People who use YouTube to promote their website (and people who have shunned the idea because so many YouTube videos are shoddy-looking) should take note: YouTube’s upped the limit on file sizes that you can upload.

A post on the YouTube Blog explains the rather big change.  “We’re happy to announce that the size of standard uploads has doubled from 1GB to 2GB.  The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera.”

And if you want to take advantage of these opportunities, the process is easy.

“To share a link to the HD version of your video, simply append &hd=1 to the end of the URL,” the post states.  “To embed the HD version of a video on a website or blog, click the ‘customize’ button to the right of the embed box on the video page.”

Since everything looks more appealing when the clarity increases (think of the VHS to DVD to Blu-ray evolution), this change could have a serious impact on marketing efforts.  Get out a bigger-than-usual camera memory card and see what it can do for you.

Sometimes, official blog posts aren’t all that useful.  They include pieces of advice that feel years old, and steer readers away from tactics that aren’t completely goody-two-shoes.  But lucky for you, Google’s Ricardo Prada broke from the mold in a recent blog post.

Prada, a user experience researcher, shared three tips that relate to his area of expertise.  First, he suggested, “[R]emember that vistors come to your site with specific goals in mind, like reading your essays, or checking out your collection of sports photos.  Write down the top three tasks your users might want to accomplish on your site, and design to make those tasks quick and efficient.”

Then, Prada pointed out, “The most natural place for a user to evaluate an advertisement is after they’ve completed their goals on your site.  Instead of interrupting your user’s main tasks, try to offer ads as potential exit path for users who were probably ready to leave anyway by placing them at the end of completed tasks.”

In the end, Prada fell into one trap and advised not using SEO unless it “makes sense.”  His other two tips should be helpful, however, and lead to happier users and more ad revenue.

Prada also recorded a video if you’d like a little more info.

Facebook has changed the way social networking online allows people to interact and this web 2.0 standard has become a source of meeting new people, sourcing prospects for business and discussing any topic with like-minded people.  Google has been supporting the web 2.0 applications range for some time with its tools.

Google Friend Connect brings the community to your web site by giving a snippet of code that you simply add to your web page. The application shows photos of current people using the API and allows new users to sign up for Google ids. No technical know-how is needed; simply copy and paste the code to the web page.

Take a look at the introductory video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Creating reviews of movies and other products is quite popular. Adding a social network to your web site has never been easier.

The API allows you to gain control over the level of social interaction so only you decide how freely available you and your data will be to the network.  This is great as you can add providers like Twitter to the account and keep track of your social online activities. Your social events can be discussions or anything just like on facebook.  The API allows you to connect with registered and unregistered users and engage all in your activities.

If you have a set of skills such as programming then the API will be of further use to you. Using JavaScript direct API, the tools allows the creation of new add-ons for the API for you to integrate into your site.  The OpenSocial development community is rife with programmers submitting all kinds of extras.

External access also is possible from other very popular social communities such as MySpace and Yahoo Groups.

To demonstrate how easy it to integrate, here’s how I added it to my blogger account, it took just about a minute!

1.    Log into blogger, go to ‘edit posts’ on the blog.
2.    Click on Layout, the Page Elements page is where you add code snippets
3.    Click the ‘Add a Gadget’ link
4.    Select Followers (usually at the top of the list), then name and save it. It will look like this:

All that’s left to do is let your friends or if for business, prospects, know about your blog and ask them to follow you - by clicking the button. This is a great way to add a social network to your discussion or if it’s for business, a great way to establish a strong mailing list.

My recommendation is to place it at the top of your blog or Home Page if possible, make it as easy to access as possible.  Now, you can connect with people like on facebook, and also build a social network that plugs into your site.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, wants to help you make money, and while he’s not sending out cash-filled envelopes, the man is making the process rather easy.  Today, he gave AdSense optimization tips in a short video, and an official blog post put some of the ideas into print.

Here’s what Talia Brodecki, another Googler, summarized as idea number one: “Discover what content and traffic sources keep people coming to your site again and again.”  Because you have to admit that it’s hard to make money off complete strangers.

Then, “Figure out which pages to improve on your site.”  Some pages are stickier than others, and you’ll want to fix the ones that cause the most people to leave.

Finally - at least this for this post - “[f]ind out where AdSense performs best on your site.”  If people can’t get enough of your one random blog post about sock puppets, who are we to argue?  Write some more.  Or shut up about them if no one ever clicks on the accompanying ads.

Since Google tends to offer a lot of tips, some of this advice may sound familiar to you, but hopefully it’ll help as a refresher.  Also, Kaushik’s video represents the first part of a five-week series, so a lot of more advanced pointers may be on the way.

The Googlebot is a pretty smart cookie; considering all of the information that’s available online, it does a fantastic job of sorting things out and returning relevant results.  That said, it can get thrown off by certain behaviors, and if you intend to move a domain name, there’s a new feature that really deserves a second look.

Think of all the stuff that can go wrong when you move in the real world: broken household items, utilities incorrectly getting turned off or on, important pieces of mail making their way back to the sender.  Not all of these have digital equivalents, but there are definite analogies.

So use the Change of Address feature and stop fretting.  A help page explains the basic idea: “you can use the Change of address tool to tell Google about your new URL.  We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL.  Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL.”

This’ll prevent you from losing traffic, and hopefully whatever reason you have for making a move will then be able to help you get more even faster.

One note: for security reasons, you will need both add and verify your old and new sites through Google Webmaster Tools to take advantage of the Change of Address feature.

It’s a big world out there - 200 or so countries, around seven billion people, etc.  And it’s a big Internet, too, as a new report from Verisign attests.

