When Facebook began rolling out its Twitter-like tagging feature in September of last year, I decided to launch an experiment in search optimization for YouTube videos.  With my very primitive video editing software and skills, I quickly put together this simple and relatively unimpressive video:

Nothing special, but it got the job done.  Instead of focusing a ton of time on creating and editing a high quality video, I decided to focus more on optimizing the video for search, to see if the video could achieve viewing longevity on the world's second largest search engine - YouTube. Optimizing my video for search, I followed the following 3 simple steps, which I hope you will be able to use for your own online videos:

1. Include major keywords in the title of the video.
2. Use the 'Description' section to your advantage.  You are able to include a lot of text in this section and if you use it as an opportunity to repeatedly plug in your keywords, it can go a long way in optimizing your video for the search keywords you are trying to target.
3. Tag and tweak. When you launch your video, be sure to tag the video with the appropriate keywords, just as you do with your title and description.  But your search optimization is not done yet!  Be sure to monitor your video and others with similar keywords.  If you notice that another video is performing better than yours, try copying some of that video's keywords and adding them to yours to try to compete on the same keywords.  Adapting your video tags can be one of the best ways to keep your video alive via search.

The results of my experiment continue to surprise me today.  After the initial promotion of the video on my Facebook profile, Twitter and my blog, the video views predictably spiked to a high of 214 views in one day.  Nothing too impressive.  But as the graph below displays, unlike most videos, this video did not die out 24 hours after its creation.  The video has received a steady amount of views over the past 4 months.  At the time I publish this post, the video has been viewed a total of 3,847 times - 77% of those views have been discovered through search related entry-points (Related videos, YouTube search and Google search).

Why Social Media is Not Ruining Search Results

Now if you’ve been trolling the web like me, you may have stumbled across a post on Search Engine Land that talks about how social media is ruining search. The author talks about how search engine results pages (SERPs) should return both relevant and timely results – with an emphasis on relevance, while acknowledging that timeliness has it’s place – for example it helps consumers determine that a product is out of stock on an online retail site. However (the author argues), user generated content is not always authoritative and compromises the quality of search results; and for that reason social media should not be included in SERPs.

I respectfully disagree. Here are three good reasons why.

Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

Last week, Twitter revealed its list of the most-discussed topics of 2009, based on Twitter’s trending topics. Now Facebook has come out with their own list, based on data from the millions of daily status updates of its users.

While the world’s largest social network took a different approach than its upstart competitor (explanation below), it did match some of Twitter’s “most discussed” topics of 2009. However, it seems as if Facebook’s data analysis has revealed that people care a great deal about family (#5), Facebook apps (#1), Lady Gaga (#12), and, yes, even Twitter (#10).

Firefox 3.5 Takes the Top Spot Worldwide

Firefox hit a new milestone today, as version 3.5 overtook Internet Explorer 7.0 with nearly 22% of the browser market, according to statistics from web analytics service StatCounter. This comes on the heels of statistics we saw earlier this month, which showed Firefox overtaking IE for overall usage in Germany.

YouTube is the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade

As the decade draws to a close, there’s at least one thing we can say about the social media space with a fairly high level of confidence: it’s here to stay. That said, looking ahead to the next ten years, it’s incredibly hard to predict how we’ll use social media — let alone which services will still be relevant — when we get to 2020.

Simple is as Simple Does: The Risk of ReTweet

Despite starting Blogger, Evan Williams rarely blogs. But yesterday, for the first time in several months, he decided to put the digital pen to the digital paper in order to lay out his thoughts for Twitter’s new Retweet functionality. It’s a great view into the mindset behind what is already becoming a controversial change.

The Problem with ReTweets

As most probably know, Twitter is in the process of launching a version of the widely used retweet on its own platform.  The move has caused some controversy, as the way retweets has been implemented by Twitter is much different from the unofficial protocols that Twitter users developed organically on their own.  Twitter founder Evan Williams explains Twitter’s reasoning here.

