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Yahoo! has recently introduced an inline video play feature that shows videos directly on the video search results page. Now, searchers can view videos directly on the search results page without entering the site where a particular video is hosted.

The inline viewing feature happens to be a bit controversial feature since the sites boasting videos will definitely want the traffic to the sites. With the large number of embeddable videos and the new feature, searchers will end up viewing videos off-site.

Anyway, if searchers wish to use the inline viewing feature they can click “Play Now” under the thumbnail of the video search result. This will open a large overlay window and play the video on the results page.

In a rather surprising move, Yahoo has just announced the acquisition of Arab site Maktoob, a very popular Arabic web portal that offers amazing services such as search, payments, social network, and auctions.

As per the reports, it is a new initiative that Yahoo is going to acquire an online property in a localized language. This move is being regarded the most viable as Maktoob.com is the largest online community of Arab. With this acquisition, Yahoo will be able to extend their influence over some 16.5 million people.

Yahoo calls this deal with Maktoob its “biggest geographic expansion in years.”

This is not just about acquisition, but about moving into a completely different and new market. With this deal, Yahoo will be able to spread its translating services into Arabic. According to official Yahoo corporate blog:

“Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.”

The financial terms of the acquisition, which is to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2009 are still undisclosed. After the Maktoob becomes its property, Yahoo will roll out Arabic versions of its different web products and services such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search and more.

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Yahoo Acquires Maktoob- An Arab Site

I recently caught wind of the ability to grow perfect white (or clear) diamonds in a lab. They have been able to create colored diamonds in labs for some time now, but the white diamond idea intrigued me so I started doing some research. I searched on “white man-made diamonds”, “cultured white diamonds”, “synthetic white diamonds”, “lab grown diamonds” etc. and the site that consistently showed up (at least on the PPC side) was DiamondNexusLabs.com.

I spent some time on the site and the more I read, the more it sounded like this company had accomplished creating the perfect white diamond. And the best part was they were incredibly inexpensive! Paying hundreds of dollars in comparison to thousands of dollars made me think I could upgrade my wife’s wedding ring for our anniversary without breaking the bank. I was ecstatic! I did a quick search on the company name to double check its legitimacy and a scan of the first page of results only gave me more confidence. It even looked like they were doing some SEO because their Facebook and Twitter pages were on the first page. Good for them!

Because I was in a consumer mindset (and it was very late at night), I felt like I had done enough research on the industry and the company and I started to seriously consider purchasing. Luckily, something inside of me forced me to sleep on it. The next morning a thought occurred to me: If this company was doing SEO or having someone do it for them, they may have been doing some reputation management on their company name. I checked on it, this time doing a more thorough search on the company name, and lo and behold, every SERP but page 1 made it very apparent that reputation management was being performed for this company. I found hundreds of comments about the company being deceptive, fraudulent, and even illegal in their claims. According to most, the company was simply a reseller of CZ diamonds that can be found for $10-20 regularly. Now, if you want to sell CZ diamonds for exhorbitant prices to uneducated shoppers, that’s one thing, but when your site appears to claim that you’re selling something very different than what you actually are, that’s a big problem in my book.

In addition, every time I found a negative comment about the company, the very next post was someone who was extremely pleased with their purchase and took the diamond to jewelers who couldn’t tell the difference between it and a real diamond. Odd? I thought so.

What really hurt me most about this experience was that with the exception of the last practice, the marketing that had been done seemed to be fairly white hat. Someone was using good for evil. I know this isn’t the first time this has happened in the SEO industry, but it was definitely the closest I have been to it.

This experience brings up a very difficult question that SEO companies have to face. Even though you may perform transparent white hat techniques for clients, the business model of the client may be “black” or even “grey”. Do you still perform the work? Do you make a company successful in Google who doesn’t deserve it?

Hopefully it’s obvious where I stand.

Let’s take the time machine way back to the good ol’ days. There once was a time when people waited. It was a magical time when folks stopped to talk on the street and books were as thick as five stacked laptops. And would you believe that we had attention spans back then? I know, it is almost unfathomable. But that is how it was. They were good times.

Back to the present day. That mythical past is now just the stuff of legend. The stuff we will tell our kids about. This next part might come as a shock, but remember those things called attention spans? Gone. Extinct. Snuffed out. We simply cannot afford them. There are far too many things to do, and if we have to spend real time doing them, well then maybe they are just not worth it.

Alright, I exaggerate a bit. But as you will see, it is for good reason. In this world of search engine optimization, there is a direct relationship between attention spans and successful websites. Put simply, the less time it takes for customers to figure out your website, the more likely you are to get the sale. Take lots of time getting to the point and your potential customers are gone.