There are a total of about 183 million registered domain names in existence, according to Verisign’s 2009 Domain Name Industry Brief.  As a statement points out, “This represents a three percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 12 percent increase over the same quarter from last year.”  Recession, reschmession, huh?

What’s more, “Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs) rose to 74.1 million domain names during the first quarter, a four percent jump from the previous quarter and an 18 percent increase year over year.”  So nation-specific activity is really picking up.

Anyway, if you’re wanting a more specific breakdown, know that .com remains the most popular top level domain, followed by .cn, .de, .net. org, .uk, .info, .nl, .eu, and .biz.  These 10 account for 64 percent of all registrations.  Plan accordingly if you intend to start any new sites in the near future.

Otherwise, just keep in mind that there are a lot of things out there competing for people’s attention and it’d probably be best to stay on the ball.

Welcome to the beautiful snow capped mountains where you can view blue skies from the lush green landscape below. While you’re at it, click on one of the areas of the pristine wilderness backdrop to learn that, “at just over 2 million acres, this wilderness area is larger than the state of Massachusetts.” Where is this place? It’s one of Bing’s beautiful interfaces, in this case featuring a photo of Denali National Park. Click on the box, and Bing will take you to what Microsoft’s engineers think are the most helpful sites on Denali.

But wait, that was so yesterday. Today, you can visit a unique island inaccessible by car, and without ever getting into a plane! Today, Bing will take you to the Cinque Terre!

Even at first glance, the casual Internet user will realize Bing has something Google doesn’t. Bing’s got bling!

But does Bing’s aesthetic appeal bring enough attention to the site to boost it beyond Google? The next few weeks should be telling, but it’s definitely enough to invite users to hang around a while and scope things out.

Bing’s aesthetic appeal isn’t just limited to the first thing you see. It keeps going and going Check anywhere in the world you want to see, and view images from those areas. Bing even recognizes that you’re looking for a country, presenting not just a random image, but even the country’s map, history, culture, government, and jobs. If you’re not interested, that’s ok. Instead, you can look at the beautiful pictures Bing wants to show you. The same search in Google offers a much less eye-catching find.

Of course, enhanced aesthetics isn’t the only thing Bing claims to offer for beating out Google. Taking Bing’s offered tour shows that they a few more things to share, including major options under travel, shopping, health, local, and “even more!”  Like similar incentives previously offered under Microsoft’s Live Search, Bing also offers Bing cashback. Bing even knows where I live, what restaurants there are and claims to know if I’ll like them or not. Hmm. That’s a lot of intuition for an Internet search engine.

So far, Bing appears to offer a lot of great features. Yet it is still slightly different than Google, and Google has a lot of unique tricks up its sleeve that intensive computer users simply need. And of course, there’s the fact that Firefox and Safari have built-in toolbars. If I’m looking for images, I might be inclined head over to Bing.  But for now, all things considered, I still prefer Google.

If you’re based in America, then the odds are good that most of your efforts up to this point have been focused on appealing to Americans.  That’s fine - there are 300 million of us, after all.  But new info from Hitwise should help you catch the eye of our neighbors to the north, as well.

Heather Hopkins took a look at how Canadians spend their time online.  About 15 percent of it goes to search engines, which should act as a tip that search engine optimization is important as ever.

The next most popular category is that of “Social Networking and Forums,” with a reading of almost 14 percent.  So don’t give up on whatever Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace presences you’ve established.  “Entertainment” is at the same level, too, meaning you might get ahead with Canadians by not focusing exclusively on business items all the time.

Then come “Email Services,” “Business and Finance,” “Adult,” “Portal Homepages,” “Shopping and Classifieds,” “News and Media,” “Lifestyle,” “Education,” “Travel,” “Sports,” “Government,” and “Music.”  Relate them to what you do as best you can.

The Internet is the Internet, after all, and traffic can net you advertisers’ dollars regardless of its origin.  Shipping companies can take packages across borders, too, so there’s little point in ignoring folks outside America even if you sell physical products.

It is happening again this afternoon. Google has another case of the hiccups, so it would seem. This time, it’s just Google News, and at this point, one can only speculate as to why this lone feature is giving the 502 Server Error. Ironically, out of habit, I used Google search to for “google news down.” No surprise, but I didn’t find anything there.

Unlike the previous Google outage, this isn’t going to leave the online community gasping for internet air, but the news has definitely hit the Twitter scene. And others will definitely feel the void. The news of Google News has yet to break over the major online news networks. And you can also guarantee, at least for the moment, that you won’t find this news on Google News.

It seems like the opportunities for individuals to become more familiar with AdSense never cease, and Google has another slew of them around the corner.  A total of four webinars, in fact, are on the way.

You’ll need to move quickly in order to catch the first one.  Tonight, at 6:30 PM PDT, Google employees will talk about “Understanding the payment cycle,” or as a post on the Inside AdSense blog also puts it, “Learn about when and how you can expect to be paid.”  Register here if you feel like making the time.

Then you’ve got a bit of breathing room.  The next webinar isn’t scheduled to take place until 3 PM GMT on Monday, May 26th.  It’ll cover “Using Custom Search Engine with AdSense,” and should allow you to “[f]ind out how your users and your revenue can benefit from Custom Search engine with AdSense for search.”

After that is “Channel and advanced reporting” on Thursday, June 4th at 6:30 PM PDT, and finally (at least for now), there’s a “Fundamentals of optimization” session scheduled for 6:30 PM GMT on Wednesday, June 10th.

In case anyone noticed, yes, Google did decide to alternate between time zones while providing its webinar schedule, and no, we don’t have a clue why.  Happy AdSense use, in any event.