Well, social media involves the exact same people that read and react to things like Howard Stern.  So really it’s a perfect storm of coverage.

Here’s what happened – on his Sirius program, Stern did a really funny bit about how lame Social Media is.  He talks about Myspace and Facebook being for 15 year olds or losers without jobs.  Artie Lange and Robin both chime in as they all collectively agree that blogging and social media is a gross waste of time.

Ultimately, they begin making fun of one of their staffers when they discover he has a blog.

It is normal Stern affair with plenty of laughs.  Check it out for yourself here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plF71s7SPEQ

I’m a social media dude (clearly), but I’m also a Stern fan; therefore, I have no problem laughing at myself and acknowledging that Stern has a point – blogging CAN be a gigantic vacuum of time and resources.  Unfortunately, Stern also showed a little bit of angst and fear about a medium he doesn’t cotton to.

In response to Stern’s Radio ramblings, social media exponent Gary Vaynerchuk posted a reaction video on his website GaryVaynerchuk.com, here – http://garyvaynerchuk.com/2008/11/06/a-reaction-to-howard-sterns-thought-on-social-networks-social-media-and-blogs/

Gary talks a lot about Stern being stuck in his old-world media and points out a fairly clear hypocrisy – Stern mocks people for talking about the minutia of their every day lives, and yet, that is exactly what Stern did to become famous.

So why would Stern attack blogging and social media?  Plenty of possible theories, but Gary suggests its a clever means of suppressing the competition.  The longer old-world radio is popular, the longer Stern will be on top.  With the internet, there isn’t just some competition growing…there is a tidal wave.

Plenty of social media is lame, but there is nothing fleeting or insubstantial about vast online communities.  This is something that will only grow in strength and popularity, and I’ll be interested to see if people like Howard Stern will be throwing tweets out there before too long.

The strip, found here, suggests that if youtube commenters were to hear what they typed before they actually submitted it, they would be shocked by their own lack intelligence.  To that end, the strip recommends youtube install an audio preview function to be activated before every comment submission.

By the grace of some higher power, this prayer was answered and youtube actually installed a similar button in its comment forms.  You can navigate to youtube, but it basically looks like this:

Youtube Audio Preview

It’s not mandatory as the comic strip suggests, but it’s close enough.  What a great case of art inspiring technology!  Even the people at youtube realize that youtube commenters are the absolute worst, and this audio preview is definitely something they would like to put in place permanently.

For now, I’m sure it’s just a joke inspired by a funny comic strip.  But you certainly wouldn’t hear me complain if they kept it there permanently.

Subscribers to either didn’t notice any problems.  The feeds kept pulling properly.  Aggregator sites, however, ran into a complete brick wall.  Every single one encountered a pulling error and none of my articles were showing up (not even old ones).  What a mess!

The first thing I tried to do was narrow down the problem.  In order to do that, I used FeedBurner’s very valuable Feed Validation Tool.  To use the validator, simply type in the url of your desired feed and let it process the code.  After it’s finished, the Validator will do its best to inform you where it encountered the problem.  Of course, as coding tends to do, sometimes the problem isn’t located at the spot validator indicates.  But a keen programmer can pick that up and really narrow down the issue.

After consulting with some smart tech brains at my company, I realized the problem was quite simple – I hadn’t updated my wordpress plugins!  That’s right, one of my plugins was old and not completely compatible with the new wordpress.  This caused a slight discprepency in the feed, and as programmers will tell you, even a slight discrepency can disrupt the whole operation.

I realized then that it is imperative to keep up with your application updates.  This can be seen as a universal truth across your whole computer.  It may take a minute or two now, but it’ll save you potentially hours of headaches later on.

One problem with social media sites like myspace and facebook is the high probability that your page will get stale. There are little commenting games and applications that you can fiddle with, but in general, otherpeople don’t really care about that. But if you connect twitter to these accounts, new doors open.