Let’s break down that concept further. Here is a list of things that will send your site viewers packing in no time:

1.  Your site takes too long to load

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You go to buy a product knowing that a few sites sell it. It really does not matter who you buy it from, you just want it done. The first site you visit takes 30 seconds to load but you were gone at 10. The next site loads fine except for the product images. You exit, wondering what good a site is that can’t display the product images. You end up buying at a site that loads in a few seconds, images and all.

What you say? That first site was yours? Big bummer.

2.  You do not have a clear call to action

What exactly do you want your viewers to do? Click on one of the hundred links in your sidebar? Read some more about your product? Visit your mother’s blog? Or do you want them to BUY? A clear call to action tells your viewer, “What you are looking for is right here behind this button – click it, click it, click it!” Sure there are other things you want them to know, but forget about those for now. Your call to action should punch them in the face (figuratively).

3.  Your important stuff is hidden in a mess of text or in some obscure location

What good is a killer call to action if they can’t find it? What good is your ‘offer to beat all offers’ if they have to scroll down 3 miles just to see it? Keep the good stuff above the fold* so they see it right when the page loads. If you send your viewers on an Easter egg hunt, they will be through with you.

4.  Your viewers have no idea what you are talking about

Let’s say you are trying to win over new customers with your site. Are you chasing them away with industry jargon? If you have got this fabulous new product that you are trying to break out of its niche, are you explaining it in terms everyone will understand? The second a viewer runs into stuff they know they don’t understand, you have lost them.

5.  Your checkout process takes longer than your viewer’s lunch break

Congratulations. They love your product and want to buy it. What have you done to make it easy on them? Is it as simple as throwing it in the cart and purchasing? Or do they have to wander through a maze of shipping addresses, billing addresses, additional offers, products they might like, and waivers? If you can’t shave it down to a few simple steps, your competitor sure can.

No terribly complicated stuff here, but allow me to make an observation about it. Very few businesses get around to making changes based on the list above. It is not that they don’t get the Marketing 101 principles. It is more likely they have a love affair with their site. It may not be the prettiest or smartest thing out there, but it is theirs by golly, and they are sticking with it. They invested time and money, and they really grew to like it along the way. I get that, and those people are not going to change on my account. So this is for the other group. The ones who are ready to make their site pretty and smart.

So there you have it folks. Now that we have adjusted to the change from the old ways to this new, flighty society, it is time to give our websites the attention they need. A few tweaks to make it more A.D.D. friendly and you will have a winner.

Over the past few months, discussions have been going on in the Webmaster Center Blog regarding how to optimize a site! Recently, Kristin Meldahl of Bing highlighted some of the recent information that the Webmaster Center team has published on optimizing site architecture in their SEM 101 column. The information appears to be useful to webmasters and web publishers. There are four recent posts that focuses on various aspects of site architecture optimization, such as file/page issues, links, content and page meta information. The posts are:

Site Architecture and SEO – file/page issues (SEM 101)

Making links work for you (SEM 101)

Architecting content for SEO (SEM 101)

Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101)

The series of posts is indeed very helpful and useful for webmasters. For more information on site optimization, keep visiting the Webmaster Center blog .

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about real-time search, but is it necessary? First, let’s look at the current state of search and crawl.*

Unless your site is decidedly authoritative, like CNN.com, you’re likely to get crawled as Google indexes more authoritative sites that are linking to your own. Your site will end up on a particular crawling schedule.

The lengthening or shortening of the crawl schedule, with blogs especially, is largely determined by the amount of new content found on the site each time it’s crawled. In the chart below, the diagonal lines represent getting crawled by the search engine and the ominous black spots represent posting new content.  In this case, if you haven’t posted in a while, you’ve probably worked up a fairly large interval between crawls. If you suddenly return to posting on a consistent schedule, over time the crawl interval will be narrowed until your content gets indexed soon after posting.

In essence, you can and should train Google to index your site more frequently by posting new content regularly or by getting new backlinks to your site.

Real-time indexation is just what it sounds like. Content is indexed and searchable immediately upon publication. None of the big three engines are there yet.

Is real-time indexing by search engines (and hence real-time search) inevitable? It’s starting to appear so.

Twitter is already considered to be real-time, though it’s far from a genuine search engine. Microsoft seems to have tweaked Bing to place higher value on more recent news. In tests, Google Caffeine, the new under-infrastructure version of the search giant, seems to be indexing a lot more pages and giving higher placement to the newest content than the current version. And Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition suggests they’re definitely eyeing the real-time search space.

