It appears that back at the end of 2008, I created an account over at Today.com. I have no clue how I remembered – it might have been running down through my list of potential linking sites or money making possibilities.

Whichever the case, it provoked me to write this article Forensics Are You Sure? based on a real eye-opener I read in Popular Mechanics of all places (they started sending it to my son shortly before he graduated and it arrives free so what the heck).

If you want the real skinny on non-TV-based forensics, this is for you

Telling you video is huge is a bit redundant at this stage, however… video is huge.

The question you need to be asking yourself isn’t “should I be using video,” but “how do I get the most out of putting my videos online.”

That’s where this great sticky tips on videos comes in handy, compliments of Webproworld.

Your videos are found via “clues on the page” where your video file is embedded. The discussion does cover both hosting videos on third party web sites like Viddler and the all-famous YouTube and the pros and cons of self-hosted videos.

Spreading your videos around is also a good thing. We’ve found that while you could host the video yourself, viewing times are greatly “speeded up” for your viewer when they are hosted on sites optimized for video viewing.

In addition, pick your third party hosting sites carefully. For example, should you choose Viddler, you are able to edit the title (use your keyword in the title), provide a (keyword rich) description, and tag it. YouTube is great, but at the moment spots like Viddler top our list. And, search engines pick up your video very quickly!

Here’s a bit more about optimizing your video online, condensed, of what you’ll find when you visit the Webproworld forum link above:

1. Sitemaps …video sitemaps are a recommended way to give Google information about the video content of your site…

2. RSS Feeds …Google loves to crawl RSS feeds of various types, and this includes RSS feeds that focus on video content…

3. Metadata …metadata is the best source for search engines to determine what your video is about…

4. Provide a transcript …embedding a transcript in the video viewing page will provide the search engines with a wealth of content to index…

5. Optimize the video page …where the video is embedded focusing on the key topics of the video. Context seems to be an important factor…

6. Use friendly URLs …provide the search engines with additional clues as to the relevant topics of the video.

7. Be consistent when distributing your video …this will give you more opportunities to show up for your target term…

8. Prepare for the future of video search …By taking these steps now, your videos can remain relevant as search engines improve their scanning and indexing capabilities.

Again, a trip to the forum is in order to fill in the gaps of what I did not include.

Also, the responses to this sticky post on video optimization are worth the read.

Not everyone is prepared to jump on the video bandwagon at the moment, but arming yourself to use this immensely popular form of internet and social media marketing in the future is a sure winner.

Related articles

• Netvibes: The new social media dashboard (vator.tv)
• YouTube Video Alerts For Your Inbox (performancing.com)
• Viewzi Launches Site Search (centernetworks.com)
• Sitemap Submission Made Simple (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)

Well, as you can see the entire week went by without a single post on this blog. The reasons are multi-fold, and I’m blaming the Olympics

While we revisit and revamp our high-end services over at Market-For-Me, assist Whole Hog Blog networkers, field marketing and advertising phone calls, and in general provide marketing assistance, the one bump in my particular road has been those prime time showings of the Olympic events.

I haven’t a clue why, but I will sit there and watch the marathoners do their thing, mile after mile. I’ve even stayed up the past two nights praying I will get a tiny morsel of “table tennis” (or as we refer to it around here “ping pong”).

In fact, pursuit of watching some Olympic-style table tennis became more than a bit of an obsession for me. I really enjoy a good game of ping pong. I figured, wow!, those Olympic players must be amazing. (more…)

On our last post I let you know I had purchased a software script that had the hallmarks of bringing traffic for those not blogging, but with full access to a website domain.

With high hopes, we installed the script exactly as indicated, and yes it did install. Logging in and looking around went very smoothly.

However, (more…)

Tonight, just about the time I’m thinking it’s time to call it a day, a friend from the Firestorm Forum recommended we take a look at Scour.

Though “new” it already has an Alexa ranking of just over 36,000 – and whether you follow Alexa or not it does show proof that other people are aware it exists

So what’s so great about Scour?

Our top priority is “what do we get out of it” (not greedy, just common business sense). Mostly we like to see our efforts reflected in increased visitors and lots of new attention from search engine spiders and bots. Building up those wonderful links online is something we are deadly serious about…

So, will Scour do that? The answer is… (more…)