Courtesy of MBTrama at Flickr.com

You don’t need me to tell you: Video is big. Whether it’s on YouTube, Vimeo or other video hosting sites, people are sharing video about all kinds of things, from cooking techniques to car repair to search marketing. Heck, AboutUs has its very own search engine optimization (SEO) videos available on YouTube.

Why are so many people marketing with video? There are a few reasons:

• Most people read very little on the Web (though you’d never guess that from the sheer amount of content most companies produce). People scan articles and blog posts very quickly, missing out on a lot of information. But many people actively enjoy watching video, so they’ll stick with a clip that’s a few minutes long….if it’s reasonably interesting.
• Video is easy to share, and it does get shared. A good video has the potential to spread quickly from one friend or colleague to a huge group…and beyond. (Notice I said a “good” video.)
• Search engines notice videos, and notice which ones are searched for and clicked on. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world, after Google (which owns YouTube, by the way), and its search data is used not just by Google, but probably by other search engines to help determine what’s popular. Remember, links and clicks on those links are like votes for a website. So videos linking back to your site are potentially powerful drivers of both traffic and improvement in your search rankings.

This morning I found a few useful articles about video for business owners I thought I’d share:

• Anum Hussain of HubSpot points out the nine video marketing mistakes we should avoid. My two favorites: forgetting a call to action (why did you post this video, anyway?) and making videos that are too long.
• ReelSEO published a guest article by Neil Davidson in which he challenges five marketers to come up with a business that wouldn’t benefit from online video. For the record, they couldn’t….Neil tells you how each business, however unlikely it may seem, could promote itself effectively through video.
• And, backing into some useful tips, Cindy Ratzlaff of Business Insider offers the Top 10 Reasons Not To Include Video in Brand Marketing. Sure, it’s tongue-in-cheek, and you’ll find a few good tips here to get you going with your own videos.

AboutUs has published a few articles about video marketing as well, all of them targeted to small business:

• Video Marketing 101 - Eleven tips (just because 5 or 10 or whatever seems awfully random to me) for making videos efficiently, and making sure they’re useful to people.
• Planning Your Small Business Video – Things to think about if the very idea of making a video is just too daunting, by videomaker Amy Dubin.
• How To Add Your Logo to Your Video – Practical help from Scott Olson, a veteran marketer and entrepreneur.
• Record Video Interviews with Skype – More practical help from Scott, who’s built a business out of video interviews at FounderBuzz.com.

You may have heard us talk about site speed before, but we think it bears repeating because it’s so important. Plus, we have some new statistics and tips to share.

Site speed can help – or hurt – your SEO and sales.

Site speed – how long it takes a web page to load and show up in a web browser window – is now one of Google’s ranking factors.  That means Google takes site speed into account when deciding how high a site should show up in search results.  A slow site will have a a hard time outranking its competitors.

If visitors have to wait too long for your site to load, they’re more likely to leave quickly, and less likely to do what you want them to do – like buy your product or service, contact you for a quote, sign up for your newsletter, or download your e-book.  Recent studies have revealed some sobering stats:

• A 1-second delay in page response can result in 7% fewer conversions
• 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less
• A 100-millisecond delay on Amazon.com caused a 1% drop in revenue

How fast does your website load?

You can test your site speed with various tools like Pingdom’s site speed test.

How can you make your website load faster?

Don’t despair – there are several things you can do. The AboutUs Site Report analyzes your website and tells you which things your site is already doing right, and what you should do next to help your website load faster. We explain why each recommendation matters and how to implement the change right in the Site Report.

Sign up for a free one-week trial of the Site Report. Get an analysis and recommendations for improving your site speed and other important SEO elements. The Site Report also tracks your Google rank – and your competitors’ positions – for your most important keywords over time.

For more information on how to improve your site speed, read  7 Easy Ways To Improve Your Site Speed for SEO.

Questions? Comment on this post, email Help@AboutUs.org, or call 1.800.AboutUs or 1.503.488.5763 and press 3.

The Wisdom of Chairman Matt

In the world of professional SEOs, Google is the Ten Commandments, Emily Post’s Etiquette and Mao Tse Tung’s little red book, all rolled into one. And Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, is Moses, Emily and Mao.