Real-time search helps anybody who reads or writes content with a short shelf-life. If you post about an in-progress disaster, a celebrity death, or a limited-time offer, your content is hot one minute, cold the next, so quick indexation by search engines means that your content will be found while it’s still relevant. You would probably gain a good amount of site traffic just by riding the wave and capitalizing on long-tail searches, regardless of how frequently you post.

The real-time search goal has plenty of obstacles. Real-time indexation takes a mountain of data computation power. Plus, algorithmically, how do you consistently showcase an on-scene Twitterer’s play-by-play updates over the Huffington Post side commentary during a crisis? Or do you? You can’t use backlinks as a determinant. Authority is negligible. One practical solution would be to house real-time search separate from regular search, just like Google News is separate from the primary index. Regardless, real-time search is only as valuable as the relevance of the top-ranking content and is likely to look different from today’s version.

Until we get there, the most important thing you can do now is get your site as close as possible to real-time indexation using the available SEO techniques.

• Create good content on a consistent schedule, applying other relevant SEO tactics to optimize your site, and building up your authority
• Create sitemaps for your site so search engines know which pages to crawl
• Use NoFollow tags on non-critical pages as a way of shining a light on the more important ones
• Submit your site and content to directories and social bookmarking sites
• Work on building links from more authoritative sites pointing to your own

*For clarification, crawling (or spidering) is the method search engines use to populate their data repositories so people can search using their websites. It involves running programs called bots (or spiders) that go from link to link scouring web pages and returning information to be indexed.

I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago that stuck with me and made me think about the basics of SEO. The line went something like this, “You have to have the fundamentals down before trying any of the fancy stuff. ” So before you go out and try to do things like PR sculpting or any of the other advanced techniques you hear about, get the basics down.

SEO can really be broken down into three essential areas: Architecture, Content, and Links. These are the basics of SEO that you need to understand and get right first. Let’s take a look at some key points to understand in each of these main areas.

Architecture – Can Your Site Be Crawled?

One of the first problems that a website has to address is whether or not their site can actually be crawled by the search engine spiders. You can have the best content in the world, but if the search engine spiders can’t get to it you won’t reap the benefits! Here are some things you can do to help your site be more crawl-able:

1. Avoid things like JavaScript or Flash navigation. Both of these kinds of navigation are not crawled very well by search engines at this time. This could change in the future, but for now it’s best to just avoid JavaScript and Flash navigations.
2. Keep your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Don’t have tons of levels in your architecture. Keep pages as close to the root as possible. In other words, mysite.com/folder/product is much better than mysite.com/category/subcategory/other-folder/product.
3. Stay away from parameter strings in URLs. By having parameter strings in URLs you could have multiple versions of the same content and will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. You can avoid this by not using parameters. Instead, have a static URL for each page whenever possible. For example, mysite.com/productname.html is much better than mysite.com/?prod-id=abc123&cat-id=def456.
4. Use internal linking appropriately. Whenever it makes sense, link to other pages in your site from within the content of the page. Don’t just rely on your navigation to get people (and search engine spiders) to where you want them to go. (More about internal linking.)
5. Sitemaps are your friends. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap. (More about sitemaps).

Content – Is It Optimized?

Once you have your website’s architecture set up the right way, the next step is to make sure that your content is well-optimized to help your site rank for your main keyword phrases. Here are a few basic guidelines to follow:

1. Don’t target too many phrases per page. You may have a list of 50 keywords you want to target, but you should only focus on 2-3 main phrases per page. Create other pages around additional phrases as needed.
2. No spammy stuff! Don’t do any keyword stuffing, alt stuffing, meta spamming, or any other spammy techniques. They don’t really work well anymore anyway.
3. Use your keyword phrases in titles, header tags, etc. By using your keyword phrases in your titles and header tags you can give them more emphasis.
4. Use your keywords in your content. Don’t just rely on your titles and header tags. Don’t overdo it; make the text read naturally but make sure you include your keywords and variations of them in the content.

