough knowledge of SEO, are a self-starter and goal oriented — then you are their ideal candidate.

The SEO Consultant’s responsibility will be to assist in the structure of the SEO architecture of their new websites alongside their SEO team.

Required Qualifications:

• Must have a genuine passion for SEO and stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends by studying, understanding, and implementing ethical tactics and techniques;
• Excellent writing and grammatical skills;
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills required;
• Knowledge of Site Taxonomy;
• Web Analytic Tools (GWT and GA – segmentation, filtering, reports );

Primary responsibilities are not limited to:

• Review of their site content and structure.
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript.
• Content development.
• Management of online business development campaigns.
• Keyword research.
• SEO training.
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Welcomed Qualifications (not a requirement):

• An overall knowledge in programming technologies such as PHP, HTML / CSS, Javascript also MySQL database is a huge plus but not a requirement;
• Knowledge on the most popular CMS’ like: WordPress, Magento, Drupal or Joomla;

Besides these features, their new SEO Consultant should be able to hire and manage other service providers in order to get support in his/her daily tasks of SEO.

This full/part time job is open for anyone in the United States or abroad. If you live in the South Florida area near Miami, consider a live interview and an onsite position. If you are not in the area then you will be interviewed through a video conference on Skype during their office hours which are 08:00 a.m. to 06:00 p.m. EST. If offered the position, you will telecommute with them by working virtually.

All interested candidates looking to fill the SEO Consultant Job vacancy should send their most recent resume along with a cover letter, relevant portfolio, and referrals.

Salary: Unknown
Closing date: Unknown
More info from: Brivin Corp Careers
Contact: Send resumes via online form: Brivin Corp – SEO Consultant – Apply Now

For more search industry jobs, or to post a vacancy, visit Search Engine College Jobs Board.

Anne Kennedy has co-authored the first book on international SEO and PPC, called Global Search Engine Marketing. Anne provides search engine consulting to hundreds of companies worldwide and formed an international online marketing consortium with Nordic eMarketing in Reykjavik, London, Stockholm, Rome and Beijing.

Duplicate content happens, says Anne. URL duplication is a big one. This is where you see several different versions of the same page being indexed and/or linked to. For example:

- http://www.site.com
- http://site.com
- http://www.site.com/index.shtml
- http://iste.com/index.shtml

and so on.

You should always use the Rel=canonical tag to lose the canonical versions of pages and also let Google know in Webmaster Tools which version of your pages to index.

Anne says to watch your crawl budget. Your crawl budget is the percentage of your site that Googlebot will crawl. Googlebot rarely crawls your entire site, so keep your low quality pages out of the index by excluding them from your sitemap and blocking them using robots.txt.

Common Duplication Causes

A very common duplicate content mistake is to have printer-friendly versions of your content. Whatever you do, lose the print friendly versions from your sitemap!

Use 301 redirects on your pages, but only when necessary because not all link value will transfer to your replacement pages. PageRank will not transfer 100 percent over to pages if you 301 redirect them – keep that in mind.

Think about using a separate XML feed for your product pages, says Anne. Separate out your e-commerce or product-specific pages from your main sitemap and create a sitemap just for them. Upload the two sitemaps separately in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Content syndication and site scraping can cause duplicate content headaches. If you are an article syndicator or blogger, make sure you link back to the original article with the title in the anchor text within the article, not the footer, because some syndications sites strip links out of footers. Require syndicators to use the canonical url version or require a no index (exclusion) of the article link in their robots.txt. This will ensure Google finds the original article more easily.

Another trick is to give syndicators a logo or image to go with the article that contains a link to your article and article title in the alt tag of the logo/image. Syndicators will often miss those.

Be sure to update your XML sitemap immediately whenever you publish a new article or blog post – you can use WordPress plugins to update your sitemap automatically for this.

If your article is out of date or no longer accurate and you want it gone from the SERPs for good, use a 410 code to tell Google the article is GONE. This is a more permanent solution than 404.

Dont put your international content on your English TLD. If you want your content to rank well in a particular international market, you should put the content on a related TLD e.g. a German language site should site on site.de or at the very least, de.site.com. Your international content will rank better in regional markets if you have links pointing to it from related TLDs e.g. site.de will rank better in Google.de if it has plenty of .de sites linking to it.

And finally – dont leave it up to the bots! Take control of your content.

Stephan Spencer is the author of two books: Google Power Search and The Art of SEO. He is also the founder of search marketing firm Netconcepts.