I’ve been testing out the new retweet functionality for a few days, and I must say I am not a fan at all.  Sean Bonner has written a great blog post dissecting what he dislikes about Twitter retweets.   In his post, he hits on my two biggest issues.

Online Advertising Stops Falling Thanks to Search

After two straight quarters of annual declines (aka, the Great Ad Recession of 2009), it looks like online advertising revenues stabilized in the third quarter. The combined online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL rose 1.2 percent to $8 billion. While the online advertising industry is not out of the woods yet, it might be stabilizing.

At least it is for Google, which was the only one of the four horsemen of Internet advertising to see its ad revenues rise in the quarter (up roughly $400 million from both last quarter and last year). Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft were all down on both a sequential and annual basis.

At POLC, one of the panels I attended was "Optimizing Your Search Marketing Program." One of the reasons I attended was because the moderator was my good friend from the other side of the aisle, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.

But more importantly, I attended because I'm running a number of search engine marketing campaigns for my clients and I wanted to ensure that my clients are getting the best ROI.

Perhaps the most important quote which jumped out at me regarding why "search" (and your entry) matters was: “Your Branding/Messaging Starts at The Search Engine—not at your website.” Makes sense.

I've broken down my notes on tips and optimization in to two sections -- paid search versus organic search. A number of the points below are directly from the powerpoint presentation that went along with the presentation.

Overview of PPC Search (PPC - Pay Per Click)
• People seek out information on search engines - hand raisers - you want to serve that person an ad for your product.
• Think of Search as a phonebook: Paid is like the Yellow Pages. Organice is like the White Pages.
• You are in complete control of your listing in the Yellow Pages.
*You choose the keywords that trigger display;
*You control the Wording of the listing;
*You choose the web page or destination the searcher visits;
*You decide the price you want to pay per click;
*You set the daily budget;
*You set the geographic region;
*You can instantly change all of these factors in real-time; and
*You can track results and optimize your campaign.

Best Practices in PPC
• Good campaign structure is the foundation of good campaign performance. In other words, spend a lot of time thinking out the intention of the campaign, what success means, and how best to achieve it.
*Think of lots of keywords that constituents would use to find information on your candidate or cause (Lots = thousands or more);
*Group similar keywords together into Ad Groups, making things as granular as possible;
*Write ad copy that is relevant to the keywords in each Ad Group;
*Select landing pages that are relevant to the keywords in each Ad Group; and
*Tailor campaigns to geographic regions, if appropriate

• Estimate the value of a visitor, and set prices accordingly.
• Track activity and performance (conversion tracking, Google Analytics, maybe others).
• Focus on results, and optimize campaigns based on results.
• Expand once you are successful with core campaigns.

Best Practices in Organic Search Optimization
• Benefits of organic:
*It’s free (except labor); and
*Perceived as more objective (people trust Google more than advertisers).

Baseline Optimization Techniques:
• Web Development/Technical: make sure your site can be read by search engines;
• Site content: Incorporate well-researched keywords onto your pages;
• Off-site optimizations: Get other sites to link to yours; and
• Close the Loop: Analyze visitor behavior.

Top Three Things You Can Do To Improve Organic SEO:

1. Keyword Research Tools (Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and Google's AdWords program has a free service);
2. Basic Site Assessment - Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see what pages search robots can read and incoming links; and
3. Build content around keywords (check trends.google.com every morning to see what people are searching for and write content about that issue if it fits with your message).

Some random notes:
The best opportunity to get a high-pagerank item is to upload video to Yahoo!, YouTube, Google Video, and title/tag it correctly.

Free Search Engine Marketing for non-profits: Google Grants Program.

Panelists/Experts:
This panel included Jerome Armstrong, Ben Weisberg of Google, Mark Evans of Ionic Media, and Gravida Couzin and Jennifer Grappone who are both SEO experts.