Links – Getting Juice from Other Sites

Setting your site up the right way is one step, but getting traffic to your website takes a lot more than just using keywords on your pages. The other big key to getting a good rank on the search engines is to get other sites linking to you. By getting these links you are showing that your site has credibility and is worth ranking well. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when you’re building links:

1. Use a variety of techniques. There are a lot of things you can do to build links: directories, articles, social bookmarking, forums … the list goes on and on. Mix up what you’re doing and get a variety of link types coming into your site. (More about link building)
2. Spread your links over a lot of domains. It’s important to get a lot of links, but it’s also important to get a lot of links spread over many domains. If you follow tip #1 this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you.
3. Use keywords in your anchor text. One problem that I’ve seen over and over is that someone will build links to their site using either their name, their business name, or their URL. This is nice if that’s what you want to rank for, but if you want to rank for a keyword phrase you have to use that phrase as the anchor text of your link.
4. Use a variety of anchors. Don’t just use the same keyword phrase over and over again. Mix it up so that you aren’t spamming one phrase too much. This will help your link building look more natural.
5. The work is never done. Don’t think you can just submit to a bunch of directories and your work is over. SEO is an ongoing process.

While these tips don’t cover everything you need to know about the three main areas of search engine optimization, this is enough to get you started. Spend some time looking over your site to make sure that you are doing these basics. Then, if you want, you can try to get a little fancy.

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Google seems to be testing changes to its “show more results from” feature and has come up with a wider use of the feature. Google removed the simple HTML link to a site command feature and now it shows several more results in the same search results page. It is using an AJAX (JavaScript) driven plus sign box that adds five more results to the web results.

Plus sign closed:

Plus sign opened:

I came back last week from a relaxing vacation and found an email in my inbox sporting the following title: “PageRank is Dead.”

Upon reading the title, my mind went blank, closing up in an effort to prevent shock. Was this possible? The Death of PageRank? I tried to remember the predetermined events of the SEO Ragnarok: Facebook devours Odin; Twitter falls to the venom of the colossal snake, Jörmungandr; Google annihilates PageRank; the giant, Surt, sets the SEO world on fire…

I came slightly to my senses, and realized I don’t need to jump to eschatological conclusions. SEO can continue with, or without, PageRank. This was not the fiery end of linkbuilding or SEO.

Certainly it is true that, for many, PageRank acts as the guiding star for the value of any inbound link. The human mind naturally gravitates toward concrete numbers over the more abstract sentiments existing in a good link.

I consigned to fate. I would navigate my linkbuilding solely by the oft-overlooked principles of RELEVANCE, LINK ENVIRONMENT, and ANCHOR TEXT. Come walk with me while I explain…

Relevance is a principle frequently neglected in the frenzied piranha link building-style adopted by some. This explains why, on any given medical professional’s website, you are just as likely to find links to “Mexico Vacations!” as you are to truly helpful medical sites. But linking in relevant ways is better. (1) It strengthens user experience, (2) it looks natural, and (3) it makes you look more relevant to your industry in the eyes of the search engines. Want to know whether it’s worthwhile to try to put a link on a site? Ask yourself if the site is related to your own site, and/or links out to your competitors. And remember that this is not the 7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You need to be slapped by Common and Sense if your logic looks anything like this: My site is about doctors, doctors are typically wealthy, wealthy people like to vacation, Mexico is a great place to vacation, so clearly my doctor site is relevant to “Mexico Vacations!”

Link Environment is another principle by which to judge link potential. At this point we’ve determined relevance. But now we must ask where the link will be. While links on a link page are good, a link from a body of text is better. Imagine how someone would feel about your link were it lost in a gorilla-infested jungle of more links. You can only carry so many bananas in your hands, before some gorilla picks you up and carries you off to a more readable site. Imagine now that your link is highlighted amongst a bevy of text, all talking about your topic, and pointing to you as an authority on the subject, or an entertaining take. I guarantee the gorilla population is lower on those pages. But seriously, gorillas aside, your link is better off showing up in the body of a blog post or other content, than it is becoming just another body in a sea of link lists. The search engines think so too.

It is no secret that Anchor Text is the bread and butter of any link building effort. It is the crux, the golden child, the guitar solo. And yet many forget the power of anchor text. For a quick demonstration, type the word “here” into Google. At spot 3 you’ll find Adobe Reader, followed by Apple Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and so on. Nearly all the sites that require you to download Adobe Reader, or a Flash plug-in, or Quicktime to view their contents use the phrase “download here” with “here” almost always being the anchor text for the link. If you want to influence the search engines in what terms you should be showing up for, you better be paying attention to the anchor text of the links pointing to your site. Get too large a ratio of links with the anchor text “website” and you’ll find that your link campaign is a sad sorry affair. Your family will send you emails offering condolences. Your friends will stop returning your calls.

It is almost not worth mentioning to you that the email title “PageRank is Dead” was spurious. Upon opening the email, I learned that PageRank had faked its own death in a publicity stunt.