Stephan starts by talking about Google’s Penguin algorithm update released on 24 April. A lot of people were hurt by the algo change which impacts 3.1% of searches. Stephan says, if you haven’t already done so, remove any dodgy SEO tactics NOW. Google is keeping a rap sheet on you – too many infractions and you could get hit.

The algorithm is basically about killing old dodgy SEO – nothing new. Lots of customers are receiving warnings in their Webmaster Tools console about spam signals such as link networks. Google Search + Your World is becoming more important now and they are trying to clean up the SERPs to display more of this social content and improve user experience.

Stephan says to give your content a better chance of being shown in SERPs, make sure your content is above the fold. Google is now distinguishing pages that have ads above the fold and filtering them out. Google is also giving more relevance weight to fresh content, so make sure you blog, post or update regularly.

A leaked copy of the Google’s Quality Raters Handbook 2011 edition shows that user intent, malware, oudated or shallow content can impact your site ranking. Sites with lots of ads can be impacted. Keyword stuffed URLs can signal spam. Google’s Panda update was about low quality pages, but Penguin is about spam. Keep in mind that Panda impacts whole sites rather than individual pages.

You should also look at the number of clicks it takes to reach each page on your site. Make quality content easier to find. Something not widely realized is that Google Instant can interfere with your URLs if you use URL parameters. One tip, says Stephan, is to use position tracking in the SERPs to determine your site’s *actual* position and then find vulnerable ranking pages above you that wouldn’t take much SEO in order to overtake them.

Keep in mind that you need to be logged in to Adwords to see historical keyword trending. You won’t see historical data if you use the Google Keywords tool without logging in, says Stephan. Also – very important – make sure you only ever research your search terms using [exact match] in the Google keywords tool, otherwise data will be skewed and inaccurate.

When it comes to SEO for videos, track your YouTube rankings using the Online Video Optimization Tracker Voot.net. It’s currently in BETA but you can request an invitation. Another tip for video optimization is to optimize your YouTube video thumbnail rather than SERP position.

You can follow Stephan on Twitter via @sspencer.

Sorry I haven’t been updating the blog daily lately, but I’ve been traveling, amongst other things. Last week I attended the Search Marketing Expo / Online Marketer Conference held in Sydney from 1-2 May 2012.

I’ve attended nearly every SMX event held in Australia and although I enjoy them immensely, I rarely learn anything new. It’s a credit to the organizers that this year, I came away with an enormous amount of exciting, cutting edge industry information, helpful new tools to play with and the inspiration to take Search Engine College in a new direction.

I have been positively itching to apply some of these new ideas into my own business, but first, I thought I’d share with you some of the inspiring presentations I witnessed at the conference. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post summaries of the best speakers and notes and ideas I jotted down during their sessions. Where allowed, I’ll post a link to their slide decks as well, so you can absorb a bit more detail that I may have missed (we had some fast talkers this year!).

Feel free to comment on any of the posts – I’d be interested to hear how the rest of you interpret the sessions as well.

About the Parenting Research Centre

The Parenting Research Centre is Australia’s only independent not-for-profit parenting research and development centre dedicated to helping all parents raise happy, healthy children.

The Centre believes that parenting is the critical factor in a child’s development and quality of life and that the science of parenting can make a difference in the everyday lives of families and communities. Since 1997, the Parenting Research Centre has conducted research and developed evidence based parenting support programs.

About the Raising Children Network (RCN)

raisingchildren.net.au is the Australian parenting information website for early childhood. It covers all the basics about raising children from birth to eight, providing a comprehensive online child health and support resource for parents and professionals. It was commissioned by the Australian government.

About the Opportunity

The Parenting Research Centre (PRC) is offering an exciting opportunity for a creative Managing Editor to join its enthusiastic team located in Sydney or Melbourne.

In this role you will be responsible for the ongoing development and publication of new content and user engagement features on the Award-winning parenting website, raisingchildren.net.au.

This is a 12 month fixed term contract position.

About the Benefits

This is a fantastic opportunity to make your mark with an Award-winning website focused on helping parents!

In return for your hard work and dedication, you will receive an attractive remuneration circa $74,787 – $84,225 plus super, commensurate with your skills and experience.

The Parenting Research Centre is committed to supporting its employees achieve a positive work/life balance, with 5 weeks leave each year as well as the capacity to ‘buy’ additional leave.

You will also have great opportunities for professional development and career pathways as you work within a friendly and supportive team.