The SMX Advanced session with Matt was extremely well attended. Easily 2,000 people sat in the conference center’s largest hall, hanging on and tweeting his every word.

Danny Sullivan, Panda & Matt Cutts at SMX. Photo by Dana Lookadoo.

The main topic: Panda. This update to Google’s ranking algorithm, released earlier this year, was squarely aimed at sites that publish content of questionable value, heavily larded with keywords, for the sole purpose of hosting ads.

Panda has caused some sites – even some offering good content – to lose significant traffic, while offering a leg up into higher search results for small, content-rich sites that are tightly focused on a specific topic.

Google will continue to develop Panda, but for now, here are the high points of Matt’s session, and what they mean for small business owners:

• Panda 2.2 is coming. This update to Google’s Panda algorithm will roll out soon. Its purpose: to demote from search results any website that “scrapes” the content of other sites, and whose scraped content ranks higher than the original.
• Panda affects the entire site, not just individual pages. Google will no longer consider pages separately from the entire site. If the algorithm identifies pages of “scraped” content, Google will demote not just those pages, but the entire website.
• Rel=author. Google has introduced this new tag to help website owners identify their original content to Google.  It’s a new way to help Google understand that anyone’s republication of your content – authorized or not – isn’t the original, and that your piece should rank higher. The rel=author tag must point to an author page on the same website. (If you’d like to see an example of an author page, you can take a look at the articles in the Learn section of AboutUs.org. Click the author’s name on any of these articles, and you’ll be taken to his or her personal profile page on AboutUs.org.)
• User experience matters. Panda is designed – and will be continually updated – to assess whether a site is a good experience for people. While Matt said Panda is not targeted directly at usability, you can bet that Google is working hard towards being able to judge more closely whether a site’s content is truly useful to someone, or whether it’s been designed solely to rank well in search results. Create your site for people, design it for ease of use and understanding, and you’ll be on the right side of Panda.

Why did Google introduce Panda?

As we’ve explained before, Google introduced its update – also called “Farmer” by SEO (search engine optimization) professionals – to weed out sites known as “content farms” from search results. These sites, designed to rank high for searches on specific keywords, were crowding more useful sites out of the top spots in search results pages.

Google is highly sensitive to criticisms of the usefulness of its search results. The company has also lost market share to Bing and Yahoo, which is powered by Bing’s search engine. Because it’s striving to maintain and grow market share – and to be fair, because of its core values – Google will continue to groom its algorithm to more faithfully mimic human judgement.

SEOs and website owners may groan, moan and struggle to parse Google’s labyrinthine guidance – but the Big G’s standards and practices will continue to dominate the Web for a long time to come.

What’s a website owner to do?

If you’re a business owner, your website is part of your marketing plan, your brand, and it’s your presence in the digital marketplace. Take care of the SEO basics, pay attention to social media sites and use them if you are so inclined, and learn what you can about Web marketing.

Unabashed pitch: The Learn section of AboutUs.org is a good place to start. You’ll find articles on the top things you can do for your site’s SEO, how to market your business on Twitter and Facebook, and a whole swath of other tips for busy business owners.

No April Fools, folks: Eric Schmidt, the “grownup” CEO who’s led Google for the past 10 years, asked the search giant to delete information about a political contribution he’d made from its search results.

This explosive tidbit comes from Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, via the New York Times review, and further broadcast by Business Insider.

Never mind that Sheryl Sandberg, who was an executive at Google at the time (she’s now operations chief of Facebook), apparently nixed Schmidt’s request. It still points to exactly what people fear most about Google: that the company’s position as the world’s No. 1 search engine will lead to abuses of one kind or another.

Yes, Google is a private company, not a public agency. But its dominance, coupled with the increasingly central place the Web occupies in our lives, makes Google into almost a public utility. When 70 percent of the world uses your search engine to get information, do you have the right to censor its results?

On a more human level, I never fail to be surprised by the impulse of powerful people to eff up make the wrong decision. Okay, so a few hundred, or even thousand, people may have wanted to know which party or candidates Schmidt backed – and yes, that could have lessened some people’s opinion of him. I’m willing to bet that the number of people who now hold him in somewhat lower regard is bigger by orders of magnitude.