Further reading revealed that it had, in fact, NOT faked its death, but that we were having a network problem involving a browser plug-in. PageRank is alive and well. And yet… it’s worth keeping the above Triumvirate of principles at the forefront when linkbuilding. They are far more likely to outlive PageRank, an arbitrary numbering system that is bound to be tweaked and changed. These three principles are solid. Allow me to conclude with this quote from a slideshow presentation about the History of SEO given by Greg Boser of 3dogmedia.com and Marshall Simmonds of NYTimes.com:

“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to access this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequently because it is not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is several months old.”

And just because you asked, were I to speak at PageRank’s funeral, I imagine my remarks would be something like this: “PageRank, we obsessed about ye far too much. So we’ve buried you upside-down in case ye decide to come back.”

In the last six months, we’ve seen many established food brands give away food using social media marketing. Using this medium, many companies have transitioned to online marketing and successfully received online and traditional press. In addition to press, many bloggers and fans of Twitter and Facebook have shared their brand preferences effectively endorsing these products.

A few examples include:

• Burger King – Whopper Sacrifice Facebook App. For Burger King, it was the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook app generating 83,000 installs and 23,000 free whoppers to customers who likely purchased fries and a drink with that. A website, Facebook app, and a few emails, tweets and text messages is all it took. You can read more from the blogosphere about the Whopper Sacrifice.
• Denny’s – Free Grand Slam Breakfast. For Denny’s it was a coveted multi-million dollar Superbowl ad that got the word out. All costs were reportedly recovered the day of the promotion.
• IHOP – Free Shortstack of Pankcakes. IHOP gives away free shortstacks each year. Did you know this? Me neither. Imagine how that would change with a few messages pushed from customer-to-customer. Think about the opportunity IHOP is missing by not keeping their 15-minutes alive throughout the year. Huge mistake!
• Quiznos – Million Subs Viral Campaign. Quiznos created a site called, MillionSubs.com and gave away one million sub sandwiches over the course of a week. I had a small meatball on wheat with an oversized double-chocolate cookie. It was delicious. And free. However, there isn’t any information about the promotion just a few months later.
• 7-11 – Slurpee Giveaway on 7/11. 7-11 stores have been giving away Slurpees for years as an annual promotion on one of the hottest days of summer. Perfectly targeting their audience and reminded them to “cool down with a Slurpee.” Notice the press release on their corporate site. Great move.

What amazes me about these promos? Just months later, I can’t easily find information about them on the corporate sites. It’s the blogger reviews, news services, Twitter and other web pages that show up in Google for their branded promo. Try it.

Traditionally, we’ve seen giveaways for food using free or buy-one-get-one free coupons, in-store taster promotions or trial giveaways, order by mail giveaways (a fantastic gimmick that grew lead lists by millions) and so on. These are all aimed at an older audience; a previous generation. A less connected people who usually believe more of what they’re told. Trying to take these old school marketing tactics online can create a negative impact because you’re approaching a younger, hipper audience that demand new forms of interaction from corporations.

A couple brands that have successfully created a social experience rather than just offer a freebie giveaway include:

• Charity Water – Twestival (Twitter Festival) raised $250,000 for awareness of the global water crisis and used the money to drill fresh water wells. Notice on the site, however, that you can easily tweet facts right from the site. A variety a messages, ready to go, so you relate to one of them and send it with almost no effort. Keep in mind, their audience are Twitter users who speak the language you see on this site. In addition, videos show more about the cause. These videos are uploaded to free video services that have their own audiences thus building traffic from two audiences simultaneously.
• Help Remedies – Selling the least sexy grocery store products in a newly re-packaged way that uses packaging as a selling point. Furthermore, there are pages on their website to entertain you while you visit. If you’re interested in finding a local place to purchase their product, you are presented with a Google Map where you can easily get directions from anywhere in the world. Funny thing is, I’d buy this over a generic product because it’s fun. Forget the fact that both products get the job done. Click through for more information about each product. It’s quite entertaining, actually.

Other forms of online marketing give-a-ways come as product reviews on blogs or Twitter promos that include re-tweeting a message that can be tracked and a winner picked.

Squarespace did this by offering an iPhone giveaway by simply using the hash-tag (#) and their name like you see below. This allows them to track the messages about their promotion. It also gave them a great opportunity to release information about their new iPhone app because they had an audience listening to the brand Squarespace and relating it to the iPhone.

Whatever the case, you can use social media properties to reach out to new audiences and avoid the age creep in your demographic. Find out how to launch a successful campaign and get your customers to become your marketers.

Image: bchow