In addition, the following fantastic range of benefits is also available:

• Free on site flu vaccinations and health checks;
• Garaged bike racks;
• A public transport travel scheme; and
• A reward and recognition program.

Best of all, you will gain tremendous satisfaction in this rewarding role that allows you to have direct impact on the future growth of this invaluable organisation.

If you’re ready to take the all important next step in your career – Apply Now!

For more information, or to apply online, please visit: http://parentingrc.applynow.net.au

Salary range: Unknown
Closing date: Unknown
More info about company from: http://www.raisingchildren.net.au
Contact: Send resumes via online form: http://parentingrc.applynow.net.au

For more search industry job vacancies, or to post a vacancy, visit Search Engine College Jobs Board.

Switched on Media is looking for a full time candidate with a passion in online marketing who wants a career in a fast growing digital marketing agency. You will have a unique opportunity to bring their clients to life in search and social media spaces.

You will undertake all technical aspects of a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns to maximise search engine visibility for a wide portfolio of blue-chip clients.

While this is primarily a technical role requiring a high level of technical ability, such as understanding content management systems and web build experience, you will be an integral part of a professional marketing team; communicating bespoke SEO strategies and solutions to both internal departments and external clients.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for carrying out a wide range of SEO tactics, such as technical optimisation, and link development. Regular support will be offered to internal departments and clients on fast developing ideas and research that has been investigated to meet client’s objectives and outperform your client’s competitors.

You will monitor, track and report on search metrics to determine market trends and customer search behaviour, both on a client’s website and through the search engines, resulting in an in-depth understanding of the client’s industry and target customer that can be fed back to copywriters, webmasters, or paid search departments to maximise the client’s campaign results.

Your regular day-to-day tasks will include pre-ordained deliverables to the clients, ad-hoc support, such as setting up new campaigns, reactions to changes in the search landscape and technical problems within the client’s websites.

You will also have the pleasure to work with some of the greatest minds in online marketing to create and share strategies and tactics on how paid search, social media services, web development and usability can work together to deliver an integrated campaign across all forms of online media.

Scope of Natural Search Analyst Role

Provide consultancy to clients on all aspects of SEO including:

• Keyword research using a suite of tools
• Comprehensively research and analyse competitor sites and search results pages
• Produce and implement back link strategies through email, telephone and face-to-face discussions with 3rd party web site owners

Production of change requests for a variety of changes including:

• Internal link optimisation
• SEO technical analysis and evaluation
• Website architecture problems
• HTML and CMS optimisation
• Analyse campaign performance and report back with insightful recommendations
• Understand issues surrounding user experience, accessibility and information architecture
• Keep up to date with the latest industry developments

Person Specification

Part of what makes Switched on Media successful is the highly motivated people who work there, and their enthusiasm for online marketing. They recruit individuals who possess honesty and integrity, and who display great initiative with a desire to be different through creativity and analytical approach to problem solving – a person that places the client at the centre of everything they do, and someone who inspires colleagues through their adaptable approach with lateral thinking complimenting their motivated and positive attitude to online marketing. You’ll have passion for your job that will be reflected in the work you deliver and regular deadlines that you meet.

Key Skills You will possess:

• A keen interest in online and web marketing
• A good knowledge of business, including your clients markets and audience
• An understanding of what differentiates Strategy from Tactics
• Understanding of how search engines and websites work
• Analytical, logic and mathematical skills
• Great interpersonal and communication skills
• Ability to prioritise conflicting workloads and consistently hit targets
• A positive attitude to dealing with people
• Ability to work independently and as part of the project team to strict deadlines
• Capability to work hands-on to solve problems, with ability to generate ideas and solutions
• Strong listening and questioning skills

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

• A degree (or equivalent qualification) in computing, business, marketing, communications or related subjects.
• 1+ year’s previous SEO experience – Ad agency or online marketing background a plus
• Demonstrable experience of working within a web development environment
• Website Build & Web Administration – HTML, XML, JavaScript, RSS, W3C, DDA, server maintenance, knowledge of analytics packages and internet protocols
• Appreciation of Content management Systems (CMS) and dynamic URLs
• Demonstrate a proactive work ethic when managing numerous competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Proven ability to accommodate evolving responsibilities and last minute changes.