Imagine including a new link with a brief descriptor in your twitter account. Using the magic of technology, you can hook that twitter account into a myspace presentation box and your facebook activity log. When you insert your link, it immediately appears as fresh content on your social media pages. On top of that, through facebook, all your friends will be made aware of your update and new link on their homepage.

It’s a pretty nifty little method. To start integrating twitter into your accounts, check out this page for facebook, and this page for myspace.

Gather invites users to create profiles, and to post writing, images, and other original works on their site. I found this interesting both from a writing and SEO perspective, as it allows for increased brand visibility and external links. This opportunity could be valuable for writers trying to get their work out, or for marketing folks who want to improve their brand.

Diving right in, I found the sign-up and profile creation process fairly painless. They allow for a wide variety of personal info and images, should one be interested in utilizing it.

But what really interested me was the group and content creation. I searched for existing wine groups and only found a few scant ones in existence. I saw this as a potential opening and created The Gather Wine Group. I was able to create the group no problem and invite a bunch of potential friends through their invite program.

I did encounter one issue though – it is difficult to find particular people, or people of a particular interest, to invite to the group. There were a few profiles that I knew about and tried to find through their search element and failed. That is something that seems to need the kinks worked out.

Overall, I think Gather is worth a peek. The community seems very vibrant and willing to interact and publish new material. I don’t think it is revolutionizing any mediums…but still…not bad at all.

At a cursory glance it might seem obvious that directory efforts would be yield far better results…but the results I’ve witnessed suggest otherwise.

A link from a directory may or may not be seen by Google, and it may or may not be added into their database of links pointing to your site. It all depends on how much respect Google gives that directory. Normal blogs and websites, on the other hand, are rarely shunned by Google, even if they only have a pagerank of one or two.

An extra added bonus to blog links is that your link may appear as a separate incoming link for every page of that blog. This means if the blog places your link on their homepage, Google may have 15-20 of their articles indexed with your link in it, giving you 15-20 incoming links. You may have spent a lot of total time getting that link up there, but if this situation occurs, it is definitely worth it.

Ideally, you could utilize both directory and personal linking – directory for the short term, personal for the long term. But if you HAD to choose one, I would vote for personal linking every time.

1. Get into Google Analytics stat. This is the best program I have encountered so far and it’s totally free. Getting up and running is pretty easy and the results are great.

2. Use Filters. Google allows you to exclude or include traffic from sites listed in your analytics, allowing you to see as much or as little from each source as you want. Use this to eliminate seeing 100% bounce traffic, or to watch a particular external source very carefully.

3. Check out Greasemonkey’s application for analytics enhancement. It has really helped me assess different trends in regards to external sources driving traffic into the site.

4. Use the Site Overlay feature. It’s really nice seeing what gets hit, how much it gets hit, and what percentage of traffic it is receiving.

Of course there is a ton of useful things you can do with Google Analytics, but that’s not really my point. I just want to be a cheerleader for it and let you know that it is definitely worth the time to investigate and learn in this SEO biz.

On May 9th I came in to work and did my normal routine of analytics and organics checking. Everything was looking stable and normal, until I got to “wine videos.” I was expecting to see our normal standing at 3, which appears like this –

But instead, I got the unpleasant surprise of this –

We were gone! straight up. I did the first thing I think most people would do – I scrolled down to the bottom of the page to see how far we got dropped. When I didn’t see us, I reluctantly clicked to page 2, preparing myself for the bad news of being dropped out of the first page. Nothing there either. Astonished, I used Google’s advanced search function to check the top 100 sites that show up for “wine videos.” Nothing. Naturally I began crying and shaking my fist at the heavens.

Once I pulled myself together I tried to analyze what had actually happened. In my mind, there were only a few options –

1. This was a temporary reshuffling that would cure itself promptly. Just part of going with the flow for Google’s organics.
2. WE did something wrong by screwing up the tech back end or SEO text.
3. We were being penalized for content duplication or inappropriate incoming links.
4. Google screwed up (which is like saying Zeus screwed up).