About

Switched On Media is a search marketing and social media agency that unites the best talent from across the industry to deliver business changing results for their clients. They aim to use the latest approaches to deliver their clients value through three key channels; search engine optimisation, pay per click and social media. Interested in working on blue-chip household brands? Maybe you prefer more innovative businesses? Either way, you’re in luck as they work across a broad spectrum of businesses enabling you diversified experiences and to have something to help explain what you do at the next BBQ.

Contact the team at Switched and apply today:

Scot Ennis: 02 8248 5054
Scot[at]switchedonmedia.com.au

Applicants must be eligible to work in Australia

Salary range: $35,000 – $50,000 package (base plus super), negotiable within range pending candidate.
Closing date: Unknown
More info from: www.switchedonmedia.com.au
Contact: Send resumes to: Scot[at]switchedonmedia.com.au

For more search industry jobs or to post a vacancy, visit Search Engine College Jobs Board.

“In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.”

So what constitutes a violation of Google guidelines? While deliberately avoiding being specific, Google has highlighted these tactics as problematic and likely to be targeted:

Unlike Panda, this algorithmic update has no cutesy name, simply the *webspam algorithm update* according to Search Engine Land.

As much as this update is a slap on the wrist for aggressive search engine optimizers, Google were very careful to endorse the methodology of so-called *white hat* search engine optimizers in their announcement and isolate those “acceptable” tactics from the tactics they will be punishing with this update:

“We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.”

It’s interesting to see them so eager to support the SEO industry but probably a sign that they’re expecting webmasters to be confused by the changes and the possibility that they might accidently over-optimize their sites.

The algorithm change has already started to roll out and Google claims it will affect approximately 3 percent of search queries.

UPDATE 27 April 2012: You know how I said above that the new algorithm revision doesn’t have a cutesy name? Scrap that. Google has now decided to call it *Penguin*

The College reached the 54 country milestone this week when a new student from Scotland enrolled online.

Since its inception in 2004, Search Engine College has set new industry standards for education and training in the field of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing and we are very proud to have produced over 1,500 happy graduates.

Here’s a list of countries where we have enrolled students to date:

Argentina
Australia
Austria
Barbados
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
China
Croatia
Czech Republic
Dominican Republic
England (UK)
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Iceland
India
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jordan
Kuwait
Latvia
Malaysia
Malta
Mauritius
Mexico
Montenegro
New Zealand
Norway
Pakistan
Philippines
Portugal
Romania
Russian Federation
Scotland (UK)
Singapore
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Thailand
The Netherlands
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkey
United Arab Emirates
Ukraine
Uraguay
USA
Vietnam
West Africa

I wonder which country will be next?

——————-

Like to learn more about SEO? Download a free SEO lesson. No catch!

Here’s the deal: Starting next month, Google is changing the way match types work in AdWords. From mid May onwards, misspellings, plurals and variations of your Exact Match and Phrase Match keywords on Google AdWords will trigger your ads. In the past, if you wanted your ad to appear for variations, abbreviations or misspellings, you would use Broad Match targeting. If you wanted your ad to appear for plurals or word stemming, you would use “Phrase Match” targeting. If you wanted your ad to appear only when searchers typed in a specific phrase/keyword, you used [Exact Match]. Now, by default, using Exact Match or Phrase Match targeting will ALSO trigger your ads for each of the described variations.

Despite Google calling this change *an improvement*, for all intents and purposes, this means Exact Match is dead. Yes, advertisers can opt-out of this so-called feature, but it is switched on by default, which means that new advertisers selecting Exact Match as a match type will wrongly assume their ads will only be triggered by exact matches of their keywords. It’s a pretty logical assumption! I don’t know about you, but I think that Exact Match should remain, you know, an EXACT MATCH. At the very least, they should change the match type to IN-exact Match so it is less misleading.

According to Search Engine Land, Google has already been testing the new functionality with advertisers and claims the change has resulted in a 3 percent rise in clicks, at comparable CPCs. In the same sentence, Google states that individual results will vary. No freaking kidding. Variations can account for a LOT of searches and for advertisers on a tight budget, this could spell disaster. Here’s an example: if you are an artist selling color prints of your artwork and targeting [color prints] as an exact or phrase match, would you want your ad to be triggered if someone types in *color printers*? No. But it seems this is a distinct possibility under the new rules.

With this move, it feels like Google is taking away some of the minimal control advertisers have over how/when their ads appear in their increasingly annoying quest to make more money for shareholders. I say hands off our Exact Match Google!

What do you think? Do you feel like the changes are reducing the control you have over your campaigns? Please add to the discussion in the comments.