The first thing I checked was possibility #2, that we screwed something up. We are constantly changing and adapting and improving, so these things happen from time to time. I retraced all of my own steps and got with my tech guys. Nothing changed in the videos portion of the site. So I crossed it off the list.

Next I checked for possible penalizations. I researched what has been peeving Google the most lately, and two things I definitely wanted to check is content duplication and links. We have small repeating elements of descriptors on our different video pages, but nothing at all that would be considered egregious. Furthermore, this would have been a very random time to penalize us on something that we’ve had up for awhile now. I also checked all the links coming into our site, making sure no one was black hatting us with a ton of porn links or anything like that. We were clean.

Lastly I called in a big gun – I got Wil Reynolds of ThinkSeer.com to analyze the situation along with me. He went through some more sophisticated technical analysis and told me that he also didn’t see anything unusual. It was, indeed, a mystery.

Ultimately I decided the only thing to do was file a reconsideration request, sit, and wait it out. I’ve been bumped around by Google before, and it usually rebounds (with a little coaxing). I had to hope this would do the same.

3 weeks went by with no change. Our “wine videos” keyword was m.i.a. and I couldn’t find our /wine-videos url on Google anywhere.

A little more time went by and our monthly company meeting came up. I was preparing my reports, and this situation was high among my priorities list to discuss. The very morning of the meeting, without warning, “wine videos” reappeared as if it had never left. It looked exactly the same as it had before, with exact same ranking, picture, text, and everything.

Quickly I opened back up my reports and added a final line – “nevermind – it’s back.”

Google it seems, in its infinite workings, had a little bit of a hiccup.

I may be getting ahead of myself – let me explain what a sitemap is in case you aren’t familiar. There are two main kinds of sitemaps, the first is the kind you can navigate on a webpage. This sitemap shows the basic structure of the website and allows for easy navigation should the user be struggling to find a certain kind of content. Here is our sitemap at Classic Wines.

The other kind of sitemap is a more extensive xml document that you submit to Google. By submitting it to Google, you help Googlebot to search and understand your site.

We change our website a lot and are constantly updating content. By refreshing the sitemap with a new more comprehensive version, we helped Google understand which pages in our website had dominance, and which ones are updated frequently. Hence the positive results in pagerank and organic placement.

We intend to build out an even better sitemap in the near future. Consider checking out your sitemap situation today!

Youtube is inexplicable when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). I don’t mean how youtube appears in Google, but how results come up inside of youtube’s own search engine. For Google, SEO practitioners can focus on external linking, fresh content, pagerank, etc. Youtube, as the rebel it is, definitely doesn’t follow the same standards.

One thing is certain – youtube extracts results based on keywords. That’s obvious, and essential to any search engine. If you type in “how to open a wine bottle,” you will invariably get results about how to open wine bottles. As you scan through the results, you’ll notice that the top results aren’t necessarily the ones with the most hits. Nor are they necessarily the ones with the most exact match of keywords. And you’ll notice they aren’t in any sort of chronological order.

Of course, only the most basic search engine would function on ONE of these criteria. Most SE’s worth their salt take into consideration a wide array of factors; but which criteria youtube utilizes most heavily is a bit of mystery. Beside the normal factors we discussed earlier, here are some other things that may come into play with youtube ranking:

* Number of comments a video has

* Quality of video

I have heard arguments for and against each of these points. I personally think the last point about the quality of video is a non-factor. Youtube algorithms really have no way of determining something intangible like ‘quality.’ If sheer crispness of video production were a big concern, we would never see most of the half-baked personal webcam videos that have made youtube such a success.

I do believe, however, that video comments and user trends could effect a video’s ranking. These are factors that could help youtube determine by community and past rates of success if a video would be worth watching over others containing similar keywords and tags.

Youtube…a difficult site to figure out, but very much worth the effort. There is no other place where anyone at all (for better or worse) can get exposure to millions of people all over the world.